04.20.05 - 9:27 p.m.

Two of my college friends are getting divorced, the first couple I know to un-couple. It's no understatement to say the rest of my friends are as shocked as I am. These are two people who dated since high school, went to the same college - she a year after him - and were together on and off (but mostly on, probably off about 8 months total) the entire time. Despite the personal weirding-out I feel when thinking about marrying someone I knew when I was 15, they worked together. Been through everything, learned from their mistakes, separate interests, all the things you say and think about people when you know - or you think you know - it's going to work.

It just seems so easy for people to give up now. I don't know the details of their separation, or why things aren't working out for them, but it scares me because I never want to be - I CAN'T BE - that person who cuts the cord. Do all children of divorce feel that way? Are we even more petrified of marriage than those from still-married parents? Some of us take that terror and distrust of the institution, and turn it into hard determination. Maybe some of us never get over it.

In happier news, the trees have suddenly budded, and it has unexpectedly reached highs of 88 - perhaps 90? I spent a Sunday cleaning the deck on my hands and knees to rid us of all traces of dove-pigeon, another Sunday sitting outside taking not one, but TWO trips to Whole Foods like a good little yupster, and will be spending the next Sunday immobile on my lovely deck after my business trip to San Francisco.

Despite the fact that it's a work trip and I'll be traveling with a manager I'm not entirely fond of, I'm happy to be going. San Francisco in the springtime seems like a good idea. Fresh food, pastel shining hills and the columns of the Palace of Fine Arts, and the colors and smells merging like Jack's ah-dream of the city... "the great buzzing and vibrating hum of what is America's most excited city - and overhead the pure blue sky and the joy of the foggy sea that always rolls in at night to make everybody hungry for food and further excitement." The right side of my brain wants to stroll and explore, but the left side of my brain knows I'll be trapped in meetings all day and night. This is what it is to grow up.