On a plane on the way to Mtl yesterday I found myself watching a woman about my age with a child about 6 or 7. She was reading her kid Nancy Drew from an actual book(!) from the library(!) and I thought it was cool. I found myself wondering if we would be friends, and realized how starved I am for women friends right now. (Later she updated a hardcover diary (diary like the book of all things you have to remember to do, not diary like diaryland). And this lady's diary was custom made with a ruler and a pen, and she was updating it with at least 5 different coloured pens and i also found that cool but reflected that perhaps we were not long lost BFFs after all because people with that level of organization do not probably do well with people like me for friends.

This longing for friends was all set off by a week at home with family and then a visit from one of my best friends, and then the stream of friends who were in DC for the March.

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The March.. i made it back from work in Ethiopia for the March and that was a brief moment of not feeling a sense of helpless rage. Mostly now back to helpless rage but I see people are organizing and i will probably find a place in that. It's hard to know my place in this when I'm not American altho i live in America.

I found my friend in the packed crowd using a series of texts like: "I'm beside the tampons, about 15 feet behind Miss America"
"Near 'keep your mitts off our bits'?"
"10 feet left of 'yes we can make our decisions'"
"circular 'injustice for all'"
"cardboard 'let us be enraged'"
"we shall overcomb"

etc.

It was a beautiful day. I was stuck in the middle, which was packed, and I didn't understand the scale of it until later when I wandered along the edges on my bike. The March was really made by the career protesters, who knew that you have to Chant to keep the energy up, and did it so much that the first timers eventually joined in.

There was an energy that I associate with Mardi Gras. I came across a really rad punk show in a park. I didn't know DC still had punks (how do they afford to live there?)

In the evening I sat with other friends on the sidewalk and ate food truck gyros (DC does good food trucks), and then as i said goodbye, managed to drop my bike key from my pocket down a subway grate. This led to a key rescue operation run by 2 metro transit guys, three members of the national guard, and my three friends. It involved flashlights, wire, two kinds of tape, a metal pole and a coathanger. It was such a production that pedestrians stopped to ask what was going on (was there a child down there? a kitten? no. Just my bike key). But they rescued it, and honestly i can't think of another situation where that would have happened. People were just feeling good and helpful and I appreciated it so much.

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In Mtl this weekend, packing and then we're driving across the border. Hope that will go okay. Feels like a weird time to cross that border.

2:13 p.m. - 2017-01-27