And this is why I have the best friends...

Alice, Lucymonster and I are mooching around my house, listening to music and complimenting one another. For reasons unknown, I decided to paint my nails, and then Lucy painted Alice's.

Says Alice, staring at her fingers: This nail polish thing is such an exercise in gender performativity! I almost feel like a real girl now...
Me, holding out a hand to be carefully shaken without disturbing the nail polish: Excellent. It has been an honour to perform gender with you. We should do it again.
*Alice and Amy burst into gales of laughter*
*Lucy looks terrified*

Social win!

OK, you know what? I LIKE MY FRIENDS. I have awesome friends. I keep making new friends, and they continue to be awesome, and, for the most part, work well with my existing friends. Who was it was telling me that I should take official notes every time social stuff does not in fact go awry? (I think it was the infinitely sensible sjazz?)

Alice, aka sommeille, came down to Canberra for the weekend, for the combined purpose of seeing myself and Lucy. Alice is AWESOME ON TOAST. We had a few hours to ourselves, and nattered on about such things as The Wanderer and his man-pain (which I will not be able to take seriously ever again without picturing Alice singing 'this is the way we row the boat'... :D), the joys of substantive adjectives, and Alice's completely batty family. We may or may not have veered dangerously close to D&M territory at times, too, and nothing exploded. Knowing things about one's friends, it's always an interesting experiment. Alice is Good People. I don't see much of her; I'd like to see more of her; but regardless of whether or not this happens, I think I Can Has Good Friend.

Last night, I had a party! It was supposed to be more dinner than party, but I think it's officially a Party if it ends up with teenagers making out on the couch. This is a thing which has never happened to me before! (Being host to such a thing, anyway. Let's not talk about my brief foray into party attendance as a teenager.) I dunno, it's probably a silly standard, but I feel like having parties, or sedate gatherings, as the case may be, at which Stuff Happens (and people go away and remember that time at Amy's place when Stuff Happened and people met and whatever) is an important component of Real Social Life. That it is possible to have such a thing with a handful of people, a mishmash of food, not all that much alcohol, and a high level of geekery is really quite excellent.

Stuff which Happened also included the meeting of Alice and kitsunejin, who turn out to be THE SAME PERSON. Quite different personalities, as anyone who's met them knows, but uncannily similar sets of interests and HILARIOUSLY similar backgrounds. How many sapphically inclined Australian students of Asian studies were born in San Francisco to lapsed Christian fathers and mothers who were the children of communist jews? Much glee was had over this, in English and Japanese, at an extremely fast pace and much to the amusement of Ali and I.

There were six of us, and we were an excellent six. Female homosociality ftw. Uninhibited queerness ftw. It was all very affirming after the demoralising encounter I had on Friday with garden-variety homophobes. At some point in the evening, we'd managed to tangle ourselves up in a giant group hug in my kitchen, and the niceness of it all hurt my heart. Back in my camp-going days, groups of us would wind up sprawled out on the grass or the worship hall floor, or piled up in group hugs, or whatever, and that was what stuck out to me: the sensation that I could spin around and around and crash down in any direction and there would automatically be someone to fall on. The physical proximity goes with the emotional, I guess.

College was a bit like that, at its best. You guys, the group which collected itself around K and I last year, you were like that. I left last year with the horrible feeling that, once again, as soon as I'd found myself a secure network, I was leaving it behind. Cue END OF THE WORLD, reboot Loner Drive, etc. Maybe not that dramatic, but it was a possibility.

Lookit this. Seven months in, and I have a) not lost the network I left behind and b) gathered a new one, which integrates quite nicely into the old one when geographical proximity allows. I had expected it would take years before I found another group amidst whom I could be as comfortable as I was last night - and I would not at all have expected that I could compose such a group myself from disparate acquaintances.

Also, I counted. Excluding workmates, I have exactly one straight friend in this town. Skep, step up and take a bow! ;) That's... quite cool. Especially since I didn't arrange it that way on purpose.