Tag Archives: Friends

September 30, 2011 · 16:52

Rebel, Rebel

My results from a spontaneous, arbitrary online quiz read:

You Fall for the Rebellious Type

You have no desire to lead or follow anyone. You’re on your own awesome solo journey. You are attracted to someone who is as independent as you are. You appreciate people on their own life path.

You don’t judge people on their appearances. You’re much more interested in their ideas, passions, and beliefs. You value uniqueness and boldness. The biggest turn on is when someone isn’t afraid to be him or herself.

These observations were obviously supposed to relate exclusively to romantic partners (“Fall For” – how archaic! I’m pretty sure nowadays it indicates some other F-word), but I’m gonna extrapolate here and posit that it applies to friendships as well, or just people to whom one is drawn.

I’ve met a lot of admirable peeps on my path thus far, and the above tends to hold true. Everyone I know is unique, of course, but there are a number of common traits I find irresistibly compelling, and all of ’em have traces of The Rebel.

Impetuousness: If you can control every word that comes out of your mouth, chances are we’re not friends. I adore those people who, when lobbing about some topic about which they feel strongly, cannot help themselves but to jump up and down and stomp their feet whenever necessary, to bring their point home. Most of us have at least a few of these in our Platonic quiver, and it’s always been the Rebels that release their lions at will that really interest me.

Memory: Rebels are aware of where they’ve been. Who doesn’t have at least one friend who pulls a recollection rabbit out of their hat every once in a while? I get off when one of my buddies stumps me: “Remember that time in _________ when we set the smudge stick on fire in the stairwell? How about that vacation in __________ with the Swiss-German exchange students? Do you still have that tattoo of the ___________?” Of course, I’m fictionalizing for interests’ sake. These pals are indispensable; they remind you who you are, or were, especially if your Rebel has been sleeping on the job.

Worldliness: I’m not worldly. I’ve been practically no where, man. But the Rebels I know have been All Over The Place (doesn’t matter if they’ve never lived outside your hometown), and I shamelessly and vicariously live through them. I wish one would up and pull off an Into The Wild, I’d have such good dinner party conservation fodder. I hope they don’t die, though, that’d be a total buzzkill.

Sincerity: These people amaze me. Rebels look you directly in the eye and talk their talk, and you just know they believe it all. It doesn’t matter a whit if you think their ideas are crackpot. Ultimately, I don’t even care if my beliefs jive with theirs at all. It’s the delivery, the conviction, that gets me every time.

Fearlessness: A necessity for The Rebel. It doesn’t have to be in-your-face. The most attractive lack of fear is characterized by a complete unawareness of being fearless. I knew a guy once who did a Casey (of Friendly Giant, Casey and Finnegan fame) impression in the middle of a crowded Toronto restaurant at lunchtime, without any forewarning. He simply bent his arms at the elbow, made his arms appear really short, and pretended to be trying to pick up his fork. The friend we were having lunch with was mortified. It was gorgeous.

Generosity: The Rebel readily allows things to go flow out into the ether. He or She is too cool to worry about claiming ownership of said cool, there’s always enough to go around. So if you steal a line or a mannerism or an anecdote, don’t feel guilty – feel free. They’ll have more for you next time.

Unapologetic: One never makes excuses for being a Rebel, or attempts to cover it up. It is what it is. The Rebel owns it.

I woke up this morning, you know… and the sun was shining, and it was nice, and all that type of stuff…, I said, “Boy, this is gonna be one terrific day, so you better live it up, because tomorrow you’ll be nothing. ~ Jim Stark, Rebel Without A Cause (Ray, 1955)

Time for us to recognize The Rebel Within, methinks.

All my (Girl)friends are superheroes

Friends can be said to “fall in like” with as profound a thud as romantic partners fall in love. ~Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Like, schmike. I love my girlfriends. I have the distinct privilege of knowing some of the most awesome, funny, considerate, knowledgeable, kind, creative and funky chicks this planet has to offer.

My gratitude for these women stems from the fact that I haven’t always had a stable full of dance partners, sob shoulders, conspirators, lunch mates, cocktail lovers, confidants, shrinks, inspiration-lenders, distress centre counselors, mama commiserators and crazed fellow mischief-makers. Truth be told, I lived through many a year without more than one good female friend, and thank Vishnu for her. Now that my cup overfloweth, it’s high time to pay homage to these mistresses of happiness.

Let’s flip back about, erm, ahem, 30 years, to whitebread middle school. Me and the rest of the pubescent crew were corralled in the gym, and our overly-made up and green body-suited excuse for a phys-ed teacher (she’ll have to have a future blog dedicated to her) instructed us to grab a partner. In a giggling flurry that only 11-year-old girls hepped up on Lik-M-Aid and Judy Blume can produce, no less than five of my buddies hollered my name at the same time to pair up with them. Now, I should point out that in no time of my life have I fit into the “popular girl” standard. I got along, is all. But at that moment I experienced such a surge of pure joy, I’ve never forgotten it. Such affection coming my way, and I’m pretty sure it wasn’t my killer badminton overhand or spazzy tetherball technique that lured them; they simply liked me. They really liked me.

Norma Rae moment aside, I didn’t have many female friends throughout my teens and twenties. I can’t say exactly how it came about, but these Life things do. No doubt I was partially to blame, because my erstwhile pal-potential hadn’t developed with the rest of me, and suddenly boys seemed so much more interesting somehow. Harry Burns ~~famously~~ notoriously said, “Men and women can’t be friends because the sex part always gets in the way.” Yeah, well. That may not stand true throughout our lives, but during our hormone-driven years it’s a pretty watertight theory. Live and learn, live and learn.

By the time I hit thirty, I’d begun to rebuild. Met new girlfriends, got back in touch with vintage ones. Little by little, I began to reacquaint myself with the joys of female friendship, and you know what? It was wonderful. It was better than before, actually, because we had way more life experience to yak about over wine. Then, at forty, a miraculous thing happened. One of my friends whom I’d known since those gym days threw me a surprise Big 4-0 shindig. My first-ever surprise birthday party. It had all the elements: conspiracy, awesome food, buckets of booze, a beautiful memory book she’d made just for me that brought on the boo-hoos something fierce, and the most awesome houseful of women to celebrate with. Several were old friends, of course, but some I hadn’t seen in over twenty years; one had even driven for two hours to attend. And they’d all come for my party, with good wishes and gifts. I was transported. I was liked. I was a beaming eleven-year-old, hearing my friends call out my name.

To all my superhero girlfriends, I’ll sign off with this quote from the film Norma Rae (Ritt, 1979):

“Thanks are in order. Thank you for your companionship, for your stamina, your horse sense, and a hundred and one laughs….what I’ve had from you has been sumptuous.”

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Tagged as Friends, Friendship, Girlfriends

September 5, 2011 · 18:04

Virginia Woolf, Time Porn, and a Room Of One’s Own

Years ago I read an article that addressed the amazing ability of the ‘Friends’ characters to always have enough time to go to work, sit around a coffee shop for hours, have incestuous relationships with each other, do their laundry and sleep enough to wake up looking like, well, the cast of Friends. The writer referred to this seemingly impossible phenomenon as “Time Porn.” I attempted to find said article via Google in order to acknowledge the author, but you can imagine the results when I typed in “friends” and “porn” as search terms. So you’ll just have to believe me.

Time porn is only too common on TV. But here in suburbia, I barely have time to change my Facebook status before I’m schlepping breakfast, making lunches, ending sibling altercations, answering telemarketer calls, tossing the recycling in the bin, wrestling a ponytail elastic away from the dog and getting Thing 1 and Thing 2 to school. And no, I didn’t forget to add “getting myself beautiful,” because that doesn’t happen. Most days I look a lot like the other stay-at-home moms I see on the blacktop – lowest common denominator. I haven’t quite arrived at the male “sniff it and see if it’s still wearable” stage, but I’m close.

That said, my dismal uniform is utterly perfect for blogging, and that makes me happy. Not as happy, say, as having Rachel Green hair upon waking, or a freezer full of Tanqueray, but it’ll do for now.

Only thing is, back in my idealist, I-want-to-be-Margaret-Laurence days, I’d always imagined myself as Morag from The Diviners, living and writing blissfully in my isolated riverside home, putting the vintage teakettle on to boil, using a beat-up Underwood typewriter, and enduring only the interruption of gulls squabbling over bread crumbs outside. Here at my current homestead, this is time porn. Even now, as I sit here, I’m competing for brain space with the sound of Transformers playing not ten feet from me. Yesterday there were six kids in this house, apparently competing to see who would go hoarse first, when they weren’t begging for food. I almost never get dinner ready at the same time for more than two consecutive days. Last year’s kid school work is still neatly packed away in a box, waiting for the discard/keep ritual I’d planned to tackle July 1st. I haven’t printed off a digital picture since sometime in 2009. My dentist tells me I grind my teeth. Hmm. A few steps away yet from where I thought I’d be as a writer.

The author Virginia Woolf really ripped us off, taking her watery leave so soon. Back in 1928, she’d been asked to give talks to women’s colleges, which led to the publication of A Room Of One’s Own in 1929. Znaimer’s Idea City and the recently-popularized and (excessively) reposted TED (Technology Entertainment and Design) talks can’t compete with how cutting-edge this chick was, over eighty years ago. She told the girls that poverty sucked the life out of creativity, that women needed freedom, education and cash in order to produce artistic work, that one needed to defy outdated ideas of female ‘propriety’, and of course, that we need ‘a room of our own’ if we are to be able to write.

Well, Ginny, I don’t have a lot of cash, but I have enough to cover the ISP bill and a bottle of Tanqueray. I have a few hours free most nights, a university degree (it’s in Sociology but no one here minds, right?), and I’ve never much cared for what the Moral Majority regards as proper girly conduct.

So I don’t have the room of my own. Who wants perfection? Someone pour me a G & T. I have to get to work.