met a few old high school and elementary school friends for a drink tonight - some of them i hadn't seen for maybe four or six years - but three minutes into my seat and it was as if nothing had changed...you really need to treasure your oldest friends. maybe it's the syndrome of increasing age, but it was really comforting to be amongst really old friends; in these friendships, the passage of time does nothing but make more flaxen the quality and depth of theese relationships.

i think i had a strange, but great education growing up. went to the public school literally right behind my house (which is why we moved there, apparently, but still, i think i was the only kid who came to school either late or right on the bell), but then i took a few strange tests, and got sent off to a school for "gifties", which involved taking the embarrassing cheesewagon for a few years, and then not one, but two TTC buses when i was in high school. there are a lot of embarrassing stories to tell about me and things that happened on those long rides home...hmm...very formative ;p anyway, for some reason, each class turned out to be a class of 15 kids, and usually 12 of them were boys. i never quite figured that one out - are there that many boys who are smarter than girls? really, could that be the case? in retrospect, i think that forced us girls to have painfully close friendships with each other (we were outnumbered, what could we do?) but i was also lucky enough to have grown up with many good pals, sometimes almost like brothers, who really endeavored to be great friends and took care of the minority female population. hmmm. you know, i think elementary and high school years are really more formative than you can give them credit for. if you just analyze your class and school dynamics - and your role in them - geez, does that really have a hand in how you turn out.

anyway, it's my theory that children identified as gifted are just an equal subset of the larger population of children. some will be your lawyers and doctors, some will be teachers, others accountants, and some will just go and do crazy crazy stuff, as in the case of my friend bryan, who apparently spends most of his time naked in bars around new brunswick, as i discovered tonight... aaahahahhhahahahahahhahahaha!!!!

but again, i'm just amazed at the choices people have made in life, how different and varied and interesting they are. some even seem predisposed to adventures; my friend john just came back from 6 months in cameroon (very thin, now, i might add), where he was doing some electrical engineering-type stuff, building pipes, and a church, i think, but also had several near-death experiences that made it seem a miracle that he was sitting next to me. my mouth was just agape nearly the entire time he was talking about what he'd seen and done. bob's doing a PhD at stanford in math/engineering, rex is doing a masters in toronto in engineering, ray's examining (butt) cracks at the local nuclear power plant, neil just quit his software job cause his staff didn't appreciate his inclination to come into work at 2 or 3 in the afternoon (! he's now going to south america to learn spanish and the tango), bahi's doing his hedgefund stuff at some financial place (and recently got dumped by his significant other cause apparently he wasn't paying enough attention) - but his company does stuff in third world countries, so he and john had a lot to talk about. jon, as ever, pesters me about working out (did you bench? no. did you do squats? no. then you didn't really work out today. i did - went running!), and about eating cakes (how many cakes did you eat today? none. how many cakes did you think about eating? a few. did you eat a cake in the recent past? actually, maybe a tiramisu), and about dating (are you dating? yes. good, i was afraid you would never find a boyfriend. thanks for your belief in me, jon) sarah and mary hate working (i'm not looking forward to this working stuff... ;p) ...and bryan (who never lets me forget that he once caught me on the bus with an entire angel food cake for myself :p), who, as i mentioned before, is streaking his university neighbourhood in good style. good to hear - i expect no less of him...

anyway, it was great fun, great to see so many people out just before christmas (but who can resist raspberry beer?), but basically i ended up nursing a single pint of canadian raspberry wheat (didn't get to my belgian bottled baby, which had really been my sole reason for holding this thing at the bier market) while the others were only getting started on multiple hoegaardens, cause i was talking so much. my voice hurts. plus, by the time i left, half of it was still there, and i was urged to "chug" (bleeeeeeeeech i hate that word) my deflated half-beer, which i couldn't really start doing cause i was laughing cause they were laughing, and finally i did, and i got a round of applause and even a song with my name in it. yay....

time for bed. reduced breakfast fererro rochers to just one this morning.... ;p