2001-05-23 - 9:40 a.m.

And now, to resume.

The envelope was from my friend Sabrina, whom I've known since before high school. I should have been expecting it, as she'd told me over AIM a few days earlier that she her parents were throwing her an engagement party. Still, as I peeled away at the drencbed envelope that sheathed a matching sheet of wedding-themed paper, it felt odd.

The idea of my friends getting engaged is not really a new or foreign one to me. I currently know 3 couples who are slated to get married, and, last summer, I was actually going to be a bridesmaid in a wedding that since been postponed, or rather, more or less called off becuae being engaged was too stressful for the couple (I applaud their decision, and, on a purely selfish level, it means one less quilt I have to make, for the time being.)

Maybe it's because I've never actually been to an engagement party, as far as I can remember, or maybe it has more to do with the fact that someone I know from high school - childhood, essentially - is now taking serious steps toward tying the knot. I've basically considered my Carnegie Mellon peers to be adults from the get-go. Which is not to say that I don't consider bree an adult. It's just... well, did you ever feel like you had more perpective on a situation than you needed? When something like this happens, a big life-changing decision, having a lot of history with a person seems to have a weird impact on the situation. It makes things confusing, or maybe just difficult to parse, even if the big, life-changing decision is an inherently good thing and the right thing to do.

That's where it gets weird with Sabrina- I've known her for just under 10 years now (God, I'm old) which means that for the majority of the time I've known her, she hasn't been dating her fiance. Combine that with the fact that I'm about to be a senior in college and though Sabrina and I have kept pretty decent contact since high school, our insane collegiate schedules haven't really allowed us to see that much of eachother over the past couple of years. So I haven't had the opportunity to see the relationship progress over time, as I have some of the engagements that have happened over the course of my time at CMU. For the first time, I know one person extremely well, and the couple not so well at all - a dichotomy that's not unusual, except that, this time, it's really, REALLY big.

Here's an interesting tidbit from a parallel universe:

I got home last night at roughly 10:20 after the promised stop at McDonald's for yet another fantastic Hello Kitty key chain, a run to Home Depot for some screws Gus needed to fix the knobs on a dresser he and his roommate recently accquired for free, and catching a few of our favorite HGTV shows. I was ready to type up the second half of the letter anecdote, but I noticed I had 4 message on my answering machine, and I figured that at least one of them might be of some import. And I was right - at the end of a long string of the usual ("call your mother," etc.) was a half-drunken (she admitted it) message from a different high school friend saying she had found out that day that her ex-lover, a guy who is totally right for her if you don't count the fact that he's twelve years older than her and lives in Scotland - or maybe he's moved south to London, I forget - is having a child with his "bitch of a fiance."

Now that, too, it pretty heavy stuff, and something I would not be prepared to deal with, especially in a case like this, in which the affair never ended in a break-up sense, rather, he got engaged and had to stop shagging his American galpal, though their friendship, to my knowledge, is pretty much the same as it was before, minus certain physical displays of affection. It's one thing to have a good, same-sex friend getting married, and quite another to know that someone you've sustained a romantic relationship, serious or not, with is starting a family. It seems like that kind of think would make a person feel pretty left out.

Thankfully, my friend isn't really bitter about the bunchkin - she's not ready for a kid, and, at 32, he is, so that's that. Wherein lies the rub is that she hates the fiance, and had hoped that he would "come to his senses" sooner, not later. What "coming to his senses" entails is not really clear to me (a broken engagement?), and though I pointed out that, if she sucks, and he's great AND smart, splitsville is hopefully not TOO far off in the distance, a the impending arrival of offspring more or less ensures that he's in it for the long haul, or, at least, a longer haul than he might have been originally.

I wish I had some sage wisdom for how to deal with this, so as to advise accordingly, but the fact is, I am stumped. I will, most likely, have to choose the kindest possible way to tell my friend to get over it, to funnel her excitement into the arrival of the new baby, and help her to choose the coolest shower gift ever.

Because what the hell else is there to do?

What I'm wearing:

What I'm reading:

What I'm doing after this: