Fickle Friendship

I've had a couple of requests for the finished draft of my great treatise on friendship. But I have a confession to make. My sudden, crippling illness was not the only reason I abandoned the piece. Despite much tweaking and artful metaphor, it was shaping up to be an unwieldy, moralizing mess. Two things I avoid at all costs here at JEDA's House of Blahs, so I binned it.

It started out as a sort of reflection on these vague feelings of....I don't know...obligation?...that I feel every time I use the rice cooker that I received as a gift from the much maligned Princess Z two Christmases ago. Obligation to what I do not know because I neither asked for nor expected such an extravagant gift. Nor do I have any qualms about my part in the drama that ensued last Spring--she's the one who blocked me from her blog, and look, that shit's just petty! So fuck her. But still, it feels odd to me to have this artifact--one that I use often, and am really quite grateful to have been given--of a once vibrant, budding friendship when the friendship itself has degenerated to the point where we avoid eye contact as much as possible when we cross paths.

My reflections on that brief but turbulent relationship naturally led me to expound on the curiosities of some of my deeper, longer lived friendships. La Dragon made an appearance here, for how is it possible to have so much shared history and depth of feeling for a person with whom you only actually shared a city for 9 very brief months?

From there the whole thing really started to fall apart. I bemoaned the fact that I have no childhood friends left, only a handful of high school acquaintances with whom I maintain "Christmas Card Status", but that's about it. Ditto most of my college friends--snooty bitches. Then, after touching briefly on various bruises and scars sustained in a brief tussle with Ms. M a few months back, I ended in a varitable quagmire of existential bullshit about how nobody can ever really know anybody, and we're all ultimately alone, adrift in an unfathomable, hostile universe.

Boo hoo hoo. Then I started my period, and I feel really rather better about everything now. So best to forget it ever happened.

It's a sad fact that there is a wide streak of moody introspection running through my heart and soul. After 34 years of my mother rolling her eyes at me and telling me to knock it off already, I've learned to do my level best to keep a tight lid on it. Got my big-girl panies on, Mom! So God willing, you'll never have to see anything even remotely like the above drivel in either its synopsis or protracted form ever again.

Witty, satirical, self-deprecating--these are the qualities I aim for. Best to leave the metaphysical ruminations on the very nature and essence of human connectivity to Boy. He's much better at it than I am.

To wit--yesterday, I was treated to this monologue on the way to school:

"I love Mommy because she loves me. I love Daddy because he loves me. Missy loves me. EM loves me. And I love them when they're nice. Puss loves me. Puss is soft so I love him. I love my house because my house makes me warm. But the car? The car Mom? I don't love the car because the car can only love itself."

Too true, my darling. All too too true.