{"id":539,"date":"2008-11-21T04:14:00","date_gmt":"2008-11-21T04:14:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/?p=539"},"modified":"2008-11-21T04:14:00","modified_gmt":"2008-11-21T04:14:00","slug":"good-friends","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/?p=539","title":{"rendered":"Good Friends"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, with the downer of the\u00c2\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/theartofpanic.blogspot.com\/2008\/11\/yet-another-wednesday.html\">upchucking dog<\/a>\u00c2\u00a0and other such wonders that one hopes to forget, was a wart on the toad of life. Except! Except that a good friend that I haven&#8217;t spent much time with in the last month called and said let&#8217;s go out to eat. Sort of like a lifeline to save the week.\u00c2\u00a0And so we did indeed go out for\u00c2\u00a0Chinese\u00c2\u00a0this evening and it was good.<\/p>\n<p>It is all too easy to lose the connection with friends in the hassles of day to day life. Just being able to sit down with my friend and his SO and enjoy the conversation on a breadth of topics was so relaxing and uplifting. Given that I live the\u00c2\u00a0bachelor\u00c2\u00a0life during the week (well, I don&#8217;t <span>*think*<\/span> the Molly the dog can be considered my mistress in <span>*that*<\/span> sense), I have a tendency to \u00c2\u00a0withdraw into my computers. The day to day tasks as mayor keep me out and about, sometimes to the limits of my\u00c2\u00a0sociability\u00c2\u00a0and beyond, but do not do anything to\u00c2\u00a0assuage\u00c2\u00a0that deep need that true friendship satisfies. It&#8217;s sort of like an itch you didn&#8217;t know you had until after you scratched it. And then it feels so good you cannot figure out why you didn&#8217;t scratch it long ago. It was that kind of a relaxing evening. I hope you all remember to scratch your itches in a timely manner.<\/p>\n<p>Here&#8217;s to good friends who remember to scratch your itch even when you haven&#8217;t realized it needed scratched!<\/p>\n<div><a href=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_RvuxwM9-lN0\/SSY6qljRoaI\/AAAAAAAAAG4\/CiDlh_nGhcM\/s1600-h\/30ea0xq-friends.jpg\" imageanchor=\"1\"><img border=\"0\" src=\"http:\/\/4.bp.blogspot.com\/_RvuxwM9-lN0\/SSY6qljRoaI\/AAAAAAAAAG4\/CiDlh_nGhcM\/s320\/30ea0xq-friends.jpg\"><\/a><\/div>\n<p><\/p>\n<div><span><span>(I don&#8217;t know who to credit for this picture. If you know, leave a comment.)<\/span><\/span><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Yesterday, with the downer of the\u00c2\u00a0upchucking dog\u00c2\u00a0and other such wonders that one hopes to forget, was a wart on the toad of life. Except! Except that a good friend that I haven&#8217;t spent much time with in the last month called and said let&#8217;s go out to eat. Sort of like a lifeline to save &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/?p=539\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Good Friends<\/span> <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[146],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/539\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.dljones.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}