i like you. do you like me?

You know when you’re little and all you have to do is offer some Big League chew to your hide and seek partner and you have a friend for life?  Well, try that when you’re 27.  For starters, you can’t find big League Chew anywhere.  And secondly, they don’t offer hide and seek as a group class at 24 Hour Fitness.  But you get the picture…

Having moved to a new city with my husband less than a year ago, we’ve found that making new friends is way harder than it used to be.

When you’re in elementary school, everyone is your friend.  I think that’s also part of the sugarcoated kid philosophy that “everyone is a winner”.  Then in middle school, you flit in and out of groups based on how long it takes to get your braces off, or when you have your growth spurt or if you have early or late lunch.  But by high school, you’ve established a group of best friends you’ve now known for years that you have similar classes, sports, and interests as.  And by the time graduation rolls around you see your friends way more than your family.  (That’s also because parents are supes lame in high school.  Amiright?)

Enter college, when life is one big blind date and party rolled into one.  All you have to do is meet someone at a house party, have three too many drinks, and you’re declaring your friend-love for each other.  “You like wearing sweatpants?  I like wearing sweatpants!  We have to hang out this weekend.  You’re my new best friend!  Give me your number, I’m calling you tomorrow!  I’m sorry, I should totally know this, but what’s your name again??”  Come on, we’ve all had those conversations that make you cringe a little the next morning…  And while most of these encounters may not stick, the sheer amount of times they happen guarantees that you weed out at least a few besties from the plethora of crazy.

Cut to your late 20’s, when even one too many drinks equals three consecutive days in bed and a morphine drip.  (Not really but totally)  You can’t rely on parties and cocktails to make you “feel friendly”, as my best friends and I used to say.  You have to find new ways to meet people.  And once you do, it’s almost as if you’re dating them… First it’s asking if they want to get a drink.  If you’re lucky, you find that you actually like them and a few happy hour dates may eventually lead to a dinner.  And before you know it you’re standing outside the restaurant wondering if a hug would seem like you’re coming on too strong.  And you’re thinking “I really like you but I don’t want to seem like I really like you because I don’t want you to think I’m weird and scare you off”.

Adding another layer of difficulty is the fact that it’s not just me anymore.  As a married person I tend to hang out with my husband a lot (marriage happens like that) so there is also the desire to find couple friends.  And don’t even get me started on those first dates, because now not only are you wondering if the girl likes you, you’re also wondering if the guy likes your husband and the husband likes you and the girl likes your husband.

Sigh…. It’s exhausting.

Almost a year deep into our life in a new city, I’m realizing that the easiest way to approach friend dating is to use the word “friend” more loosely.  It doesn’t need to have the same meaning that it did in high school and college.  It actually shouldn’t have the same meaning it did back then.  As long as I still have my best friends, regardless of where we all live, there’s no pressure to find someone in my new city to get matching tattoos with quite yet.  Priorities change and people change so it’s okay to be a bit pickier, but it’s also okay to realize that you don’t have to love each new person to infinity-and-beyond… just so long as they have the same adoration of sweatpants that you do.  Well, sweatpants AND bloody mary’s.

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oh! christmas tree.

So far in Casey and my 2.5 years of marriage and 5 years of dating, we’ve never had a Christmas tree together.  We usually have eleventeen celebrations to go to during Christmas week and since teleporters don’t exist yet, we generally spent a majority of our holiday time traveling from shindig to shindig.  Apparently real Christmas trees are super needy so it’s never made sense for us to get a tree and leave it neglected for most of Christmas.  In an effort to not be a complete grinch, I usually fashion together some resemblance of tree-type decor, which in the past has looked a little something like this:

Or this:

But that ALL changed this year.  THIS year we’re staying in Portland for the holidays, and while I’m super super bummed to not be with family, the silver lining is a big glorious yummy-smelly Christmas tree that is currently taking up 1/4 of our living room/dining room/apartment/life.  We had a true Christmas tree-cutting experience when we went into the wilderness (ok a tree farm) and chopped that sucker down.  We also had a true Griswold experience when we attempted to tie 2 slightly large Christmas trees to the top of our friend’s Honda Civic.  And then we went a little further into idiocy and forgot to open the doors to the car before tying the trees on, an oopsies that we finally realized when we got to tying off the fourth door.  The result was 3 doors that were tied shut, 4 adults climbing through the backseat/windows of a car, multiple awkward looks from fellow tree-goers, and a partridge in a pear tree.

But we finally made it home with our grand fir tree and after 30 minutes of finagling, we got that baby firmly grounded in it’s new tree stand home.  I should now mention that up until that point we collectively had 3 ornaments – when you never have a tree to decorate you tend to not accumulate them.  Who knew?  We quickly realized that we needed to invest in some ornaments that could truly enhance the beauty of our tree.  So on Sunday we got all dolled up and made a trip to the dollar store… and 30 minutes later we walked out of that joint with over $11 worth of fine holiday trimmery and a slightly expired Mountain Dew… and approximately one hour later we returned to said dollar store to exchange our decorations.  We realized after leaving with our fancy finds and walking around for 5 minutes that every single one of our ornaments in our bag seemed to be (for lack of a better word) defecating glitter all over us, causing us to look like a couple of Lisa Frank stickers.  Let it be known that I hate glitter with a passion, I consider it to be the chlamydia of the crafting world.  Eventually we exchanged those glitter bombs, got home to decorate, and the rest is history:

It has yet to be seen how Gus will fully react to the tree.  We tried to keep ornaments off of the first few feet of the tree but that does not stop him from jumping up and trying to eat them.  For now he’s settling on eating just the pine needles.  Which definitely does not, if you’re wondering, does not make his big potty smell piney-fresh.