On my friends here.

Catching up after a 3 year sabbatical from the city has been fun - a little awkward, baby-steps.

Relationships have shifted, so have careers, and looks and tastes and smells. They remain the same inside, but I'm seeing them with new eyes again.

2 of my down-to-earth pals became swanky, my swanky friend is trying a grunge look, and I am blonde now from 2 years in California.

Y stopped by the office last Friday for a visit, a coffee, some gossip and a hug before a very important interview. His suit was perfectly fit, razor-sharp and of an impressive shade and weight of lighter wool, his cologne came from France, and his watch had no numbers on it. Hmmm....what happened to the Banana Republic tech guy, the alumn from the Coding Floor, was he body-snatched by Tom Ford? Very odd. He speaks of a new house in Pennsylvania, a $1.5M condo on Central Park South, and his latest Cartier timepiece. What? Not metrosexual but just brushing the right side of it. His latest intended conquest? A top ten international lawfirm, and a great position in the $160K range....Wow. I seriously need to bump my game up, hmm? He said the first question the men ask him in an interview surprised him. It was, "Where did you get your shoes?" I looked at the floor. I mean, they WERE nice shoes...of course, in my ghetto building in the heart of midtwn Manhattan, there was oil dripping from the elevator floor, and I hoped none of it dripped upon the beautiful suit. He wouldn't take a green duck from me, afraid it would fall out of his bag during the interview.

E and I met up a couple of nights before, for a burger and a couple of glasses of wine on the Mezzanine dining space of Grand Central Station's Michael Jordan's Steakhouse. He joked on the telephone that he would be the one with the Afro. I said, "Huh, did you grow your hair out? What happened to Senor Swanky?" I used to tell him he put the S in Swank. On the bar side of the table settings overlooking the marble staircase across the main clock foyer and under the magnificent Grand Central ceiling, I met up with the new E, mussy sweatshirt and jeans, old sneakers and hauling several portfolios. "They're for the interview with the UN tomorrow." he said quietly. UN? Apparently, he wants to start going on UN Peacekeeping Missions as a photo-journalist. War zones, missions to feed the hungry, missions to highlight Development Initiatives...we talked for long hours over his need to do something meaningful. (Goodness knows that the business we were in certainly wasn't...meaningful.) I liked the new look, he was just kidding about the 'fro.

And R, he visited me in the early stages of the move, for a diner breakfast, a hug, and to present me with a screwdriver with bits in it that I was supposed to swap out to use on different screws and joints and stuff like that when I put back my furniture together. A week passes. I tell R that I "did something" but I couldn't tell him what or that he would be mad. But since I couldn't keep things from him, I told him that the bits ended up somehow incorporated into the new TV stand where my new flatscreen sits happily...[well, I mean, I am sitting happily. I snacked it from New Egg last week.] He was very good about my improvisation. It was an emergency. R is also one of those who shifts from swank to grunge at will, but his changes are mostly on the inside. He's a soccer dad now.

It's different, being here this time around. Like I am on version 2.0 of my life.