Friendship

I don't think I make a very good friend. In fact I think I make a pretty horrible one.

But then I don't think I ever learned how to be one. I learned how to be a sister and that was about it and a sister doesn't necessarily need to be a friend; she just has to be a sister because that's a relationship that's not going to go away. (Though I have heard and seen ones that have and it boggles my mind.)

I just today send a long email to a woman I consider a friend, apologizing for getting nasty with her. (I am also sort of her supervisor at work but she only works in the evenings and I am only there one night a week so we only ever really work together 4 hours a week. I am the only full-time person so I am the titular "supervisor" although everyone does what they are assigned to do.) I asked her to do some data entry for me and, because of the new store configuration, I could hear that she was chatting with an off-work employee rather than working, and I came out, mad as hell and sarcastic, saying it would be nice if she could yak and work at the same time.

Now maybe that's not what she was pissed off at me about and maybe she wasn't pissed off at me at all--I'm really good at reading into situations things that aren't going on at all, it's what makes me a good writer but a lousy interpersonal communicator.

So who knows? But this isn't the first time I've been short with her or with other people and it's not the first time I've had to apologize.

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The older I get the more I think I was simply born a misanthrope. Maybe the career testing I took when I first got to college was right, maybe I would have done better as a fire spotter for the forest service, living in a remote tree house, searching the skyline of mountain peaks for plumes of smoke--all by myself!

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I don't think I really had a close girl friend until I was in junior high. You know someone you passed notes to and shared secrets with and talked about boys with. I was in seventh heaven that this girl was my friend. My older sister has a best friend and they did all kinds of things together and I thought that this was how Ruth and I would be.

But things fell apart at some point. I didn't want to smoke and I didn't want to defy my parents and go out with her and the guys she hung out with. So she "dumped" me and I was as heartbroken as if we had been lovers.

I had always considered myself unlovable as a person--family didn't count, I somehow knew in my heart that they had to love you, at least that's the way it was in my family--and so this just reinforced my lack of self-esteem even more.

This came along at about the same time as all the other issues that coalesced into what I'm now calling my nervous breakdown. Another brick added to the wall that eventually crumbled down and buried me. (Sorry, Pink Floyd, but I borrowed your metaphor.)

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I got through high school without any close girl friends, knowing that I would get out of that place of torture and go onto someplace far away where I could reinvent myself. And I did.

At Dayton, I made friends and had close girl friends and housemates that I still talk to occasionally. But I also had another spectacular girlfriend break-up.

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(Please note that none of these were ever sexual in nature. I'm way too rabid for a cock to care at all about getting into a cunt! But I firmly believe that you can love someone of your own sex as strongly as you can love someone of the opposite sex without sexual love being involved. Sometimes I wish I could have that kind of love with someone of the opposite sex without a cock getting in the way but that's a subject for another blog!)

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Sue wasn't my roommate to start with freshman year but we became fast friends toward the end of first semester and definitely into second semester. She was very charismatic and I think her original roommate hated her friendship with me because I was taking her place in Sue's affections. We went home for the summer planning to live with different roommates sophomore year but right next door to one another in the dorm. And we wrote each other back and forth twice a week it seemed (this was back when snail mail was the only way we had to communicate.) Her old roommate was moving to TX to live with her fiance.

Over the summer Sue worked for Kodak (she was from Rochester NY, the home of Eastman Kodak) and met an older guy. When she came back to school, she discovered that this guy was a nut case and he began a campaign to try to get her to come back home by threatening to commit suicide.

At some point, her roommate and I switched rooms so I was living with her and things just kept going down hill. He called the suicide line to say that she was going to commit suicide and we had everyone under the sun all over our room. She drank too much one night (and we smoked some pot) and I had to take her to the emergency room because it looked as if she was vomiting blood when it was really only sloe gin, and I had to pretend I wasn't drunk off my ass and stoned out of my mind and talk coherent to the dean of students.

It was a total screwed up mess. She was and I was and this guy was.

She finally ditches him and things settle down a little. We finished up the semester and went home for Christmas. When we came back, Sue told me that she met this other guy at a bar over Xmas that she really liked. I'm a little surprised but I say, what the heck, she's in Dayton OH and he's in Rochester NY and as long as no one is calling suicide lines, I'm cool.

And things would have been cool, except that she wanted him to come down for a Valentine's dance in February and she wanted to rent a car, she wanted me to rent a car. (Because I want to win friends, I can be talked into just about anything.) So I rent a car. She asks me if I won't also sleep on the floor of one of the other girl's room so she and her guy can have our dorm room to themselves. Sure, okay, it's an adventure, I say.

That is until I am driving us all back from having pizza the day after the dance and total the rental car by running up the back end of a city bus. City bus 1-rental car 0.

I have a broken leg. The girl in the front seat, Cheryl, has a broken wrist. Sue and Al have scraped up shins but are unhurt. I have to call the rental company about the car and call my parents and tell them what happened. (My mother had told me not to rent the car!)

And all I wanted to do was sleep in my own bed.

I told Sue this and she went ballistic. She lost it. You would have thought I had betrayed her in the worst way. She vowed she would never speak to me again.

And she didn't.

We lived together in the same room from the middle of February until the end of April and barely said two words to each other. I felt as if someone had struck me through with a sword or a lance and I didn't yet have the sense to fall over dead.

I told her that I thought it was too soon after the break-up and turmoil with the other guy to fall for this one and that I was just thinking of her but she told me I was meddling in her life and to mind my own business and she didn't need someone in her life that was trying to lead it for her. So she vacated my life, figuratively if not literally.

I saw her once after that. She came back to Dayton for her first roommate's wedding. Joan and I had gone on to become good friends, roomed together in the house we lived in off campus junior year and pledged a sorority together. We weren't terribly close but then I wasn't terribly close with anyone after that.

When I saw Sue and Al at Joan's wedding, we said hi basically and avoided one another. As far as I know they are still married but I could be wrong. As far as I know they has two sons but that was a long time ago. She wanted to be a special ed teacher. I wonder if she ever did it.

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Since then, I've had women friends, some closer than others. One I've had a very long time and only recently have seemed to had some sort of falling out. I'm not sure what exactly that was about really. We've known each other for over 20 years and have been through some good times and bad on both our parts so I'm sure that each of us can reach the other.

I have made several old friends as well, my parents' age, who have moved away and that I wish were closer.

And then there are my work friends like the one I first mentioned--people I started out working with but who have definitely become more than co-workers.

I have always felt that part of friendship has been doing things. I'm a worker bee, not a socializer.

I would rather help someone do something than sit around and chat on the phone. I don't mind talking so maybe what I need is a bluetooth headset so I can talk and do at the same time. But I also don't talk a lot of the phone (or call people) because I feel like I'm taking up their time. Surely they have more important things to do than talk to me and I always feel unaccountably (and unjustifiably) hurt when a phone call gets cut short because it's just reinforcing that notion that I'm not worth talking to.

(Do I need a therapist or what?) ;)

But anyway, this is my story of my friendships such as it is. Sad really, but I guess the point of remembering is to learn from your past mistakes, right?

That's what Pinky thinks...