2001:May:10
2001
You may see me driving down the road actually smiling and listening to "Free Falling" by Tom Petty. Yesterday I did just this thing - even sung along. You see, I once had such a nice friend who made me laugh so much. His name was Jeff Drake. He was one of those people who peppered my high school's halls with fashions such as Def Leppard, Van Halen, Jane's Addiction, etc t-shirts. I was a U2/Rem girl. In blessed college, I blossomed, and people like Jeff Drake were opened up to me in my circle. At first, he was just the sarcastic friend of my fellow K-Mart worker, Eric. (Have I ever told you the unlikely story of how Eric Lassen changed me life and saved me from sorority conformity hell?) Then Jeff and I found out that we shared a sense of humor and like-minded intellect. I grew in our short time together to appreciate good stereo equipment and led zepplin. The best I've ever heard anything was sitting on Keith's (Jeff's roommate) upper bunkbed and listening to U2's "A Sort of Homecoming" live. This was my giddy introduction to boy friendship (I think I've expounded on this earlier). Ah, how wonderful it was to actually have a meeting of the minds without all that shitty, messy attraction crap (in fact, I think this is why I'm so testing of my boy friendships now. I want to be absolutely sure that there's no getting messy crushes. Also, I think that boy's mostly aren't taught the social skills be FRIENDS with girls. - which is probably why I'm friends with Greg Gulas who doesn't really have any taught social skills and therefore accepts my friendship just as he would a males. He never had any of that peer pressure from other boys I suppose.) So here we are in college, Jeff and I are great friends. We see each other every day. I let him put his hands on my breasts (the famous idealistic/naïve episode of mine) to show him that they were nothing but protrusions on my body and would be the same as holding my elbow which he was by the way welcome to do as well). He played guitar. He would always be strumming something (in fact I only knew three boys who DIDN'T own a guitar in college). Once he played a song for me and asked me how I liked it. I told him it sounded just like "Free Falling". He grimaced and fretted and then said I ruined the song for him. Later, it became our joke song. When we went to our pizza bars and played pool, sometimes, one of us would put it on the jukebox. So now, even 11 years later, I still smile when I think of our friendship in that one epitome moment. I couldn't think of the friendship as a whole and smile because it ended up becoming one of the friendships that taught me a lot of ugly things about myself and disillusioned me against friendships with men. As my arrogant friend (and sure I looked on her as a competitor - I was young) Amy Holmes once confided in me, "I love boys and think they're so great. I know this sounds really arrogant, but my only problem is that they always fall in love with me and then it's ruined". I thought immediately, "What a fucking clueless bitch," but then the joke was on me. Later, I learned how right she was. It's not an arrogance thing at all. It's that damned dance that males and females have to do (even my words now sound trite) that we're taught by society such as when your mother asks if you are going steady and with who...when magazines have a regurgitation every month on how to win men... when guys are presented these pretty packaged females who have done so much to please them (albeit often unconsciously)... when guys are taught to not hit girls and be gentlemen, etc. Why can't we just be who we are? Wouldn't it be great to not be taught to go after the OPPOSITE sex and just to love humans regardless? (I feel lucky that Mark was a male so that I didn't have to go through any stigmatism). Often, I've tried to tone down my more exuberant expressions of emotions because it would either a) offend girlfriends of boys directed at, or b) cause said boy to look at me in a romantic way. You get to know these things as you age, and I fear maybe when my youth is fading, I may get desperate enough to NOT filter anything and try and actually woo men into my "friendship" sphere so I can get adulation and not feel so cast aside.
