I just left a message on one of my best friend’s work voicemails, saying the actual letters OMG. Not, Oh My God, but "OMG, I’m having a Legally Blonde moment and want to squeal! I also want to curse. But I won’t. Because this is your work phone, and who knows what assistant listens to your messages. But OMG!" Holy shitballs, she’s pregnant. I know it. And now, it’s likely that her secretary knows it. It’s her second baby. And I have tears in my eyes. Good, happy, joyful, Stevie Wonder tears, but also selfish miss tears. I want to be there. That’s the hardest thing about distance: you can’t be there. Even those long wonderful catch-up calls aren’t the same. Because you’re not on her sofa, ordering in sushi, watching your shows.

I want to live through it all, every time she has to run to a trash can and hurl. I want to live in the details with her. And the details can’t come in Tweets or Facebook status updates, because that’s not friendship. It’s sound bites. And photos. And "Well, I saw the photos online, and I’m up to date now, so there’s no reason to call."

I’m here, in Austin, working on building new friendships, finding other friends for shows, sofas, and sushi. It’s why when I was approached by Chevrolet to go on a roadtrip to Pearl’s Farmer’s Market in San Antonio with a small knit of Austin food bloggers, I hit reply: I’m in.

Because you can’t talk about hoping to find friends; you have to go out and make them. And sometimes making them involves driving a pickup truck.

I wanted to call the whole thing off. I had to arrive at the dealership at 8AM on a SATURDAY, ready to sign a model-release form, in case they wanted to use any of the photos. Therein lied the problem. Saturday. 8AM. Photos. Crapjacks.

I’d invited a friend to join me, and as I got a glimpse of my swollen vagina eyes in the mirror, I thought, "Damn, she’s a good friend to do this with me." Because it was damn early. I don’t want to do this. But it was done. I was going.

I was in my car, driving to pick her up, when my mood began to lift. Okay. I can get behind this. Roadtrip!!! I came alive when I saw her. We were wearing the same shirt. Figures. No, don’t change. Who cares? Let’s begin. We’d have hours of music and gossip, and girl. And as much as I needed it, I also knew it would go by too fast.

Before long, I was talking like a trucker. Balls this. Blow me that. Talk of swampass (where you turn a passenger’s seat heater on, without their knowledge, in the dread of summer–surprising them with a suspicious case of swampass).

On our way back from the farmer’s market, we were planning on meeting up with the rest of the group at a "Fourbucks," to switch cars. We took a certain pride, knowing we’d bypassed traffic by calling OnStar, when the others hadn’t thought of it. We arrived first. Waiting. And waiting. Until we decided not to wait and to instead, in true girl form, hit the outlets. A designer handbag later, we were back in Austin at the Capitol Chevy dealer, where they had my personal car detailed! And I was reminded that beautiful friendships really are in the details.

And yes, this is the first blog post about a farmer’s market that doesn’t actually mention food. The detail didn’t escape me.