» Intense Friendships

barbed wire necklace
My best friend in high school once gave me a necklace she'd fashioned by hand by twisting together links of copper wire. It poked me mercilessly and I wore it anyway. I'd bought the spool of wire for her at a Canadian Tire after she'd been caught trying to shoplift it and had been duly humiliated by some power-hungry aisle cop. The necklace, which featured a wire-wrapped pendant of her namesake gemstone (which I had given her), was presented as a going away gift when I left for university. We'd had an intense sort of friendship - lots of driving out into rainy wilderness parks of a Sunday night to listen to radioplays on CBC whilst hotboxing her little alien-green Pontiac Acadian, sometimes giving in and making out in the backseat until dawn, or under cottonwood trees by the river in the pouring rain, you know, moments that go straight into a 17-year-old girl's psyche and lodge there like a throwing star with pictures of kittens on it. We used to go down to a field behind a burned-out house and read under the apple trees. Once I duct taped her to her own roof rack. I took her to her grad. My boyfriend hated her.

So when I came home in the summer and announced I was getting married, something changed - I guess she had other ideas. However. The following year, when my husband and I moved back to this neck of the woods, she decided she was his new best friend, and things became very strange indeed... She convinced him to drive to Nevada with her to go to Burning Man (I couldn't go because I was pregnant and working), and seemed to really get off on my mixed feelings over the arrangement (the snickering kind of gave her away). They stayed away an extra day or two, driving past through our city and on up to the west coast to camp on the beach... they became fast fast friends and spent many an evening running around stealing roadsigns or dropping ecstasy or God knows what while I stayed home and washed the dishes and took bubble baths and tried really fucking hard not to feel sorry for myself. They didn't (so I hear) actually go to bed together until about four days before the baby was born. I didn't find out for five years. But when she left flowers on my doorstep with a cryptic note when I was at home with my wee infink, I knew there must be a reason I wanted so badly to pitch them out.

My ex-(for reasons unrelated, even!)husband's childhood teddy bear vanished from our house the night they spent together. He's convinced she took it. When I came home from the hospital I found her initials carved in my bathroom door.

Why aren't people resonding so readily to this question? Jesus. Because it's fucking personal. If anyone I know happens across this posting, I'm guaranteed a "get OVER it already". Trust me, I'd dearly love to. But I really want to strangle that woman and fuck her corpse.
(Thu 3rd Aug 2006, 7:53, More)

» Toilets

modest ladies...
My university dorm had a common bathroom for each floor. Mine was a girls' floor (being, as I am, of the "F" persuasion) and I couldn't help but notice most of my floormates had devised unique strategies for camouflaging the telltale sound of excrement hitting water. My roommate, for example, would come down with a most delicate attack of the coughs (ckhe-ckhem!), accompanied by a curious, wettish sort of 'ploop'... why, what could that be? Other noted strategies, once I began investigating, included:
Flushing at moment of splash (yes, each one)
Attempts to dampen sound by covering surface of water with toilet paper
Extra-noisy foot shuffling
Carrying poo quietly from ass to its watery bed in cradle of paper (watch fingers!)
and of course, the old standby,
Waiting for someone else to flush, or simply waiting for everyone else to leave.

And all for the sake of upholding that cardinal rule of womanhood:

Girls Don't Poop.
(Sat 3rd Sep 2005, 7:46, More)