Relationships are difficult.  They take work.

They involve compromise.  Understanding.  Patience.

And yet, even the best friendships don't always run smoothly, and the bumps along the way remind us of how important they are, and how we need to do what needs to be done to preserve them.  But we do those things, because the relationships are that important.  Sometimes it means giving space, sometimes it means apologizing.  Sometimes it means recognizing that we all need to work at being better communicators.

I didn't walk this morning, my leg hurts now, and hopefully I'll get some relief from this evening's birthday present massage.  But I might as well get in a blog entry today, since I failed to do so this morning.

Saw a movie today.  "For a Good Time, Call..." all about two women who hated each other in college due to an unfortunate incident involving a new car, a cup of urine and an untimely bump in the road.  Ten years later, they are reunited as reluctant roommates because each needs the other in order to be able to afford to live in New York City.  One makes her living working for a phone sex service, and soon the other one is helping her start her own phone sex service, so she can make the whole $4.99 per minute rather than just the $1.00 per minute her former employer had been paying her.

Long ago, when I was a reporter, phone sex was crawling out of its infancy and becoming a mainstream thing, advertising in the back of Penthouse publications, before moving to ads in things like the L.A. Weekly.  I learned all about it, because I did a in-depth, five part story over five days, all about it.  I interviewed two girls who did "calls" and another who was a "booker", who handled payments and hooking up the callers with the girls.  At that point in time, phone technology wasn't nearly as advanced as it got later on, and the girls worked out of a nondescript office building near the Las Vegas International Airport.  I spent several hours interviewing the three and learned a lot.

Later on, I learned a lot more when a woman I was involved with after the break-up of my second marriage started working nights for a phone sex service right there in my living room.  I even wired up a "hands-free" headset to my home landline, to make it easier for her to do her part-time, night-time gig.  So I already knew more than I wanted or needed to know about the topic before I saw the movie.  But there are funny moments.

Another plank in our party platform for the Centrist Party.  Right now, members of Congress still get more money contributed on their behalf to the Federal employee retiree system.  One of our party platform planks will be that members of Congress get no benefits that any other Federal employee doesn't get, with the exception of things like the Capitol Hill gym, barber shop and the like.  But when it comes to retirement benefits and healthcare benefits, they get no better and no worse than any other employee of the Federal government.

There are a few other things I wanted to mention, but I'll hit them in "in the headlines".

Thanks for reading.