I love my IIF team. After running our session (which was a rousing hit), we have the job of providing our class with food tonight on a budget of $200 (for 30 people plus what's probably going to be a nontrivial number of guests) and settled on pizza from The Upper Crust plus mochi. We debated how many pizzas to get (the rule: if you're eating a "healthy" Upper Crust pizza, you can eat the entire pizza - if you load it with tons of sausage and bacon, maybe a quarter of a pizza - ergo, we should get LOTS OF PIZZA) and ended with a strategy of "here's a list of pizzas; order top to bottom until we run out of money."
Part of me is scared that these kinds of little conversations will stop being normal someday, that this world I've waited and wanted and worked for so long to belong to could still be taken away from me. I'm trying to think myself through this, because it's not something I want to grant the power to affect me. I can keep myself from getting into a situation where I won't be able to participate in the sort of communities I want to be a part of; that is not an issue. The issue is whether I'm using these communities and the means I use to stay in touch with them (the internet, for the most part - but also being around Boston) as a security blanket tha keeps me from being open to trying different things, different ways of being, thinking, spending time with people. It's almost silly when I phrase it that way; I'm two years out of college and I'm still scared of being alone in the dark.
There's a lot of snow today, which is going to make it interesting to get the pizza to class (my job is to do the delivery).