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Friday night we went out to celebrate a friend’s birthday.  The setting was the Bloomsbury Bistro in the Five Points area downtown.  It is an oft-chosen site for birthday celebrations among this crowd.  My first few times i had a hard time finding something on the menu that i liked.  But when i learned you could order “off-menu” and get the bar steak, it quickly became a favorite location for me too.  That steak is absolutely delicious.

So we’re having a big time with a fairly large group of ten people.  It’s dessert time, and i order their Orange Muscat dessert wine.  Someone makes a comment about how sweet that type of wine is, and I ask Lance to try it, figuring he won’t like it.  I’m right; he doesn’t.  He makes a yick face and everyone laughs.

I also offer it to the birthday girl.  She’s a good friend, and she seems interested in trying it.  Quick note about me: i am not a germaphobe.  I don’t like to share with people who are sick, for the obvious reasons.  Or small children, b/c too often backwashed food bits somehow end up floating in your soda.  But other than that, if i know you just moderately well, you’re welcome to taste my wine or try food off my plate.

So anyway, the birthday girl, whom i know to be healthy and who is many many years away from her small child years, tries the wine.  She makes the same face Lance did, and everyone laughs again.  In the midst of this, another celebrant, we’ll call her Bronchia, takes the wine from birthday girl, glances at me and says “I love this stuff.  Do you mind if i take a sip?”

I automatically say yes, but a few moments later (after i have already ingested more of the wine), i recall that Bronchia had been telling us earlier about her bronchitis.  Which she saw the doctor for a mere two days ago and received medication.  Now, she’s not coughing, or hoarse, or really displaying any obvious symptoms, but still.  But she has freaking bronchitis.

What kind of person knowingly does this?  Seriously, you have bronchitis, and you’re going to subject me to your germs in a way that is completely unnecessary?  If i were sick and someone offered me a taste of something, i would say no thank you, i have been sick.  And i certainly wouldn’t proactively try to get my germs on someone else’s glass.

I’m sure it wasn’t intentional, but it was certainly very thoughtless.  I should probably let it drop, but it’s made me kind of angry.  Possibly because Bronchia would be the type to be extremely appalled should someone else exhibit that same thoughtless behavior toward her.

If i get bronchitis, i will be seriously pissed.

Dear Friend-I-Will-Never-Make-A-Lunch-Date-With-Again,

I missed you at lunch today. I went to the restaurant that we had verbally confirmed twice last week, and waited for 25 minutes. Then i decided to go ahead and order, just in case you were 30 minutes late. I ate lunch by myself, with none of my eating-out-by-myself armor, such as a book to read or something else to keep myself occupied. I looked, i am sure, exactly like what i was - a woman who has been stood up for lunch.

While i hope nothing bad has happened to you, it is far, far more likely that you simply forgot. (Or blew me off. Although surely you would have called if you had remembered and just couldn’t do it today. Right? So you probably forgot.) Well, it doesn’t make me feel all that special to know that i am forgettable. Now, i get that we’re not super close, and i’m not a particularly special person in your life. But, this lunch was your idea in the first place. YOU invited ME.

My time is worth something to me. I could have been at the gym. Or working through lunch so i could leave work early in order to do some last minute shopping. Or having lunch with a friend who actually bothered to show up. But no, i was stuck alone in downtown Cary with a bad salad.

XOXO,
podrey

For the 4th, we spent the day with Paige & her family at Tucker Lake. It is a small lake, but the owners have outfitted it with all sorts of fun stuff: water slides of all sizes, swimming areas, rope swings, zip lines, paddle boats, canoes & kayaks, many picnic tables with grills, music playing all the time, silly contests for the kids. It was a lot of fun.

One strange and amusing (to me) thing happened. When we got there and paid our $9 per person to get in, the attendant asked us to pop the trunk. I thought she was looking for alcohol (no alcohol allowed). But after a very quick look, she closed it and said we could go. Brief conversation that followed:
Lance: “What were you looking for?”
Attendant: “…”
Lance: “Wait, were you looking for people?”
Attendant: *shrug* “You’d be surprised…”

Tuesday night at North Hills.  Met Tonia for dinner & drinks beforehand.  Lots of classy-looking ladies around, and we figured many of them would be joining us for the movie.

We finished our drinks and entered the theater in the nick of time, just as the previews were starting.  We walked down the hallway, turned the corner, and found ourselves faced with a full theater.  There were not two seats together anywhere in the stadium-seating area.  So, we turned our attention the section way down front, and found that the only space available was on the very front row.  We snagged two seats in the exact middle.

The fun thing about being on the front row was looking behind us at everyone in the theater, and counting the men.  There were exactly FIVE men in the whole theater.  And remember, the theater was FULL.  250+ capacity.  That’s a lotta ladies!  And many of them were dressed up in fancy labels.  We saw a few girls at the bar pre-movie drinking Cosmopolitans.  I loved the aura of the whole experience..  I was surprised, though, that it was a sell-out movie on a Tuesday. 

The front row where we’ve been forced to sit is too close to the screen.  We spent the entire movie pushing backward to try to see more, and having to move our heads from side to side to see what was happening on the entire screen.

The movie itself was entertaining.  All the familiar faces are back, albeit a bit older.  The movie was good.  Fairly predictable, but fun.  The series was better.  Still, it was nice to revisit them.  I hate that Stanford isn’t with Marcus anymore, and hate even more who he ended up with.  I don’t like the part where Carrie blames Miranda’s comment for Big’s behavior — it was a pretty thin excuse for their longest ever fight.  But, the rest was fun and entertaining - i liked seeing how their lives ended up.  

I’m going to see it again next week with another friend, and i hope to get better seats this time!

A good friend has been pregnant these past 40 weeks with her first child.  This morning, she went to the hospital to be induced.

I am very excited for her.  And anxious.  And completely dumbfounded that she’s about to be a MOM.

I know people who have kids.  I’ve even known another very good friend when she had her first kid.  And i felt the same anxiousness and dumbfoundedness on her behalf as i do now.  And she’s a super mom, and so good at it.  And her son is the cutest thing in the world.  (Watch out girl, when he gets older i might have to make a man outta him.)

So i know i will acclimate, and it soon will be totally normal that New Mom has a small soul that is totally dependent on her.  And it won’t be weird.  But it’s so unbelievably strange to me that today she’ll be a parent, when yesterday she wasn’t.

I wish you all the best!

This started out being a movie review of Heavenly Creatures, which i have wanted to watch for a long time because it was directed by Peter Jackson.  (He also did Lord of the Rings.)  But, it has morphed into something else.  A tale from my own childhood also follows.

Going into it, i didn’t know what the movie was about, although i did have a vague notion that it contained lesbians.  And i associate Peter Jackson with fantasy.  So i thought it would be some combination of those two concepts.

Heavenly Creatures is about two girls and their close relationship.  Sexual intimacy between them was insinuated, but there was nothing graphic.  And there was fantasy, but nothing sexual.  The fantasy was the fantasy of their combined imaginations.  They made up worlds and people and afterlifes.  They role-played and had imaginary names for themselves.  They eventually became obsessed with each other.  Their parents became concerned and strove to separate them.  Their panic at being separated drove them to concoct a plan to murder one of their mothers.  With her out of the way, they thought they could be together forever.

I was quite surprised as the ending credits rolled that this was based on a true story.  They were caught and convicted of the murder they perpetrated.

This movie touched me a bit, and i have been thinking about it all day.  Peter Jackson indeed did an excellent job.  I sympathized with them!  The agony they each felt at being separated was clearly captured.  And i identified with it.

I identified with it because i also was involved in an obsessive relationship at that age.  14 years old is a time of figuring out who you are and becoming separate from your parents and their routine.  Of starting to rebel and identify who you are.  Except, you have no boundaries and no experience and no context.  And it is surprisingly easy to lose yourself in someone.

When i was 14, i fell in love for the first time.  His name was Sonny.  He was my brother’s best friend, and i had had a crush on him for years.  When he finally noticed me and we began to hang out, i had never been so happy.  With the innocence of youth, we gave our hearts to each other completely.  We both felt that there was nothing more important in the world than each other.

Our parents didn’t get it though, and rarely let us see each other.  We went to different schools, and Sonny was often grounded.  Our relationship was conducted largely by phone.  When he was grounded from the phone, we wrote letters to each other.

Our relationship was serious in our eyes, and since our parents did not understand and would not allow us to see each other more frequently, we came up with our own solution.  Sonny only lived 7 miles away from me, and he had a bike.  So, in the dead of night after everyone was asleep, he rode his bike to my house.  My window was ground level, so it was easy to get inside.  I thought it was terribly romantic of him to bike all that way (7 miles seemed so great a distance to me) in defiance of parental tyranny.

The first of these nights, we had been “going together” for about 6 months and still hadn’t had our first kiss.  And we were both nervous and shy, and it took at least an hour for us to get around to that kiss after he crawled into my room that first night.

We were both innocent, and remained so.  I don’t think either of us really knew what sex was at the time.  It was certainly never a danger during the handful of secret rendezvous we had.  If it had continued much longer… it’s hard to say.  Of note, those secret liaisons brought us much closer emotionally.  First of all, we shared a big secret.  Secondly, it was unsupervised time together - if we did not do anything particularly sexual, there was still a lot of kissing and hugging that isn’t appropriate for 14-year olds.

But then, of course, we were discovered.  And separated.  And not allowed to communicate in any way for 15 months.  Letters were intercepted.  Phone calls were screened.  No contact was allowed, and soon we stopped trying.  It was awful.  I was devastated and depressed for quite some time.  I wrote stories about us running away together.

Heavenly Creatures reminded me of that period of depression.  It seemed most cruel to separate me from my true love, and the way the girls in the movie felt was portrayed very similarly.  They went one step further than i did, though - they formed a plan involving murder, and executed it.  It was a disturbing movie.

It’s disturbing in a large part because it has made me revisit this time in my life and i don’t think i was that far away from being as crazy as the two girls ended up being.  So, in that light, I can’t say i disagree with the decision to separate us.  It was extremely traumatic to me at the time, but it was probably pretty unhealthy to have such a strong attachment at that young of an age.  I still blame both sets of parents for not accomodating us a little more.  The relationship might have progressed more normally in a properly supervised environment if they had just let us see each other a little more frequently.

To finish the story, when we were 16, Sonny and i did become reaquainted.  But we had both changed.  The innocence and romance were gone.  He had acquired some brutish attitudes, and certainly didn’t think it was cool to be in love.  I had acquired some cynacism and skepticism.  We did try half-heartedly, but i think we were both disappointed.  It just wasn’t the same.  We decided to be friends, but only kept in touch sporadically after that.

About six months later, Sonny committed suicide.