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October 05, 2002
Yawn.
Few updates mean very little going on. I slept far too late this morning, dragged my groggy self out of bed at around 11 o'clock, and ate pancakes while watching Trading Spaces. I went a bit nuts playing with the library's online system, and requested five books, all of which came in this past week. So, after stuffing myself with pancakes, I wandered to the library to pick them up. I'm reading the whole Aunt Dimity series -- they're very sweet books. I'd read the first one back in college, after my mom read it and lent it to me. Sort of mystery/ ghost stories, very easy to read, and thoroughly charming. I was planning to spend the afternoon curled up on the couch reading them, but my roommate is home and has some rather bass-heavy music playing upstairs, so I can't really concentrate on them. I really should be working on the afghan I'm making -- I've crocheted all the squares, and I just need to finish sewing them together. I'm nearly half-done -- it's just too warm today to want to handle thick, fuzzy yarn.
There really isn't much new here -- last Saturday evening, Lee and I met up with Patrick and D. to do laundry, which was a whole lot more fun than it probably sounds. I hadn't seen Patrick since he moved out, and it's more fun to do laundry in a group, anyway. Our general silliness made a few of the other people in the laudromat look at us funny and give us a wide berth, but made one woman folding clothes nearby laugh a lot -- with us or at us, I don't know. And I can't remember quite what we were talking about, but I think it involved pirates, and I know we were mocking America's Most Wanted for quite a while. Laundry done, we went out for dinner, then went home to put all the lovely clean clothes away.
Work has been busy, but my boss will be away for the next two weeks, hurrah! She leaves me in charge when she's gone, but I don't think my authority extends to closing the place and giving everyone a two-week vacation, alas. I told my high-school best friend off after she sent me an offensive e-mail forward -- I wrote about it here, in the October 2nd. entry. I haven't heard from her since, and that's probably a good thing. I wasn't thrilled that she'd decided to wander back into my life again -- we were great friends in high school, but drifted apart in college when her drinking and drug problems grew to be too much for me to handle. I tried to keep in touch with her, but she never reciprocated, and eventually I stopped trying. We had nothing in common anymore, and it just made me sad to try to find some common ground with her. She has reappeared a couple of times in the last ten years -- once about five years ago, when she called me out of the blue. We had a great long phone conversation, and she promised to stay in touch, and I suppose in her mind she did -- she never called or wrote again, but she did forward me every hoax, chain letter, bad joke, and cheesy poem about friends she came across online. Since she only checked her email every couple of weeks, and she forwarded every damn thing, I'd get end up with dozens of forwards from her in my inbox, all at once. Since she was sending them to my work email, I was less than pleased. I asked her gently to stop, then asked more forcefully, then told her if she forwarded me one more thing, I'd block her address. After that, I didn't hear from her for five years. It wasn't so much the forwarded stuff that bothered me as the fact that she never contacted me any other way. I'd call and leave messages, and she'd never call back. I'd write her chatty emails, and be answered by a barrage of forwards that she was sending to everyone in her address book. I tend to dislike being forwarded things as a rule, but I don't mind a few as long as the person sending them isn't relying on them to be our only means of communication. So, a few months ago, she contacted me -- again, out of the blue. She said she wanted my address and my mother's, so she could invite us to her wedding. Now, it's been five years since I last heard from her -- I didn't even know she was dating, much less getting married. My mom asked me not to give out her address, so I wrote back and said that I didn't know if we could make it to the wedding, but to send both invitations to me. She wrote me back a rather curt email, asking what my problem was, and saying that if I had decided I didn't want to be her friend anymore, I should just tell her. Sigh. She always did have a penchant for drama. I wrote back and explained that I wasn't angry, it was just... it had been five years. I was more than happy to renew the friendship, but maybe we could, you know, talk a little bit before the wedding? Get reacquainted? (The whole thing really struck me as a plea for wedding presents, but that's neither here nor there, really.) She apologized, we had a great long phone conversation, and then... nothing. My calls and emails went unanswered. No more contact at all... until the forwarded emails started showing up again. It was only a few, so I just deleted them, until that last one. It was offensive and hateful, and I didn't want any part of it. I'm assuming she won't contact me anymore -- I hope she doesn't, anyway. It's not so much that I'm angry with her, because I'm really not. I'm annoyed, sure, and unhappy that we've grown so far apart, but you know, it happens. We didn't have much in common in high school, but we had fun together. She could make me laugh harder than anyone else in the world. We were opposites, but with a very strong bond. That bond just didn't hold together once we graduated and moved on -- she went off to college and spent every night partying until she flunked out after her first semester. while I went to school and worked my ass off. She moved back home, and I stayed in Boston. I'd visit her, but we very quickly ran out of things to talk about. She made it clear that she found my life boring as all hell, and I'm sure I didn't hide my concern over her drinking and drug use well. (She'd been in rehab before I met her, and she knew I was unhappy with her decision to start drinking and using drugs again. I just didn't know what to do to help her, since she saw nothing wrong with it.) I didn't see much of her after the night she got so drunk she passed out, leaving me to catch a ride home with a guy I'd just met that evening. Luckily, he was nice, although I was so angry with her that he would have been taking his life in his hands had he tried anything with me. So... I don't know. Obviously she stirs up a lot of unhappy feelings for me -- I wish things had turned out differently. I was sure that she and I would be friends for life -- we joked that we'd be roommates in the nursing home. It's not going to happen -- we're strangers to each other now, and the gap between us is too large to fill.
Now I've depressed myself. But the roommate has left for the weekend (riding off on the motorcycle he bought recently, and is deeply proud of) so I'm going to curl back up on the couch and read my books. Have a good weekend, all.
Posted by Mary Ellen at October 5, 2002 10:43 AM