How can I support my long distance best friend?
One of my best friends has been going through a tough time for a while now. She also happens to live over 200 miles away. How can I be a good, supportive long-distance friend at a time like this, when popping in to help for an evening isn’t possible?
I need to stop measuring success by how many friends I have
I’ve never had a great time of making friends at all in my life. I had a bit of a meltdown about this recently, thinking about how I have so few friends. I lamented, “I wish I was just at the stage of my life where I didn’t care anymore. Where I didn’t measure personal success by how many friends I have.”
What crafts would you recommend for our weekly craft-y group hang?
I want to start a once-a-week group where we can do crafty things and learn new skills. We are already planning on amigurumi dolls, and learning knitting, crocheting, and cake decorating. Any other fun home-y crafty skills we should put on the docket?
The Financial Aid Dorm: What it’s like living with 6 people in our Futurama-themed, “halfway house for twenty-somethings”
At first glance, my house doesn’t look particularly offbeat. Look a little closer, though, and you’ll notice the comical number of computers hiding here and there. Seven or eight bikes in the garage, corralled by a bike rack made of two-by-fours. Five cars that come and go. The duplicate cookbooks and kitchen utensils, the camping equipment lining the walls in the garage. And, of course, the five bedrooms that are definitely occupied by six adults.
How do you stay happy being single in a world of families?
I’m 32 years old and broke up with a longtime boyfriend about two years ago. At the time, half of my friends were single and only a couple of them were getting married. Two years later… all of my good friends are married or in long-term relationships and I’m still single. How do you stay happy being single in a world of families, wondering if it will ever happen for you, and feeling like a sudden outsider?
On divorce and the “you just didn’t try hard enough” myth
I didn’t know what to expect from friends and family, and strangers when I announced my divorce. I had kept many of my relationship “issues” away from family — not wanting to harm our image as a couple should we work things out — so it came as a surprise to some of them. Though, for the most part, family and friends (especially) have been supportive, there is a certain rhetoric around divorce that really started to bother me.
My accidental social media experiment: How Facebook changed the way we define friendships
I have had a love/hate relationship with Facebook since the get-go. Yet, most of my online family, as well as former co-workers, classmates, and even long lost friends and family now connect there. Then the holidays came this year. A time of numerous social gatherings with friends and family you don’t see nearly enough. And a little phrase kept sticking in my brain. The first time I kind of just laughed it off. “Oh yeah, I saw that on Facebook.” Could I be divulging too much on social media?
So I decided to try my accidental experiment. I deactivated my Facebook account.
What to expect when you’re the first of your friends to have kids
Throughout my pregnancy I’d sit with my friends, often at a bar, sipping orange juice and Seven-Up and suspiciously eyeing my other female friends who weren’t drinking. I watched drinking patterns to see whether or not I could “score” a maternity leave buddy for at least part of my year as a stay-at-home mom. Although I have many close friends who often act as designated driver, no one was pregnant while I was. I have a handful of mom friends who are at home right now, but they all live outside of the city and on average are a fifty-three minute drive away.