when people marry

You might find this to be an odd post. Just warning you.

I hate social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. I find them to be vanity projects, destroyers of the English language and people's ability to communicate in person, and huge time suckers.* But, alas, I have accounts for specific purposes (I joined for other reasons but eventually came to my current state of opinion). I joined Facebook when it was only available to students at certain universities, so it's been a long time. I only keep a membership to periodically check on the status of people I grew up with but don't really keep in contact with. And that's what prompts me to blog this morning.

I got a friend request and a message from people I know, so I figured I should log in. While I was there I glanced at people's updates and clicked on specific people I wanted to peek into the lives of. That is how I discovered that one of my childhood friends (we've known each other more than twenty years) is engaged and comments on her page seem to indicate she is getting married this summer.

Don't worry, I'm not griping about not being invited to the wedding--I would have never have expected that. We have kept in touch only sporadically, and the last time I saw her was nearly three years ago (though that's, honestly, a lot more recently than anyone else I grew up with) when I first moved to L.A.

This hit me in a way that is hard for me to really understand. What I think it is, is that I've finally hit an age where people from my cohort are really going to start doing this. 25 isn't that young to get married by most of society's standards, but it certainly is to me!

I have plenty of friends that are married. In fact, I probably have more friends that are or have been married than aren't, but that's because I've never quite fit in with my own peers and have always had older friends (my recent friend request was from my high school English teacher). So it's not the idea of marriage that is sticking me either.

I also know other people from growing up that are married and married younger (I haven't talked to them since before the nuptials), but I wouldn't really call them friends. I doubt my name would even register with them today (but you never know about such things).

This is the first actual friend from my childhood that is getting married (that I know about anyway). She's one of the few people that I have any fond memories of growing up. Other people's reputations in my mind are marred by acts of meanness, taint from close association with those people, or just the superficiality I feel they might have had for any regard for me.

I don't know what to do with all this. I'm not having a quarter-life crisis. I have no interest in getting married within the decade (or ever). This is just a little introspection on my role in social expectations and how others fulfilling them impacts me.


* You could say this about a lot of internet stuff, but I don't hate the internet. I'm entirely dependent on it, and I'm the first to admit it. I also use it to socialize and do a lot of online dating, but I find this other stuff to be too invasive and pushy and entirely driven by capitalistic greed (the companies, not the users).

how much is a radio worth?

Ok, I know it's been a really long time since I've blogged. I probably need to do some back-blogging, but I'm just going to go with my instinct to get back into the flow of things even though I'm so tired I might fall over typing.

Do you have any idea how relatively expensive portable radios are? When you can get tiny MP3 players that hold at least 12 hours of music for about the same price as a radio, it makes you wonder. Are radios really a dying, archaic technology? They're not exactly cassettes (which, by the way, I finally--after years--spotted a pack of high bias Maxell tapes like I used to use in the old days for $12 for 5, or something like that). And I am not talking about the fancy, hand-crank radio NPR stations give out if you pledge enough money. Or satellite. I'm talking just a small AM/FM tuner with a headphone jack.

I know what you're thinking, why does Stephanie even care? What the hell prompted this outrage after six or seven weeks of no blogs? Well, honestly, I really miss NPR.

Huh?

Well, I've been working my usual summer historic preservation gig since I got back from my two-week trip back East (including 5 days in NYC--check my photos for a peek). But in an effort to get more exercise and walk more, I decided that I am going to take the bus all summer to and from work. But it's not the slightly more time-efficient Metro Bus; no it's the LADOT DASH, which only costs 25 cents (1/5 the price of the Metro Bus) that never runs ontime and only is supposedly at 30-minute intervals (ha!). It's not just a fraction of the cost, but it makes me walk more because the stops are farther from my apartment, which is what I want. But the problem is, I'm barely driving my car (some problem: I'm saving loads on gas and being far more environmentally friendly), which is when I listen to NPR. The times I am in my car, mostly on weekends, is when KPCC plays mostly crap like Prairie Home Companion on a seemingly infinite loop.

I've been getting lots of use out of my iPod shuffle, but dammit, I'm really missing Morning Edition, All Things Considered, and Marketplace (you know I love that Ky Rysdall). So I need to get a portable radio. After some searching around, it looks like I have to pay $35 for one that actually works well. Crazy.