8 posts tagged “friends”

Hmm, so I guess I haven't been around Vox in a little bit.  I'm home for the holidays and have therefore been occupied with work, Christmas shopping, baking cookies, and other such enjoyable pursuits.

Some noteworthy things that have happened in the past week or so:

1) I arrived at home, went to watch Janna's dance team perform, and almost immediately afterward hauled my ass to Jackson to be a lovable stalker.

2) Went to the late showing of Home Alone and discovered exactly how much of it I know word for word.  (answer: a lot.)  We then went to Denny's and it was snowing a little.

3) Saw Boondock Saints II with Paul.  Screw what the reviewers say; it was awesome.  I loved how many shoutouts there were to the first movie. 

4) I returned to work.  My manager is not nearly as annoying as she was over the summer, and has apparently whipped the place into shape since I was last there.  I also got to see my favorite coworker, George (or Sasha on the weekends).

5) I found fun Christmas presents for all of my friends and family members.

6) I had breakfast with Lauren and Paige at Panera.

7) I had an epic party last night.  The last of the guests didn't leave until almost 4.  Mulan, the Random Book, cookies and cake and fizzy grape juice, Telephone Pictionary, really long Burger King runs, exchanging of gifts, illustrating the Sex Deck, "That's what she said!", and late-night rantings about people we hated in high school.  Good times.

Here are some things I did over Thanksgiving:

1) Got some new clothes at Plato's Closet, including a dress that I love, but I'm not sure where I would wear it.

2) Hung out with my cousin's new husband, who is a pretty cool guy.

3) Watched my rambunctious younger cousins use a fluffy duvet as a landing pad.

4) Ate less pie than usual because my favorite kinds were absolutely demolished in no time.  Clearly our family needs to start buying more French silk pie.

5) Watched The Muppet Christmas Carol, Juno, Disney's American Legends, Up, and part of The Sphere.  Boy, is that ever a weird movie.

6) Decorated Christmas cookies.  One of them was an Eddie gingerbread man, but it didn't look as good as I meant it to because the icing was kind of runny, so it quickly stopped being a vest and started being a jacket.  My cousins thought it was supposed to be Elvis.

7) Hung out with a lot of KDI people at Embassy Suites.

8) Went to happy hour and established that the bartenders at that hotel aren't particularly good.

9) Bought a lot of CDs on clearance at an already cheap bookstore.  (When I say "a lot" I mean 14, and when I say "clearance" I mean I got them for a dollar apiece.)

10) Went to the KDI reunion.  Drank about three water bottles in the space of two hours, which was probably more than I needed, but oh well.

11) Apparently missed out on some gossip.

12) Got smoothies.

13) Tried to find some jeans with a wide waistband, to no avail.

14) Janna spent the night in my dorm room.  Boy, was that crowded.

Well, okay, not really, since it's nowhere near winter, but if it works for Gaelic Storm then it works for me.

So, okay, wow.

What a way to send out the summer.

The show was amazing, despite Tyler's tendency to go in the complete opposite direction from what you tell him.

Kevin, the theatre manager, left the house lights partway up during the performance so people could see us.

We had a great crowd both nights - no troublemakers, no overenthusiastic virgins.

Nobody fell on their faces, even when my shoe strap broke.

The costumes were amazing.

And the post-show events? Those were enough to keep me from my usual post-Rocky-Horror letdown and to keep me happy for the past two days.  It hasn't worn off yet.

I can't imagine a better way to send out the summer.

And I'll be back for the Halloween showing.  I'm so excited.

It's a very strange sensation being back at school. 

On the one hand, I'm looking forward to this year because in a way, it feels like completely starting over. 

On the other hand, I frankly feel a little marooned here.  This is due to a combination of events - both the fact that I feel like I've grown a lot closer to my at-home friends, so it's harder than ever to leave them; and the fact that due to my severely restricted social life over the past year or so, there are not a lot of people here that I know very well.

It's not like I have no friends, or anything, but I have a lot less stability than I have in past years.

I'm sure that in time, this will remedy itself; indeed, once classes actually start and I'm doing stuff on a regular basis, it'll be enough of a distraction that I won't always be dwelling on my old friends and can make some new ones.  (Not that I ever intend to leave behind the old ones, understand.  My friends are sacred to me.)

...It just takes some time.

In some ways, I am exactly the same person today that I was when I left high school; I have the same interests, I have passion for what I do, I hang out with the same kind of people.  But now when I think about it, I'm also a completely different one, maybe a little bit more mature, because I've realized some things about myself and others.  I think this is probably a normal college thing, since it seems to have happened to some of my friends and it comes across in conversation.

First and foremost, I appreciate my friends more.  Not that I didn't appreciate them before, but there's nothing like wanting to sit down and talk with someone and not having them with you, to make them that much more important when they are around. 

As for the people who have abandoned me or otherwise treated me like crap, I haven't completely given up on them, but forgiveness is a lot less likely now than it would have been had they done this to me a year ago.  Sure, I miss what we had, but I don't need it anymore.  These people are not irreplaceable, as much as they would like to think they are, and I've now accepted the fact that our estrangement is almost entirely their fault, not mine.  I feel no guilt, just a fleeting sadness.

Above it all, though, I've realized how completely self-satisfied and obnoxious I could be in high school, especially when it came to choir.  I was a control freak in that class, and a flat-out brat at times.  I was determined that everythign be exactly the way I wanted it, and even though I was often just being the voice of the people, so to speak, I almost always pushed it.  I'm pretty sure that the only reason the teacher still liked me at the end of senior year is that I did things to help out, like teaching dances for the pop concert.  In fact, the only thing that kept me from turning into Blake is the fact that I still followed the rules, showed up for concerts and rehearsals when I was supposed to.  I never pushed it too far or did anything stupid, but I was still a brat.

I was so cocky in high school.  I complained about being screwed over in a lot of situations, but overall I had a pretty good deal; since I was a Challenge kid, I could leave class when I got bored and go to play on PhotoShop or work on homework or just read.  The teachers trusted me to ridiculous lengths because I was smart and got good grades, so I never really needed a hall pass, and I could get away with stuff that other kids probably couldn't.  I knew all of this, and I think I was subconsciously pushing my limits every time I did something particularly outrageous, like wearing that big feathed Angel coat to school on Halloween.  Even in Challenge I could get away with a lot more than other people could; Limbaugh put up with me being "off-task" pretty frequently when she would yell at other people for doing the same thing.

It's strange to think that some of the things I enjoyed most in high school were the ones in which I made myself the biggest nuisance.  Is that normal?

I'm not sure what made me think about this today, except that I added a Facebook application that I decided to invite people to.  I was going through my Facebook friends, trying to decide who would enjoy it, and I realized that, even though I did a massive purge of "friends" a couple of months ago and got rid of all of the people I would most likely never talk to again (which amounted to about a hundred of them), I still have a bunch of people on Facebook that I haven't talked to in months, even years, and I wondered why I keep them around.

In some cases, these are people I met years ago and didn't know very well, but I liked them enough that I wanted to keep some semblance of contact with them even though we never talk.  (This could be applied to several friends from MFAA, for instance.)  Some of them are people that I technically haven't been real friends with for a long time, but I'm still nostalgic enough about old times that I can't really accept the fact that, if I deleted them from my friends list, they would never notice.  (Several one-time speech-and-debators come to mind.  And when I say one-time, I mean they haven't been on the team for years.)  And then, of course, a lot of them are people I was friendly with in high school that I probably will never see again, or maybe see them once or twice before the ten-year reunion, but it hasn't been long enough since graduation that I feel like I'm justified in deleting them.

That got me started thinking - what happens to a friendship when it dies?  Whether it ends in a gigantic blowup or just sort of fizzles out because you go to different schools or live in different cities, whether one or both of you is painfully aware of the gradual separation or whether you just look up five years later and wonder "Whatever happened to so-and-so?", is it salvageable?  Does it just take an apology or a few hours of "catching up", or will it take years to get back to where you used to be, or is it even worth it to try in the first place?

I wish I knew the answers to these questions.  I've lost several friends over the years, both as a result of just general "growing apart", and because people were just being flat-out jerks.  Recently, one of these people started contacting me again, saying we should get together when I get back into town, and while it was nice to hear from her, it made me wonder whether it was worth.  I spent a very nice year with this friend which ended abruptly when she started choosing guys and alcohol over friendship, and I can't forget that easily.  There's a difference between forgiveness and forgetting; even if I did start hanging out with this girl again, I'm sure we could never have the kind of relationship we used to have.

I guess in the long run, the effect some conflict will have on a friendship depends on how strong it was in the first place.  I can only think of one current friend with whom I've had a major conflict (she insists I won't let it die, but I just like to tease her), but we've long since gotten past that and we're still going strong.  Other friends have come back into my life after nearly eight years of noncontact and we immediately clicked back into full-on friend mode.  So I guess there's really no telling what will happen until the conflict actually happens to you.

I hope that my current friend problem will work itself out, but I have come to the decision that I am not going to work very hard for it anymore.  For nearly six months I have been the one bending over backwards trying to keep this going, and the other person involved has done absolutely nothing, so I am going to do one more thing and then leave it entirely up to him.  If he wants to have me in his life, he is going to have to stop being a complete and total asshat and make an effort.  If not, well, I guess at least I'll know.

1) Whatever deity is in charge of lost items must really object to my listening to music.  First, $40 worth of iTunes gift cards disappear.  Then, today, my iPod disappears into thin air the day before I leave again for school.

2) I am now in possession of a ticket to Wicked at the Fox tomorrow.  Lori is in love with my cat.

3) Comparisons were made between someone in my life and a certain fictional vampire.  Three of my friends agree.  Now that I think about it, they're right; some of the Twilight dialogue sounded very familiar when I read it. 

4) Every girl loves talking about weddings, even if it's someone else's wedding.

5) Apparently, when one registers for an absentee ballot in my hometown, they don't send it to you; they have you vote right there at the office.  Wish I'd known that so I could've done some research.

6) I am really going to miss my friends when I go back to school.

Remarkably yours,

~Carly

Why do I seem to be the only one of my friends who has any sense of time?

Whenever I go to meet someone for lunch or a movie, they are either late with no explanation or call me to say that they either slept in or something came up and they will either be very late or we need to reschedule.

Whenever I go to pick someone up, I always have to wait at least fifteen minutes past the time I said I would pick them up, because they're not ready yet.

Whenever I go to a group get-together, there is always that one person who doesn't show up and doesn't call to say they won't be showing up.

Whenever I leave someone a phone message, unless I just happened to catch that person in the middle of a phone call, it's at least a day or two until I hear back from them.  Either that, or they don't call back at all and I am forced to call again.  That is not the way phone tag is supposed to work.

I am having a party tonight that is scheduled for 8.  I can almost guarantee that at 8:15, I will possibly have one or two guests out of the 20-odd people who were invited.  I can also guarantee that there will be at least one person who won't come, even though they told me they would.

People.  Get with the program.  I am not a time Nazi.  I am simply the only one who seems to care at all about schedules and deadlines and even common courtesy.  I don't think that's unreasonable.  I am just sick and tired of being that person who has to organize everything and then have it all fall apart because no one else seems to care.  Or the person who sits alone at a table or on a bench until she gets that crucial phone call - or not.  Can people maybe start treating me and each other with a little bit more respect?

Belatedly yours (NOT), 

~Carly