Tag Archives: friends

Break up to make up

America, these are scary times. I get through them just a bit more easily thanks to a few important people. I would say I add more important people every year than I subtract. Then there’s the people I’m out of touch with even though you live across town. What’s your damn deal? Who stops writing back first? Who lets the calls go to voicemail? Many times I’m guilty. Life gets overwhelming.

Like this week. I had to hop in a cab yesterday to get home to take Mr. H to Rehydration Camp. That’s like Guantanamo Bay, with Tylenol and surly nurses. Today the little sucker had to go back again because he couldn’t breathe, and it turned out he has pneumonia.  He never really gets sick, so when he calls in the middle of the afternoon to say “Can you come home,” it’s a pretty big deal. I had this horrible thought that he might kick off even as I waited in line at CVS to purchase the exciting thermometer with 3 modes. You can tell which mode it’s in because the stick man on the LCD points to his head, his armpit, or his ass.

After all the prescriptions were filled, we sat on the couch and got weepy talking about how neither one of us is ever allowed to die or become gravely ill. I realize how my definition of family has changed over the years. For all intents and purposes, a lot of my blood relatives are nutbags. My own parents are kind and well-intentioned, but they just don’t understand half the stuff that comes up in our lives. Weddings? “In my day, you changed your name and liked it!” When I was busy doing the pee-pee dance about getting laid off, released from 1999-style hell, my poor mudder was unsettled. Until I put it like this: “I motherfucking retired. Like Coolio.” Retirement, that they get. “Oh. Well, CONGRATULATIONS!”

But I’ve got my boo, and we’re a family. We make big scary adult decisions. We are getting life insurance. We use the cat as a child substitute, because she’s people too. And then there’s the rest of the tribe, the friends we can count on no matter what. Sorry to be a sap, but it’s true, and you know it. Don’t underestimate what you have for a snot-covered second. It’s worth more than a job or a new car or even shoes. Sure, work kept me in cartoon underwear for a while, but there’s more to life than lame-ass pyramid charts and capabilities presentations. We’ve got empires to start, hairstyles to try out.

So thanks for being my people, people. All those rude conversations about other people’s outfits, all those rounds of drinks, oh, those times we paint each other’s nails, they mean so much.

-xxoo

Half-assed

This is about right: fuh2

I stole that from Mr. Baby’s daddy. And the other day I was saying that I simply must meet his baby mama. You people have no visible means of contact on your site, what else am I spozed to do? Don’t you WANT crank letters? That’s the whole reason I have a site.

In the meantime, I’ve instructed him to make up things about me in advance of this potential meeting. I dearly love rumors, especially ones that go something like “Well, Helen’s a little different, she has a hump…and a speech impediment. You might want to prepare yourself.” Speaking of rumors, my co-worker who recently attended the FurCon would like you all to know that he missed out on the cold going around because of the protective powers of his squirrel mask.

The hump idea reminds me of a spectacularly bad roommate situation I had way back in college. I shall not begin to detail the faults of the third mate, but let’s just say they motivated mate #2 and I to go to great heroic lengths to pester her back. The single weirdest thing we did involved prosthetic deformities. She’d traipse in with a posse of ne’er-do-wells to find one of us scuttling into the kitchen with one giant fake butt cheek, or perhaps eating microwave popcorn on the couch in the guise of a hunchback. We wouldn’t acknowledge the get-up, and people would become very uncomfortable and frequently leave.

Come to think of it, I should reprise my Quasimodo role at the family Christmas jamboree. That would be a larf!

-xxoo

Ooh, it’s shakin’ (It’s electric)

This morning I was thinking of a friend from high school who won’t be able to travel from LA for the wedding. I will miss my plucky Tibor* dearly, but then again we do get into trouble when we are together.

We used to sit next to each other in an English class. We had to take an essay test on A Passage to India, a tedious endeavor at best. By page 3, my energy was flagging. Right in the middle of a paragraph on the Marabar Caves hoo-dee-doo, I wrote “I know who you are, you’re my toothbrush.”

I kicked Tibor and pointed to my page. At the top of his third page, right in the same spot, he wrote “No I’m not, I’m electric.”

We forgot about our lark until the following week when we got the tests back. Teach came by our desks and asked “What IS this about? I even went back to re-read that chapter to see what you were referencing!”

“Well, you’re one up on me,” I said. “I rented the movie.” I still got an A-. Everyone loves a weasel.

-xxoo

*name sort of changed, but I’m sure you can figure it out, you are ever so smart!

You Shriek

lambchop

These guys are really brilliant. And no human should be without their new album, site Unreal Cities. I am listening this very minute to their snazzy cover of Burning Skies. Also a killer version of Flock of Seagulls “Wishing”.

I had a soggy weekend that bled into this week. Two acquaintances of mine have turned into a regular Stella and Stanley show, ask complete with bottles being thrown out of windows and throat searing shrieking. People like this should not really exist outside of film. But if they must, I am of the opinion I should not know them. I know no woes- I have really large sunglasses and am trip-trapping gaily along shoving pieces of chocolate caffeinated gum into my mouth.

smooch