Well, all in all it was a very successful Thanksgiving holiday, I must say. I'm still at my parents' place right now (my flight back to LA isn't until tomorrow), it's cold-ass outside, I don't have a car and am therefore housebound like something out of an Agatha Christie novel, but my parents' dog is curled up next to me and keeping me toasty warm, so that's fine.
Thanksgiving itself was a whirlwind of turkey, shrieking three-year-olds, and wacky family hijinks. Since then, I've spent copious amounts of time with my best friend from high school (whom we shall refer to as Pussy Galore), caught up with some of my other schoolmates I see most infrequently, ran into one of my few college chums I'm not trying avoid, and got to see a good friend I've been missing for two years now. So, like I say, a success.
Right now it's snowing, and I really wish I was out there in it. It doesn't snow in LA (which is kind of a craptacular city, all things being equal), so I miss the ambience you get when everything is covered by a blanket of white. Of course, I don't have a car, so I must enjoy the ambience through the kitchen windows, but whatever. I always enjoyed snow better from the vantage point of a cup of hot cocoa anyway. Mmmm, cocoa.
Anyway, Pussy Galore is supposed to call me today so we can see a movie, catch dinner, or just bum around the mall like the couple of low-level hoodlums we were back in our rowdy high school days. Actually, if we were truly to revert back to high school, we'd be sniping at our contemporaries over an assy cup of Denny's coffee, griping about our serious lack of funding, and exulting over our most recent inside jokes. Hmmm. Now that I think of it, we did that on Friday.
Life has actually changed a lot since high school. We're all very different people now. Of the four girls I crushed on the hardest as an underclassman, one is married, one is a teacher, one is...kinda crazy, and two are mothers. My closest friends are scattered to the four winds and we rarely (if ever) see or speak to each other, my ex-girlfriend is married (to a woman), my arch-nemesis is also married and feeling quite superior to me (some things never change), and a one-time friend turned enemy is dead.
Talk about conflicted emotions; I was on Freud's payroll that weekend, I can assure you. This girl had said some very offensive and hurtful things about me and my closest friends directly to my face, and I had called the "friendship" off on the spot. After her death, I wasn't quite sure how to feel. I'd already mourned the loss of the relationship, and I'd promised never to speak to her again, so what had I lost on her death? On the other hand, she was somebody I knew and was once close with, and any death is a sad thing. Still, it felt hypocritical and self-serving for me to go around crying over the loss of someone I'd professed to be my enemy, and had already washed my hands of. I hate people that use any random tragedy as an excuse to garner some sympathy from their acquaintances. I didn't go to the funeral, and I'm still not sure how I feel about that.
Anyway, my dysfunctional psyche aside, it's so weird to meet up with high school friends and catch up on their lives. We're completely different people now -- I'm much, much sexier, for one thing, plus I'm a genius and I invented post-its -- but our relationships are still defined by the same things that bound us together back in the day. I value them for being a part of my past youth and for experiencing a piece of my life that no one else in this world can understand. Sometimes, that alone is reason enough to stay friends despite our ever-widening differences.
Life is a bowl of cherries, y'all. Sometimes it's sweet, and sometimes it's the pits. The point is that there's always someone sharing the bowl with you.