Chatting with my Friend

I got a text from a friend this morning, she was outside waiting to grab an order I brought home for her. I threw on a coat and went to take it down.

"You okay?" she asked. "You sound down."
"I am. Been a crap couple of weeks, and now the skating thing is making me feel like crap."
"Does he still like it?"
"Yeah, course he does."
"He's still doing okay?"
"Sure, better than ever."
"So what's wrong?"
"I feel like I'm being pushed to something that I don't know what it is. He got bumped up and I'm not liking it. But the other way had its own problems so I was stuck."
Now, Friend doesn't know the details. All she knows is that Stitch skates. "Did he do okay with it?"
"Sure, did some pretty awesome things yesterday. He's now offering to give Dad lessons."
"So what's the problem?"
"I went back on my word to myself."
"Don't be so fucking deep. It's stupid ice skating. It doesn't sound like something you can plan out, I mean, you never saw any of this coming to begin with, so why is this a surprise? Maybe you should stop trying to make so many plans and let it go."
"I just need to figure out what's happening."
"So do that. We need to have lunch."
"Yup."
"Listen, if Stitch is having fun and doing okay, then who cares? That's the whole point, right?"
"Yeah."
"Okay then. Problem solved. Don't overanalyze this stuff, you always do that. It gets annoying."

I realized we were blocking traffic. She gave me some souvenirs from Hawaii, we made a date for lunch later on in the week and off she went.

Maybe she's right. She usually is.

At any rate, Stitch was spinning in the living room again when I came back up. One of my souvenirs was a "Wish Pearl." It's a mollusk you open and there's a pearl inside. Even Friend thought it was delightfully tacky, which was why she got it for me. Of course I did it with Stitch, so he could see. A science lesson.

I thought of some analogy that a pearl is akin to skating, that it starts with a little grain of sand that just annoys the mollusk so it puts a coating on it to relieve the annoyance. This of course doesn't work, so it keeps coating and coating, adding more and more, annoying itself ever further until it gets cracked open by someone for the pearl that annoyance became. I could have done that, but then I'd be overanalyzing things again and my Friend says I should stop doing that.

We're going to have lunch and go skating instead.