Dear Nate,

(a letter)

My understanding of you grows every day. That's a good thing, because you've been one of the easiest people to 'know' without really being someone you 'understand'. If that makes any sense.
You were always the person who made, when I first think of you, the word 'competence' come to my mind. Your trademark self-assuredness went hand-in-hand with this. Whether it was classes or life plans or traveling to Australia or cooking or how to fix a loose doorknob, you always seemed perfectly put together, one-hundred percent confident even when you didn't know immediately how to fix a problem.
That ability - coupled with a ton of talent and a great touch with people - might be part of the reason why you take on so much, all the time. In college, with your extra studies and RA work; after college, with the Coro internship; when you come home from work at 9:13 PM or 11:24 PM or not at all and Dave and I don't even blink. You have plans for the city, for the world, for yourself, and something as simple as time is not going to get in your way.
You're still short of a workaholic, by the way. You're not quite there yet. And it's in those moments - the three of us sitting and watching Baseball Tonight, or how you can blow off work once in a while, or sitting on the steps and having a white russian - that I realize the quality of your friendship.
Willing to help, to aid, to listen and suggest, to always ask how a day was - basics of Wildfire-ness, thoughtful things that never take thought; these are constants. And your ability to instruct is a key component in keeping your natural knowledge and competence from being overbearing. It is, instead, enjoyable.
The fact that you're right 90% of the time can make you overly sure you're right the other 10%, making it difficult for you to realize you could be wrong, or at least be annoyed with people who are less competent than you are. You are a whirlwind sometimes, someone trying to do 45 things in a day. And you continually leave your sweaty socks on the furnace in winter.
The odd thing is, this whole thing with Bethany and Gillian - such a tear on your heart and mind over the last few months - has actually made you more understandable. You're more human, someone who sometimes makes bad decisions or is in situations that are less than perfect. You can be hurt, and can be depressed and down and everything else. This was true before; but your natural talent and competence hid it. I can respect those abilities even more now, knowing they are - once in a while - not always true. And that's okay.
You still - unintentionally - taught me more than you can know. How to handle disputes and think of problems in terms of people; how to seamlessly weave your friends and relationships; how to refuse to be afraid of big life steps or life goals, and to actually be excited while throwing yourself into them; how to gather resources and help to accomplish what needs to be done; and of course, how to sip white russians on the front steps with your boys.
So keep going on going on, Nate. I never planned to go to high school with you. I never planned to go to the same college as you. I never planned to be your roomate, to head back to Pittsburgh after college, to play on the same volleyball team as you, to move to an apartment with you, and to end up spending some of the best moments of my life with you. But all of that happened. And having you there has been a comfort, a surety, that behind me I have competence and talent that is ready to drop everything and aid me in whatever I need help with.
*clink*
Here's to you.

The Pony Express

(your mail in three months, guaranteed)

There is something infinitely redeeming about a letter.
Every day I send upwards of twenty work e-mails, sometimes more. Sometimes many more. I send a lot of friends e-mails as well. Just type, click, and it's there. Instantaneous. And when I type as quickly as I do - almost as fast as I think - it's not hard for me to get all my thoughts down that I want immediately, fresh and hot off the synapses, still sparking with nanobits of literal mental electricity. And when e-mail became the preferred method of communication, both in the work and the social worlds, it was because of its immediacy, it's ease of creation and delivery, a process that required no pickup or dropoff times, no physical materials, and no horses. (Or the couriers on them.)
So getting a letter is a strange and rare event. Getting two in one day is unheard of. But upon opening my little mailbox in the lobby of my apartment complex last night, I found two letters from Margaret, sitting all nice and pretty.
One was dated June 20th; the other, June 26th. I got them both July 6th, a testament to Margaret being at an electricity-poor camp in Maine and the reliability of my apartment complex always adding 4-7 days onto the normal mailing process. I sometimes wonder if the building supervisors wait outside for the mailman, cheerfully saying "We'll sort them into each apartment box for you!" and the mailman leaving thinking, "That's really nice of them to do that", while the women carry the mail back to their offices and see how long they can hold it before their residents pitch a fit.
But I digress - I got two letters, both long and handwritten. That seems to go without saying but after the thousands of e-mails I've sent and received over the last year, there is something pure and simple about a handwritten letter. For one, it takes time. My handwriting is infinitely slower than my typing. It shows you that the person put a lot of time and effort into it, because it's not that easy to create a long letter, particularly compared to the ease of e-mail. For another, you get all the personality of the characters, the slant of the lines, the flowing strokes of curves and hard dashes. It brings to mind the scene in Hero of the battle at the calligraphy school, and how writing and swordplay are almost exactly the same thing. But the personality is the key - and it's something I never noticed before, or at least not this explicitly.
The cool thing was that Margaret was having a similar experience in Maine. Away from all the 'basics' of city/suburban life - like electricity - you get down to what the real 'basics' are - trees, fire, lakes, stars. It was really impressive to read about and the topic just seemed to fit the handwritten letter perfectly.
And the last cool thing about handwritten letters is that, unlike e-mail, one good letter deserves another.
A timely quote: "The harder you press on paper, the more intense of a personality you have."
Excellent...

Going to meet with Martin for a writer's conference tonight, and I'm excited about it. Caissa practically needs a new dress. W0w. I'm pretty sure she wrote that before my brain had actually comprehended it.

I set up the family fantasy football league today, and it looks like it's going to be awesome! So many good things ahead...

Life is getting better...