7 Things your Best Friends Lie to You About

July 10, 2014 By

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I love girlfriends.  Without them I’d scowl more, spend more money on therapy, laugh only at Arrested Development, and likely have a drinking problem.  My besties are all beautiful and funny and selfless and they all strangely pick up the phone when I call. But let’s be honest.  Even amongst friends there are half-truths.  Nice ways of saying things.  Lying.  For example:

(1) I so don’t care what your house looks like.  Now this is a bald-faced lie, because they do care.  They care because the more piles of dirty laundry, crumpled up receipts, and dirty frying pans the better it makes them feel about their own lives.  To which I say: you’re welcome.  At a minimum I owe them this, so I purposefully leave hairbrushes on the kitchen table as a token of my undying admiration.

(2) You’re not crazy.  Because honey, sometimes you are.  When you and a boy break up and yet you end up texting him multiple times in one night like “heeeeey” and “wanna meet up later?” and his response is that he’s watching a baseball game – no thanks –  but you push onward not to be deterred until said boy says “you need to get over it” and you sob for hours and text him one teensy little text that may or may not be 500 characters wishing him a healthy future because he’s so kind and wonderful? That’s a tiny bit crazy, I’m not gonna lie.

(3) You look amazing. Not true.  You are wearing yoga pants and you haven’t washed your hair since last Spring when your daughter was studying fractions and at this point you just don’t care about the external appearance of your body in public places which is why your friends lie to you and say you look amazing. You’ve gained five pounds and you need highlights.  Let’s think rationally.

(4) Let’s grab dinner next week.  What this really means is that I care about you more than simply offering lunch, because it’s not that fun dumping the kids and going to Subway, and you’re worth more than ham sandwiches, and yet it’s too much trouble to wait until the hubs gets home and change clothes and meet you someplace and pay thirty bucks for margaritas and then drive home to kids up past bedtime unbathed while the husband said “I thought you were going to be home at 10” and so they say this as a term of endearment which translates to “text me tomorrow, girlfriend.”  It’s okay.  Just agree and move onward.

(5) You are so funny! This is a common lie to cover up the underlying meaning, which is “your life is such a train wreck that it makes me cackle on the inside that I am, in fact, not you.”  It’s not that you’re funny, it’s just that your life is a combination of awkward and unfortunate events that makes other people uncomfortable when you talk about them out loud so they translate that to some form of humor.  But I take it as a compliment and invite them to grab dinner.

(6)  Call anytime.  This is a crowd favorite, because when your friends are trying to sit at a swim meet or navigate their way through Costco the last thing they want is for you to call and start telling them about your crazy complicated work situations or why your ex-husband is the way he is.  Their response is usually full of mumbles and agreeable verbals nods followed by “I gotta run” and you’re left feeling like you dumped a load on the side of the road.  But they answer the phone the next day to make you feel better, tell you you’re funny, and remind you that life will get better because you look amazing.  How do they know. They’re on the phone. 

(7) I am praying for you.  This one is sweet, and I always say thank you, but in reality this means your friend throws three kids in a bath, reads The Tawny Scrawny Lion (again), hangs out with her hubs, watches two television shows, falls asleep without brushing her teeth, wakes up in a daze at 11:30, stumbles towards her bedroom, and on the way toward her toothbrush she thinks “Lord, help that poor girl because she can’t seem to catch a break” before falling into her mattress.  But it counts.  Cut them some slack.  They pick up the phone for you at Costco for goodness sakes.

Then every once in a while, one of your really good friends will say “Snap out of it. You’re worth more than this (guy/job/heartache/stress) and you need to head to the gym and I don’t want to hear any more of your bellyaching and a woman shows stress through her stomach but what the frack ever and you need to be grateful for your life or I’m gonna drive over and slap you and you are really deeply loved by so many” and the universe is righted on it axis because truth reins supreme.  So you invite her to dinner next week, say thanks for all those heartfelt prayers, and drive to her house to drop off a bottle of wine and a card.  And if she’s home, even better, so you can sit at her bar and laugh like silly children. Because honestly, you really don’t care what her house looks like.

Liar.     

 

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photo:

Nightshift

Filed Under: Friendships, Humor, Uncategorized Tagged With: , , , , ,

Luck of the Irish

February 10, 2014 By

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This girl can’t pass up a good groupon, so when an Irish restaurant in town offered a four-course menu for four for $99, I ran toward the computer with my credit card in tow and snapped it up like last call.  Not that ye Irish are really known for their food, and I’ll be honest about a vague stereotype I had trapped in my mind of a bunch of burly men in pubs eating Guinness rabbit stew, but still.  So when said groupon was about to expire, I gathered up three besties and we wore our St. Patrick’s best. Come on, it’ll be fun. They’ll be potatoes.

So off we go toward this random restaurant set high on a hill like a movie set and as we pull into the parking lot and leave the vehicle I have a sense that we’ve grown ten feet tall and what’s in front of us is really a hobbit’s house or maybe a hovel for gremlins.  But we approach what appears to be Hansel and Gretel’s cottage and open the creaky door, it opens to a front-porch-like haven of horrors with little dolls and St. Paddy’s paraphernalia. My nostrils are hit with the smell of old-people’s homes but with someone baking soda bread in a far-off forest. It’s a confusing combination.

I start to back my way out, because perhaps we’re in a dream and this place has swallowed up my children and there’s no hostess stand or normalcy and why for the love are there so many dolls.  For a fearful moment I thought we stepped into Frodo’s neighbor Marge’s living room, who has been alive since well before Eisenhower. But alas – another door in front of us creaked open and my other girlfriends were in fact inside, perched at a table covered in lace.  They looked frightened, or maybe hungry for rabbit: hard to tell.  But there were normal-looking people inside, everyone just sitting around as if they were eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday. My friends waved and I sighed because if we are going down an Alice-in-wonderland tunnel at least I wouldn’t be alone.

So there we sat in the hobbit house, trying to not hit our heads on the ceiling, just a simple table covered in lace.  My friend Jess kept wiping her eyes because the prices were all wrong and there was a bottle of wine on the menu for thirty-five thousand dollars and she thought maybe they laced the air with hallucinogenic drugs.  But alas the waitress came along, just a wee girl of fifty wearing a prairie dress with spitfire hair and told us that bottle of wine wasn’t actually for sale. “It’ll kill ya perhaps, young lassies, with all the air bubbles and such trapped inside.  But it’s a family heirloom, yeh.” So we decided to live and order the house red and the lady’s voice said “Aye, a good choice,” and the cadence of her voice rose and fell as if she descended from the streets of Dublin and I WAS TERRIFIED AND ENTHRALLED ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

So the courses began, and us girls all sat around giggling as the potato soup was served and we attempted small talk as if we are not all in a hobbit house sitting around a table covered in lace.  After a while my friend needed to use the restroom so she transcended into the bowels of the earth somewhere to the left and came back to the table as if she were having a life-threatening brain spasm. But in reality it was just the facilities, which included a green bathtub and a faucet connected together by strands of electrical tape and a cherub that looked out the window at nothing that overcame her. So my other friend Becca braved the dark and I offered to tie a string to her so she’d never get lost but she went in like a hero and took iphone pictures of the statute of a woman staring at your private places holding towels.

So between the salad and the beef they brought out a palate cleanser, but not the real kind, just lemon sherbet from Wal-mart, and we were just so giddy about all the absurdities we looked around and realized no one else was laughing and we must in fact be caught in a dream. But our best friends are all there so it was actually quite delightful and I drank red wine that in hobbit-money probably costs thousands.  I had a hunch the other patrons were in fact staged and it was all some big gag and a muskrat dressed in a three-piece suit would very soon appear with signs that said “Happy 40th, Josephine!” and we’ll all say “no, no, you’ve got the wrong girls.” But no one jumped out from the kitchen so we sat eating carrots cooked in maple syrup, but not the real kind, just Aunt Jemima’s from Wal-mart, and we toasted our future travels to Ireland where we could start a gang because we were all a good six-inches taller than all these other red-headed hotbloods and we could take this place down.

So we finally got the bill and although I had a groupon they said the actual cost of the meal would have run us about $469 so the suggested tip was around a hundred bucks and we’re like “but we live in the real world, thankyouverymuch” so we paid for our wine and we took our iphone pictures and we ran out of the hobbit house as fast as our legs would carry us.

I haven’t laughed so long and so hard in months and when I think of that green bathtub and my friend having a brain spasm and that waitress in the prairie dress and the hobbit house as we sat around a table covered in lace I am exceedingly glad we went, because it was all just so brilliant and colorful and strange. And it’s times like this that memories are seared and if we were all just sitting around eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday night we’d have no great stories to tell.

Because life, my dear friends, is a huge book that can’t close because it’s so jammed with stories. I’m so blessed and delighted to live inside of it, with friends who laugh and a heart that’s open and a life that sings, so when we run out of little houses after sitting around tables covered in lace we can say we had a life well lived, and friends that are well worn, forged in the tunnels of green cherubs staring into nothing.

It’s just luck of the Irish, I suppose.

 

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photo:

Bag End

Filed Under: Creativity, Friendships, Humor, Love Tagged With: , , , , ,

Herd Jumpers

October 3, 2012 By

Humans are inherently pack animals.  I think it’s bred into our souls to walk together in groups.  Hillary Clinton says it takes a village to raise a child, and even Jesus chose twelve disciples to hang with.  We all huddle together as families, and units, and choose folks that think and eat and pray like we do.  When we stray too far from the herd, we are weak and vulnerable.  Wolves surround us and start closing in.  It’s safer to stay hunkered down in the middle.

And yet safe is boring.  So I start breaking free. 

I’m writing at (in)courage today, an amazing place where faith and community collide.  You can check out the full article HERE.

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photo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/horiavarlan/4833864060/sizes/m/in/photostream/

Filed Under: Friendships, Inspirational, My life, Religion, Uncategorized Tagged With: , ,

The BFF Rules

August 4, 2012 By

Girlfriends are awesome.  You call them when you’re bored, when you get a new job, or when you want to get a play-by-play rundown of Top Chef because you forgot to Tivo it and you were stuck in a meeting.  And when you just can’t breastfeed one more day or you feel like bludgeoning your own husband with a meat cleaver, you pick up the phone and speed-dial your BFF. It’s not like you can only have one of them.  I have several – each a bestie in their own right.  Here are my top ten rules to abide by when cultivating these important relationships:

(1) Accept them like they are, but also laugh at them. When a friend tells you she has a bad habit of buying fancy water, or expensive chocolates, or pricy shoes, tell her that her vices could be much worse.  Think of something more expensive that she’s not buying by the truckload (champagne/new cars/trips to Vegas) and tell her that she could be buying that.  So in reality she’s very frugal, and you’re proud of her, and agree that overpriced organic baby soap from France does smell quite nice.  But for the kid’s birthday, be sure to buy some generic bath wash from Wal-mart that has some Disney character on it and smells like raspberry that may possibly be radioactive.  Because honestly, it cleans just as well.

(2) Offer small reminders of your love.  Like care packages.  They can be small, and contain thing from your pantry, but how fun is it to get a package in the mail full of power bars, gum, and a message scrawled on the back of an electric bill?  Mail is giddy and silly and fun.  Go on and add that postage expense into your monthly budget.   To my friends who haven’t received a package from me in a while – I’m sorry.  I’ll do better. I may be mailing you fruit snacks and goldfish.  Deal.  I’m also a huge fan of random texts and short phone calls when you only have three minutes.  Please don’t use that lame excuse of “I was waiting for when I had time to talk.” When exactly does one have that kind of uninterrupted time?  I say never.   Unless you’re on the toilet, and that’s just disgusting.

(3) Pray for them.  For when they are going through hard times, or when their life is upside down.  Pray for their very soul.  And mean it.

(4) Support Them at All Costs. Repost and like and comment away on her witty facebook posts because flattery will get you everywhere and us gals have to stick together.  Celebrate your BFF’s adventures and never allow guilt or jealousy enter the relationship.  Just because you work at the DMV and she got a job in New York as a fashion model doesn’t mean you can’t be happy for her good fortune. Hug her neck.  Buy her a drink. Then look for another job.  For goodness sakes –why do you want to work at the DMV?

(5) Listen when they vent about their husbands, but the next day forget the entire conversation.  If a girlfriend unloads on you about how her husband is lazy and never picks up his dirty laundry and doesn’t appreciate all she does around the house, your response should be something like, “What a jerk!”  Fast forward three days, when the same girlfriend received a dozen tulips from her formerly jerky husband.  She tells you he’s the most fabulous man ever.  Your response should be, “What a sweetheart!” See the difference?  It’s subtle, I realize.

(6) Be insanely loyal.  If you hear someone talking bad about a bestie (She’s a bit controlling if you ask me), redirect the conversation (she’s strong willed, but man that girl can run a meeting like you wouldn’t believe.  Makes the men shiver in their boots). Then meander from that to a conversation about boots in general, which leads you to that trendy little boot store on South Congress, which of course makes you focus on funky clothing, which you lack, and then you can begin a tirade on how your mother keeps buying you sweaters from JC Pennys.  See how this redirection thing works?

(7)  Don’t keep score.  If you watch their kids twice and they only watched yours once for half an hour, or if you always bring them Starbucks but they never return the favor, remember that a friendship isn’t always completely equal.  You have them in your life because they bring something wonderful and precious to yours.  It’s not a card game whereby they owe you when you do something for them.  You each have your strengths and weaknesses.  Give effortlessly without keeping a tally.  That’s exhausting.

(8)  Don’t let things fester.  The worst is when you allow some minor annoyance to get out of control and it drives a wedge into your long-standing relationship.  If they always text when you want to talk by phone, or if they smack their gum too loudly, or always wait for you to pick up the check, tell them.  It doesn’t have to be some insanely serious talk, where you hold their hand by the fire and say “it’s not you, it’s me,” but you can respectfully tell them that “hey – what’s up with me always paying for lunch?” or “it bothers me when you always email when I just want to visit.”  You have built up enough rapport to be honest.  If you can’t, or if you are afraid of splintering the friendship, how solid is that foundation?

(9) Keep it real.  The best thing about girlfriends is the ability to find common ground, and laugh about shared experiences.  Whether you are sitting around drinking wine or running together at 6 am or just texting in the carpool line, find a way to add humor to their day and remind them of how blessed they are.  So their kid broke their arm and they had to endure ten days in the Cayman’s with their overbearing mother-in-law and their husband is away on business for two weeks.  Your response shouldn’t be “you poor darling – that just sucks for you and I don’t know how you’ll possibly endure.”  They went to the Cayman’s, for crying out loud.  They drank fruity cocktails and now they get to wallow around in stretchy pants making microwave dinners.  Life really isn’t that rough.

(10)               And finally, be careful who you let in.  Don’t throw your heart into someone who doesn’t hold friendships in high esteem, or who won’t get your back, or acts one way around you and a different way around others.  If you work this hard to cultivate friendships (time and energy spent away from your own family), make sure you give your heart to someone who will cradle it, and respect it, and who deserves who you are.  Because you are fabulous.

Filed Under: Friendships, Humor, Inspirational, Love Tagged With: , ,

best friends forever

July 27, 2011 By

I have great friends.  In fact, my peeps are the most fabulous people I’ve ever known.  That’s why I begged and bribed and cajoled them to associate with me.   I have good taste, after all.  My circle of girls is unique and funny and brilliant.  They give great presents and remember my kids’ birthdays.  They write and sew and travel.  They take kick-ass pictures and whip up chocolate pound cakes and can banter with boys.   If you really think about it, I got the better deal.  I never remember their birthdays.  I can’t even remember their addresses.  I’m always at the post office balancing a care package in my arms, texting things like “do you still live on Cresent Avenue?” or “do you still hyphenate your name?”  I usually get some response like “uh, no.  I lived there in college eighteen years ago” or “I got divorced, remember?”

 

Maintaining friendships is difficult, especially when you have a husband and a chatty mother and evening routines that involve baths and reading and kids with ear infections.  I believe this is what prompted Hollywood to produce trashy television.  And cell phones.  And silly, fruity drinks.  Without girlfriends, who has a use for such things?  Texting has been a real boon to friendships, because you can text someone you haven’t seen in a year to let them know that you are currently seeing more under-eye wrinkles and perhaps you should try botox.  No one texts back and says “oh my gosh how’ve you been?” or “so how are those kiddos?” or “still got hemorrhoids?”   They simply text you back with the best eye cream on the market and tell you to hold off injecting your face with toxins.  See?  That’s maintenance.  One friend just sends random photos with no explanation, like a mountain or a picture of her kid wearing a cape or a slice of cherry pie.

 

I need to do better at showing my friends how much they mean to me.  Husbands are great – they are fun to have around and are interesting to talk to during dinner.   They do things like “support the family” and provide “love, loyalty, and wisdom” and all that jazz.   But when you really want to know who Justin Timberlake is hooking up with or what Jennifer Aniston’s house looks like and you forgot to buy this month’s People magazine, men are completely useless.  Also, they don’t like to talk at length about hairstyles or the sugar content in yogurt or other really important things that a modern woman needs to know.  And when it comes to being sad – heartbroken and dejected and can’t eat or cry or sleep type of sad – you just need to hear the voice of your BFF, saying you’re not a bad mother and you are so totally skinny and let’s go eat nachos.

 

You know when you’ve met a friend that will stick.  That kind of person that instantly makes you laugh and seems to roll their eyes at the same things you do and isn’t sensitive to sarcastic comments about their t-shirt (for future reference, the old navy, patriotic flag shirt you got for five bucks in 2002 is not acceptable to wear in public. It’s questionable for working out. Possibly okay for gardening.  I’d defer to your husband on whether you should sleep in it).  Friendship is all about chemistry.  You just fit or you don’t.

 

Sometimes you try really hard because you want it to work.  You meet for lunch and you have common interests and this new person obviously sees the value in great shoes.  Or they look on the outside like you’d fit together, being all zen and yoga and blond and hip. But after stilted conversation and awkward pauses, you must move on.  Or meet in groups.  Or just make a silent, unspoken pact to talk about one common thing, like your kid’s school or books or your rotten, cruel bosses.  I have one friend that all we talk about is kids.  The moment we start asking about each other or politics or celebrities, the air becomes thick and stale.  So we revert to talking about time-out strategies and how to minimize whiny talk and the breeze starts to flow through the shiny sky yet again.  Focus on the strengths, people.

 

I think the reason I cherish my friends so much is that I value their contribution to the world.  Each of them has such unique gifts.  And they give so much of themselves.  I have one friend who acts as if her sole job on this earth is to support me.  Once, after reading my novel six (million) times and giving me feedback, she then proceeds to text me and asks how my husband’s trial went and if my daughter had a good birthday.  How does she know these things?  She’s an attorney with two grown kids of her own.  How can she possibly care that much about my life and remember all these details? I can’t even remember her recent hair color! I called her once on her anniversary, when she and her husband were out for pre-dinner cocktails in Washington, D.C., to whine about some minor, trivial thing, and she just walked out of the restaurant like it was the most natural thing ever in order to listen and convince me that it (whatever it was) would all be okay.  It’ll work out, she said.  Trust me.

 

I could write pages upon pages about how special my friends are.  How much they add to my life.  How many ways they enrich my soul.  How lonely I’d be without them around.  I try and remember to tell them, but I’m too self-focused to always do so.  So here’s to you, BFFs in my little section of the world.  Husbands and kids are great, but nothing adds sparkle to life like girlfriends.

 

Best friends forever. Unless you insist on wearing that old navy t-shirt.  Then, you’re on double secret probation.

Filed Under: Friendships, Humor Tagged With: , , ,