Silver and Gold (and Purple and Blue and Shiny and Fluffy)

I got some new students in Spanish today. I think they liked it and will be coming back. Yay. I always take it so personally if they decide not to continue.

Speaking of classes, I'm starting another round of salsa this Thursday. I'm looking forward to it because it's been so long. Still waiting for me to get super duper good. Don't know when that'll happen. (Although, I think super duper good is a moving target. By the standards of when I first learned I probably would already have said, Ooh, now I'm super duper good. But now I'm like It's blah. More spins! ...Now dip, damnit! What's all this standing around for?)

I think I've decided I want to have at least one irrelevant and one personal or introspective post each day. So here's the deep thought.

I love my friends. I love that I love my friends. You know? I love that there are people in my life who I actually like who I can choose to talk with and visit and hang out with as often as I want. I was thinking about this the other day while I was at the cabin with my mom and sister (and I even commented this to them). Now, the cabin is more than 2 hours outside the city, pretty isolated. No TV, and (gasp!) NO internet. Which is rough. (Most of us normally wouldn't even know the pain of internet withdrawal because normally we don't have to go without internet for more than a day if we want to.) Anyways, on about the 2nd a half day of sitting, eating, reading, sleeping, eating again, and sitting some more, I'm bored out of my mind, going crazy for lack of entertainment. On several occasions, out of the blue, I'd sniffle, and whimper, "I miss the internet." Mu.

And (and here's my point)..... and that got me thinking. You know, back in the day, back back in the day, take say, Elizabethan England, Jane Austen and all that (and most definitely in the years before that).... before there was internet, or phones, or even houses near to each other... before there were airplanes or cars or dependable roads.... well, if you were bored, if you were just sick to death of reading the same 3 books and quilting the same old quilt and looking at and being around the same (possibly unbearable) people you lived with... well, at that point the only thing you could do was get up and physically go visit somebody. And even then, probably a lot of those people lived far away so first you'd have to arrange the visit by like mailing a letter that would take a month to get there and a month for it to come back. In the end, I imagine, because of all this, you'd get to visit someone or have visitors come to you about...what... (considering weather) maybe 7 times a year. So let's say for the sake of rounding that between these visitors, your family, your nearest neighbor, the doctor, and the shopkeeper, you know a total of about 50 people. And, what... maybe out of all of those you're lucky if even one of them you like at all? One of them that you can consider a friend? Think if that one person, maybe they live far away and so you only get to see them for about a week once a year. For you that's the only time you get to laugh and cry and be comforted by someone you actually connect with and enjoy. One week a year! How depressing is that? Ug. And here we are today, so spoiled, never lacking for entertainment, and never lacking for friends, real friends. Friends that we like, not just that we have to hang out with because we don't know anyone else. And if we don't like the friends we got, we can go out and make new ones! Just like that! That's just amazing is what that is. And I feel very lucky.