Tuesday, June 8, 2010

Old friends

A few years back the Onion had a nice set of euphemisms for menstruation. My personal favorite: It's 'that time of the month' where 'I'm not at my best' because my 'vagina is bleeding'. Of course, my vagina is not actually bleeding and I resent the implication that I'm not at my best, but then, I'm the enemy of humor everywhere. In any event, I had BETTER be at my best, because two of my dear friends are coming to stay tomorrow.

I've mentioned before that I'm a girl of few friends, but you might be thinking fifteen...ten... I've got five. (This is perhaps part of the reason why I think Facebook is pointless...) So this weekend the majority of my friends in the world will be in one place. I'm going to tell you about them, not because I think you care, but because I want to. So there.

First, there's J. Here's a suitably ancient, grainy photo of us on a backpacking trip (me drinking, as usual). I met J my junior year of high school, when I arrived at a brand new school in a brand new city (Berkeley). I didn't know a soul, but noticed J immediately, due to his enormous mohawk. He's a truly remarkable person: his parents were insane and abusive, his dyslexia was diagnosed so late that his academic record was severely tarnished, but by scratching and clawing his way through life, he's now an engineer. Also the most gentlemanly man I've ever met. And he makes fighting robots for fun. Anyway, he's bringing a girlfriend I haven't met yet. She better be up to snuff. Or else I'll...keep my mouth shut and pretend I like her.

My Other Best Friend is also coming. We've known each other since we were twelve, and she's also an extraordinary person. Her family is horrible and nuts, but she turned out really well. She's like an ethical, kind, compassionate version of me. We haven't lived in the same place since we were fifteen, but have written letters to each other ever since then. When she visits me, she brings the letters I've sent and we collate them with the ones I've gotten from her. Here's the collection--over twenty years of correspondence, packed neatly in white linen bags...except for the ones waiting to be collated.

Both of these people are awesome beyond description, but particularly awesome is the fact that they are childless, and there's little danger of a surprise pregnancy announcement. Both OBR and J have long maintained that they aren't fit to be parents because of the horrors of their childhoods.

The funny thing is, I really want both of them to have kids. I think they'd do a great job, in part because their own parents were so awful. I love to imagine little versions of them, and it saddens me that they'd feel too defective to raise a child. And probably it worries me, given my own unhappy childhood... I'm certainly not going to argue with them, as I am capable of understanding that some people genuinely don't want to spawn, but...I am secretly hoping they'll change their minds. Ideally not until after I've had a few dozen fat babies.

Anyway, I expect to be drunk for the next four days, so best wishes to those of you going through difficult times. 

21 comments:

  1. I like the preemptive drunken sign-off :) Have a wonderful time with your old and dear friends. Old friends are so special to me, and old friends who live far away are even more so.

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  2. some of my favorite ppl think they're too damaged to have their own kids, and that makes me sad. my oldest sister is one of those and i think she'd make a great mommy.

    i hope you have a fabulous time with your friends over the next few days :o)

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  3. I think that people who were the least lucky on the parent front frequently turn out to be the best parents themselves. This was the case with my mother, whose hellish background (seriously...books could be written) only made her more conscious of being a decent mom. Thoughtful people are exactly the ones who SHOULD be having kids (so saith Adele!).

    Have a GREAT couple of boozy days. It sounds like well-deserved fun.

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  4. Have a great and excessively drunken time, Bunny! :) I love it when you can just pick right up where you left off with childhood, distantly-living friends, like time and geography are completely irrelevant notions. I too am one of those individuals with a small, nuclear circle of friends. Those tight friendships may be few in number, but they're off-the-chart in intensity and nostalgia.

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  5. Ooh, fun, bunny! (Oops. Rhyme doesn't pay.)
    Five good friends are worth 50 of half-assed ones. I love the carefully archived letters - see? That's the kind of effort that you can give your friends when you have five of them.

    The photo is fantastic. Has kind of an adventurers of the 19th Century vibe about it.

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  6. Dude, 5 real friends is a friendship-fortune. Who is so lucky??? Even one is like a miracle. Don't ask me why true friends are scarcer than hen's teeth.

    I'm THRILLED that you get to spend time with them, and I already want to steal mohawk-dude away from you. He sounds awesome! And the linen-wrapped letters in that lovely chest, well, that's just BEYOND amazing. You guys could do a 'beaches' remake without the bad singing and the cancer (I actually forget the rest of that movie, too, so maybe nevermind). And, at the moment, you're ESPECIALLY lucky that they aren't into babies. Hard to imagine, isn't it??? People I try to but absolutely can't understand: 1) voluntarily childless. 2) transsexuals.

    Have a great time bleeding and drinking-- sounds like a great party.

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  7. These sound like wonderful friends. I especially love your letter collection. So you're the letter keeper?
    Anyway, have a lot of fun!

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  8. That is awesome. I think it sounds like the perfect weekend, and I hope that it is all that and more!

    And on the friends? The real ones? Anyone who can count those on more than one hand and a couple of fingers scares me. So count yourself lucky on that front that you have so many.

    Enjoy!

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  9. I loves me a lost weekend with friends. You are a fortunate lady. Come to San Francisco and fall in love with Britex Fabrics. I am overly ambitios with sewing, as evidenced by my gummed up tension from sewing pink glitter vinyl.

    Yes, I also am a fan of people with bad childhoods being good parents. The Mr. and I feel especially cheated on this point. We would be such fun parents.

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  10. Yeah, facebook IS pointless. I have maybe 5 real friends I am connected with, and the rest are high school classmates or fellow grad school survivors or former coworkers or whatever with whom I have little in common anymore. And then the family members from whom I mistakenly accepted friend requests. Ooops.

    Get extra loaded for me with your friends this week. Try to imagine that the drunker you get, the better I feel....

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  11. I'm reallllly hoping for a drunken post in the next few days.

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  12. I hope you have a great drunken 4 days! I agree, you should do a drunk post =).

    I don't have many friends either and I don't do facebook. =)

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  13. Old friends = wonderful.

    Have a fantastic, fun-filled, four days of friendship and drunken-ness.

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  14. Totally would love a drunk post from you - much like the post-op drug post. That was great.

    Have a wonderfully drunken time with your old friends.

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  15. Party-on dude. And please lay a drog on us (drunkenblog) if you can manage it. We needs the laffs!

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  16. Have a wonderful time.

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  17. Ohhhhh, this is such a lovely post. So much love from every angle. And you are right, its sad that their childhoods have tarnished their views on parenthood.
    I hope you have a fabulously drunk time with them and that you laugh so much you ache the next day. Thats what i LOVE about catching up with old friends,.... all the laughing. And it's genuine, belly wobbling laughter that gets your whole body involved.
    Makes me smile just thinking about it. xxx

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  18. Wow, that correspondence is impressive! Hope you have a fantastic time with your friends! And I'm with Al - definitely voting for a drunk post :).

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  19. Your friends sound so cool. I love that you have these deep friendships. I have a lot of friends, but VERY few, if any, really really close friends. Have a great weekend!

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  20. You know, all you really do need is one or two truly good friends - plus you have a whole community of blogger fans on top of that!

    That chest full of letters just blows me away. I have a boxful of letters that I used to exchange with a cousin of mine - I'd like to think that she's kept mine too.

    Anyway, I was kind of hoping that you'd blog while drunk (kind of like when you talked about blogging on pain meds), but I'd rather you focus on having a good time with them.

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  21. you are hilarious... and it sounds like you have amazing friends. that chest of letters is truly impressive. have an awesome time getting shitcanned with your friends over the next four days :)

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