How to Show Up for Your Friends When All You Really Care About is Tacos RN

Being a good friend is hard, especially as an adult. We have so many demands on our time and attention: spouses, homes, children, jobs, and--especially--tacos.

Back in high school or college, your friends were probably your top priority. You had more time to really sit down with your friends and shove tacos in your face at all hours of the day and night, but now you have to carve out the time to be a good listener and really show up, which is hard to do when all you can think about is the carne asada tacos you're going to eat later, as soon as you're done listening to your friend describe her child's experience of being bullied on the school bus, maybe also with guacamole, though that can get messy.

What does it mean to really show up for your friends? Without thinking about tacos? 

Well, it's hard to explain, but you know it when you see it: maybe you send them a handwritten note, or a care package. Maybe you call them on the phone, instead of just texting or liking one of their posts on social media, just to let them know you're thinking about them and not exclusively about fried halibut tacos with a mango slaw and a tiny bit of sour cream. 

Maybe it means trying to make them feel seen, to validate their experiences and to listen without judgment. You should strive to truly BE in any given moment with your friends, even though it's hard to be present when you can't decide if you prefer hard shell or soft shell corn tortillas, and even then, whether you prefer the soft shell ones fried in oil and sprinkled with cojita cheese as opposed to simply warmed up in the microwave because that's faster and easier.

Think about what brings you peace and joy: Maybe it's your tribe. Maybe it's your village. Maybe it's being savage (when called for). Maybe it's your spirit animal. Actually maybe it's recognizing that loosely throwing around any and all of those terms is deeply problematic if you're not indigenous. So if you aren't, maybe don't do that?

Also maybe try to put yourself in the other person's shoes: how would you feel if you were telling your friend about your mom's hysterectomy and she was staring off into the middle distance, and when you asked her if she'd ever had an ovarian cyst she said "Huh, what? Oh sorry, I was just daydreaming about pico de gallo with extra cilantro and how weird it is that some people think cilantro tastes like soap when it is obviously an herb of the gods. Can you repeat the question?"

That would suck, amirite?

One strategy you might try is to eat tacos before you go to an important event like a wedding, graduation, or funeral. That way, you're thinking a little bit less about how great tacos are going to taste a few hours from now, and instead focusing more on trying to stay awake because you're in a taco-induced coma.  

The point is, be gentle with yourself. It's a heavy lift, but it's actually possible to be a good friend and also only really care about tacos.

Adult Friendships Should Be Value Added. Full Stop.

Brevity is the soul of wit, which maybe is why I’ve been shying away from longer-form blog posts lately. That, and they’ve kind of fallen out of vogue as a medium, and also I’ve been feeling pretty depressed and uninspired.

But I’ve been thinking more and more about the role of friendship in adult life; what we as adults need (and don’t need) from our friends; and what we should seek from our friendships.

I can remember a time, mostly in adolescence and young adulthood, when nothing mattered more to me than my friends. I spent a lot of time fretting over who was “mad at me” or who was on the outs with whom or how I could navigate every little social interaction to maximize the goodwill of my peers. It was insanely stressful and occupied a shitload of mental real estate, which, at the time, I could spare.

But as you get older, your priorities shift and your social circles narrow. The perils of adulting rush in to fill the void previously occupied by friend drama. You start to contemplate your own mortality amid piles of bills, professional conflicts and setbacks, marriage troubles, and child-rearing. You find that you lack the bandwidth you once had for friend bullshit, because there is enough other more pressing bullshit to go around.

I realized a long time ago that I needed to adjust my expectations of friendship for sanity’s sake. That no one person can be all things to all people; that some friendships will always be one-way streets; that moments will arise when a person’s character emerges and you learn who your real friends are and who could really give two shits about you. I long ago gave up caring who was mad at me for no good reason and decided that my standard for friendship would be based on personal boundaries and mutual well-being.

The basic metric now is value-added. Adult friendship should support and buoy the rest of your life. It should add value. It should make life easier, not harder and sadder. It shouldn’t be a drain on an otherwise stressful and chaotic existence. It should be a refuge and a harbor—not yet another storm.

Here’s to calm seas.

The False Alarm Friend

Can we talk about this person for a second, please? The false alarm friend? Or relative. It can definitely be a relative. Usually an in-law. I can’t say for sure that they haven’t covered this on Seinfeld, but a quick Google search suggests not. Which is odd, because the False Alarm Friend (hereinafter, “FAF”) is definitely a type. 

A close cousin of the “The False Gasper” and “The Scary Sneezer,” (both of which I have covered in prior

posts), the False Alarm Friend scares the shit out of you with cryptic texts and voice mails, only to unwittingly deliver a punchline that results in a massive and jarring feedback loop of neurochemicals in and out of your adrenal system.

The FAF is what the kids call “extra.” Here’s how a text convo goes with a FAF:

FAF: I have something urgent to tell you

You: OMG what?

*10 minutes elapse*

You: Hello? I’m calling you.

*straight to voicemail*

You: what’s going on are you okay?

FAF: Are you sitting down

You: WHAT?! You’re scaring me

FAF: They have organic anchovy paste on sale at Costco

Here’s a voice mail from the FAF:

FAF VMX: “Hi .... um. Can you call me back? We need to talk as soon as possible.”

You: SHIT!! *calls FAF* Hi I got your voice mail what’s up?!

FAF: What size socks does Isaac wear?

You: Wut 

FAF: What size socks does Isaac wear? I’m standing in Gap Kids and they’re having a half off sale on boys’ socks 

You: Are you fucking serious right now?

There’re only so many times your heart will restart. If you want to conserve them, I suggest readjusting your expectations of the False Alarm Friend.

Embezzlement is Kind of a Friendship Dealbreaker

So I was at a party recently, chatting with someone whose business was embezzled by a friend and employee a few years ago. After she got out of jail, this person explained, the embezzler wanted to be friends again.

Friends ... Huh.

Now, maybe it’s because I’m not sufficiently bountiful in spirit, but personally I think embezzlement is kiiiiiind of a dealbreaker friendship-wise. Like if you’re going to embezzle from a friend, you should prolly assume that if you get caught, the friendship is over. 

I mean, embezzlement is pretty high-level friendship misconduct, my dudes. No?  It’s right up there with marital affairs, except it’s actually illegal.

I don’t typically have feuds or “break-up” with friends. Sure I’ve drifted apart from friends over the years, but always due to outside circumstances, and I always feel fondly toward them, even if they aren’t in my daily life anymore. I’m also not a particularly high-maintenance friend. I don’t get super worked up over the “always late friend” or the “constant drama friend” or the “risk-taker friend” or even the “crisis friend.” I’m pretty good with all of this.

But I draw the line at embezzlement. 

I’m not saying you shouldn’t forgive someone for their mistakes, but I don’t think that means your friendship should be presumptively on offer to the person who skimmed thousands of dollars off the top to go on a shopping spree at Target. In fact, I think the presumption should be that you ceded your friendship to a set of sequined pillows and a floor lamp.

My verdict is in: Embezzlement is a pretty generous friendship boundary.

Is This Really Worth Losing Friends Over? Yes, Absolutely.

When is it “worth it” to lose a friend over “politics?” This is a question that’s arisen, again and again, since Trump was elected. It’s a question that many of us—especially those of us in white skin—haven't really had to confront until recently (a privilege and a blInd spot unto itself).

This is by no means an original thought, of course. The strain and divisions in the American zeitgeist under Trump’s “leadership” have been the subject of one take after the other, with each day seemingly bringing a new test to the limits of our collective empathy and civic conscience.

On a microcosmic level, these divisions are playing out in our most intimate relationships. One argument goes that it’s just politics, and a stupid thing to feud about. The other argument, and the one I endorse, is that this is more than “politics,” or at least it’s more than “politics” as many of us have complacently defined it for ourselves until now.

This time is a test of character and values, and if character and values do not form the basis of human relationships, what does?

Everyone has a different definition of what makes a good friend, but there are some common qualities most of us can agree on: true friends love and support you for who you are; they listen with empathy; they “hold space” for you; they are dependable; they do not betray you; they are loyal and trustworthy; they don’t judge you; they share your values; they give and accept tough love. 

In short, friends have character.

Do not forget: the moment we are in is not a political moment but a test of character. It’s a rare moment in which the true nature of people’s characters is revealed. Are we lizard-brained animals who will strive at all costs to hoard resources and justify our dominance over each other? Or are we able to appeal to and meet the demands of our better natures, finding the empathy needed to actively defend our ideals when called upon to do so? And if we have people in our lives who insist on regressing to the former while we want to do the latter, is it okay to let those relationships go?

In my opinion, it is.

If your friends don’t understand why you are afraid; if they cannot listen without judgment; if they cannot cultivate empathy for you as a woman, a person of color, an immigrant, an LGBTQ person; if they refuse to listen and learn; if they betray you by voting against your life and liberty (yes, that is a betrayal); if they dismiss your concerns as petty when none of those concerns affect them personally; if they cannot be depended on to fight for your autonomy and needs when needed, then how are they a friend? How are they worth it?

The answer is they’re not. Let them go.

The Ridonks Bond

I've always had a great horse sense for people. My first impression of someone typically proves accurate over time, but not always. And when it doesn't, the person usually turns out to be better than I expected, not worse.

People talk a lot about "love at first sight" in the romantic context, but no one ever really explores the more platonic "holy shit, this is my people" moment. That moment you can have with a new friend--someone who isn't your friend yet--but who in a split second you suddenly realize will be. 

And if we're being honest, it's usually because you both detest the same people or things. 

Take law school, for example. Law school was pretty much wall-to-wall douche bags. Like the ratio was 10:1 douche to non-douche. But the non-douches were SO GREAT, and the reason they cleaved to each other so closely, was because they hated everyone else.

Now look: douchery is subjective and in the eye of the beholder. I recognize that. For all I know, I could THINK I was in the 10% non-douche category, but in fact I was the douche, and everyone else wasn't. It's all rather meta. Point is, birds of a feather flock together in this respect.

Here's an example: There was a woman in my 1L section (meaning we had every class together) named Michelle. She was a shameless loudmouth, and my first impression of her was that she was insufferable and obnoxious. But then one day we were in the elevator, and I overheard an "I was a sorority girl six months ago" type woman say, "I don't like my labor law professor. He's so pro-YOOOOONION, and I'm pro-MAAAAAAAANAGEMENT." 

Michelle was in the elevator at the time and we locked eyes and they widened in unison. We had this electric, silent communication of HOLY SHIT DID SHE JUST SAY THAT?! AND WAIT . . . YOU THINK THIS IS HORRIBLE TOO OH YAY SO DO I WE ARE GOING TO BE FRIENDS FOREVER.

Fast forward almost 20 years, and Michelle is literally in my will as one of the guardians for my kids if Geoff and I die in a fire or something. And it's all because we think the same people and things are fucking ridonks. 

Seriously, think about it. You KNOW you want to send this post to that person you've been friends with forever simply because you bonded over someone else's crazy.

Finding Amie

Amie is one of my oldest and dearest friends. I've written about her on this blog in passing before. She was with me at my first rock concert (Guns N’ Roses at MSG when we were 14 and 15) and she was the first person I ever emailed. (Yes, we are that old).

Over the years, we’ve fallen out of regular touch. She’s lived her whole adult life in San Diego, and I’ve lived mine in Alaska. The geographic and logistical challenges of getting together have caused the years to pile up, until a decade managed to pass without us seeing each other. We've kept abreast of major life developments and chat online from time to time, but we are simply not in each other’s everyday lives like we used to be.

To paraphrase Stephen King though, you never have friends later on like the ones you have when you’re a teenager. 

When I think of my adolescence, I think of Amie, because she was such an integral part of everything that was fun and memorable about that critical time in our lives. We had, and still have, a deep and lasting friendship, which in early 90's NYC was characterized by the absolute most fun imaginable.

We would stay out all night and blast our eardrums watching struggling hair bands play shitty nightclubs on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. We’d swoon over leather-clad, Slash-from-GNR-wannabes. At dawn, we’d head uptown for gross chicken soup and a marble frosted donut at Dunkin' Donuts before we slept until noon and I took the bus home.

Amie had terrific parents who adopted her at birth.

Amie always knew she was adopted, but like many adoptions in the 1970s, there wasn’t much information available. She knew that her biological parents were Portuguese teenagers who were not prepared to raise a baby, and that was about it. We would sometimes speculate that perhaps they were a prince and princess living in Portugal.

Fast forward to yesterday, when I saw on Instagram that Amie’s lifelong best friend, Jen, helped orchestrate the first-ever in-person meeting between Amie and her birth mom, Della. I immediately froze with my phone in my hand and texted Amie for the details, and we caught up early this morning.

Amie put me on speaker phone with Jen and Della, and although it had been a few years since I’d heard Amie’s voice, it felt like no time had passed. I had a million questions and got the gist of the story.

Della was 16 and living with her father, brother, and grandparents when she had a brief romance with Amie’s 19 year-old biological father (Amie has located him, but has not reached out to him yet). Della became pregnant with Amie and it was a scandal of sorts in her traditional family. 

As with many teen pregnancies at that time, Della didn’t have much control over what happened next. She finished out her pregnancy at an apartment in New York City, a private adoption was arranged through an attorney, and Della tried not to look as Amie was whisked away a few days after her birth in the hospital. 

That was the last time Della saw Amie until yesterday at the airport in Austin, Texas.

Both women had been on Ancestry.com looking for the other. Through a bunch of detective work by their friends and families and with help from Ancestry, they discovered they were a DNA parent/child match. 

Della wrote first, and Amie wrote back right away. I'm sharing their email exchange (and writing this blog post) with their permission and a few personal details omitted:

Della to Amie:

Hi Amie. My name is Della Pagano. Several weeks ago with the advice of a dear friend, I submitted my DNA. Today I hope a miracle has finally happened. I believe I am your biological Mother. If so, my search is over and my dream has come true. I am Portuguese and have 2 other daughters, Alexandra, 27, and Jaclyn, 24, both of whom are very excited right now. If it is you and you want to meet me or speak on the phone first, it would be my greatest wish. I pray I hear from you. You have been in my heart for always!

Amie to Della:

Oh my gosh! I can't even find the words . . . I can hardly breathe at the moment. I'm so overwhelmed with emotion! I have been searching for you forever!! I am incredibly overjoyed that you have found me, and even more so that you wish to meet me. I can't believe I have sisters!! I have always wanted sisters! You, by the way, have a 2.5 year old grandson. His name is Julian. My sisters are aunties. :) He is beautiful! You would be very proud. I most definitely want to speak to you and meet you as soon as possible. I currently live in San Diego and I know we have a 3-hour time difference. What time of day is best for me to call you?

xoxo, 

The happiest girl in the world, your daughter.

So mother and daughter quickly dispensed with their mutual fears that neither would want to meet or know the other. 

Della said she had never stopped thinking and wondering about Amie. For her part, Amie had wonderful parents, but was naturally curious about her birth parents. 

Jen arranged for them to reunite in Austin, with Amie traveling from San Diego and Della from Fairfield, Connecticut where she lives. Jen—forever loyal, tenacious, and fiercely loving—flew them both to Austin where they are presently enjoying a reunion together with Jen and her family.

In the course of just two weeks, Amie learned the identity of her birth mom and her two sisters, Della learned she is a grandmother, and Amie and Della met in person. They will all be having Thanksgiving together this year in North Carolina.

Intense much?!

Through tears, I told Della that Amie had a great childhood, which I knew because I was there for a bunch of it. I told her how amazing Amie’s parents are and were. (Her dad was a private pilot who died in a plane crash when we were young adults). I told Della what Amie and Jen surely had already told her many times: that Amie’s mom and dad, grandparents, and step-dad loved her and gave her everything she could have wanted or needed: love, support, an amazing home and education. 

You can see not just the physical resemblance, but the love that Della and Amie share despite only meeting in person yesterday. It’s an amazingly moving thing to witness. 

Even if you don’t know Amie, I defy you not to cry when you look at these pictures, watch this video and read the poem below (author uknown) that Della sent to Amie. 

A true once-in-a-lifetime moment. Absolutely incredible. Seriously, watch the vid.

Once there were two women,
Who never knew each other 
One you don't remember, 
One you call your mother. 
Two different lives,
Shaped to make your one, 
One became your guiding star, 
The other became your sun. 

The first one gave you life,

The second one taught you to live it. 
The first gave you a need for love, 
The second was there to give it. 
One gave you a nationality, 
The other gave you a name. 
One gave you a seed for talent, 
The other gave you an aim. 

One gave you emotions, 
The other calmed your fears. 
One longed to see your first smile, 
The other dried your tears. 

The age-old question 
Through the years:
Heredity or environment
Which are you a product of? 

Neither, my darling, neither.
Just two different kinds of love. 

The Stuff We Collect

One of my best friends in Juneau moved away. Again. Comings and goings of the people we love is part of life in Alaska.

Like snow, like no free shipping, like waxy tomatoes. It's part of the deal. You can't be mad about it any more than you can be mad at your driveway for icing over.

Before she left, Becca was part of a public art exhibit here in town. I refused to take the cast-off junk she tried to dump on me, but was later forced to admit that really the scooters were fun and Wonder was a great book and we'd already finished the leftover homemade granola she'd crammed into mismatched old yogurt containers.

I've put her portrait and her words here. I love and miss you, Becca.

Bouncy Balls and the Three Pillars Theory

Have you bounced a bouncy ball recently? Not a big one, necessarily. Even just one of those little red rubber balls that come with a set of jacks and that you can buy for 39 cents at a convenience store or get out of a gumball machine for a quarter. If you have kids, you probably know how annoying bouncy balls are and how much damage they can cause.

They are so small, and yet they are incredibly compact and powerful.

I have to hide them from my kids because of the havoc that they wreak indoors. Yet my kids find them anyway, and they appear to be irresistible. BAM! There goes a glass picture frame. BAM! There goes a bottle of liquor. SLAM! There goes someone’s eye.

Once launched, the bouncy ball is very unpredictable in terms of where it ricochets and the damage it can do.

I’ve noticed that sometimes, people will throw metaphorical bouncy balls into my life. They don’t do it to break my shit on purpose, but they also don't reeeeeeeeeeeeally care if something gets broken. 

They do it to play with the bouncy ball, because the bouncy ball is fun. 

I don’t know if you’re familiar with this phenomenon, but it ties into something I call the three pillars theory. I don’t think I made this up, or maybe I did. I don’t know. But that’s what I call it and here’s what it is:

There are three pillars to every relationship: physical/interpersonal chemistry (physical if it’s a romantic relationship, interpersonal if it’s platonic); intellectual compatibility; and emotional security. The three sort of orbit around each other and can make or break friendships and relationships, but in my experience, by far the most difficult pillar to find and maintain is emotional security.

Emotional security is a sort of dependability. It’s the idea that the people in your life are, on some level, fundamentally reliable and consistent. And not just reliable as in they don’t flake on drinks or fail to meet you at the airport. Sure there’s that, but true emotional security with another human being is more than that.

It’s knowing that you can expect the same level of emotional investment over time on a consistent basis, be it a lot or a little. That a person will not run hot and cold and make you insane with intermittent reinforcement of human connection. That they will not withdraw and retreat and reemerge at will with an expectation of responsiveness and an abdication of boundaries. 

That they will not pick up a bouncy ball and fucking BAM the shit out of it just to see where it lands.

I am turning 40 this fall. I feel like I am done letting people throw bouncy balls around in my psychological living room just to see where they land, and I am ready to start cleaning up all the valuables I have let them break.

Defects and Damage

I wake up early this morning feeling sad and sorry for myself for no reason, which is a typical mindset for me, unfortunately.

Despite a current lack of objective reasons in my life for self-pity, I always manage to find some--even and especially on a sunny day in Juneau, when the blaring blueness of the sky twists the knife of my unjustifiably stank mood.

I’m great at this feeling.

I step on the scale and weigh five pounds more than I think I should, and yet I’m “starving.” I spot a brownie in my fridge and gobble it down for breakfast standing up, lurking in a corner of the kitchen while my kids are distracted with a squabble.

I’m battling my insurance company to get them to cover a “breakthrough” medicine that costs $37,000 a year and will supposedly magically cure my allergies and eczema, thus allowing me to exercise and sweat again without feeling like I just washed my face in battery acid, and give me that elusive "runner's high" that's never been close to as good as drugs or alcohol.

I promptly free-fall down a Facebook rabbit hole, indulging in a depressing perusal of the one-dimensionally happy lives of everyone who’s ever hurt me or for whom love was not enough.

When I lift my head up from the iHunch position, I have nothing to show for my “research” besides a well-deserved neck cramp and the firm conviction of lost and wasted time. Writing feels plodding and laborious today, and like nothing anyone, least of all me, gives a shit about.

Then I see this picture of Becca, and I look back at what she texted me after “Happy Easter, another Jewish parent fail day!”

“You can blog about it,” she said of the photo. “I don’t have it in me!” I texted back to make sure she was serious. “If you want to,” she responded. “It seems rich with possibilities. Unlike my fucking life!”

What can I say? She’s not wrong.

When your husband dies suddenly leaving you with two children under 7, you get diagnosed with stage three breast cancer, start a blog, have multiple surgeries, move twice, obtain a difficult and demanding job, and then develop an unrelated and rare form of eye cancer over the course of seven years, it’s not easy to disagree. So I don’t, and I tell Becca as much when she gets home from her most recent cancer treatment this week.

“I won’t try to shine this turd,” I say, and we both laugh.

Becca always says John’s death was a combination of bad luck and bad decisions, but I guess because I’m not religious, I think that’s true of everything. Each of life's zig-zags is some combination of luck and decision-making--good or bad--and not in an even 50/50 ratio, either.

More like 90/10 luck to decision-making, I’m afraid.

We like to think our friendships are forever and preordained to endure; that we are in the driver’s seat; that we can control outcomes. In short, we like to think our spouses, our jobs, our relationships, and all of our life circumstances were fated and earned on merit, because that makes them feel less likely to be lost.

And when we do inevitably lose them, it’s easier to say, “well, everything happens for a reason,” instead of being honest with ourselves by entertaining the terrifying possibility that everything, good or bad, happens for no reason at all.

This is Becca standing in our local climbing gym, aptly named “The Rock Dump,” at a kid’s birthday party this weekend. She looks like a movie star (as usual) particularly with her post-eye surgery sunglasses on. She’s in a harness and ready to climb a wall, and probably plans to do some of her signature eagle-eyed editing for work with her good eye later.

She keeps saying she’s defective and damaged now, but aren’t we all? And weren’t we always? From the moment we’re born, we’re dying and fucking up along the way. But we’re also learning, growing, and reflecting at the same time.

If Becca is right, and this is what defected and damaged looks like, then I guess I’m less afraid of defected and damaged than I thought. 

I have Becca to thank for that.

For Charlie

Everyone called him Chuck, but if you really knew him, you called him Charlie. So that’s what I called him, and it made me feel cool. Like I was elevating myself to a special level of intimacy simply with one little tweak to a nickname for Charles.

It didn’t hurt that he looked like a pinup from Tiger Beat magazine, either--a teen heartthrob before he was even a teenager. Somehow he skipped over the whole "awkward phase," the asshole. I should know. I was there. 

Girls loved him, all the more so because as beautiful as he was--and he was not unaware of that fact--he was never a dick. He was never cruel or unkind, like many boys his age; and if he could sometimes be suggestible, he was never mean. He never mocked anyone. He was always funny and witty, and a little dark and broody as well.

Every girl knew Charlie had perfect teeth, but not every girl knew he was funny and dark. I loved that about him, and I loved how I felt like I was the only girl who knew it.

We met at summer camp in 1988, before I had boobs and when Charlie’s entire wardrobe consisted of unwashed New York Yankees tee-shirts. We both lived in New York City, so we saw each other often throughout the year.

Charlie possessed an enviable collection of Nintendo games and VHS movies; and he had free reign over Manhattan’s ample takeout menu options. We played Legend of Zelda and ordered big greasy hamburgers from Jackson Hole, laughing like morons when the guy answered the phone the same way every time, “HALLO JACKSON!,” in a heavy accent of indeterminate origin, with the bustle of industrial kitchen noise in the background.

He was a regular fixture at my apartment too. Sometimes he’d take the express bus and bring his homework. We’d compare French text books, making fun of the pictures and the characters: “Guillaume va a la discotheque!” What the fuck is a “discotheque” and who goes to one anymore? And we would dissolve into peals of laughter at how stupid they were, these cartoon French kids in a text book, drinking nonalcoholic punch and dancing at a party to vinyl records.

When Charlie left for boarding school in tenth grade, I didn’t have a word for the void I felt, but I knew it was a little glowing orb of love. We talked on the phone when he was homesick, which was often. I would check the mail each week for a mix tape full of Led Zeppelin and Doors music, pop it into the tape deck on the pink carpet of my bedroom floor, and then carefully select songs for my reciprocal mix tape, writing the song titles in careful print on the liner sheet of a blank cassette. 

I insisted on tagging along with Charlie's mom on the two hour drive to all of his plays (I think I still have the playbills somewhere). When he came home for vacations, I decamped to his mom’s place, and I’d borrow his clothes with no intention of returning them. We’d sometimes mess around a little, completely at my insistence and mostly out of a mutual curiosity I think.

Charlie always had a girlfriend, but we never talked about why none of them was me until we were maybe 20 or 21.

We were looking at a familiar lake and mountains, sitting on the front porch of the mess hall at the same summer camp where we’d met a decade earlier, and where we were both working as counselors. By this time, each of us had experienced at least one serious relationship. I can’t remember exactly how the conversation went, but I more or less asked Charlie why he had never wanted to be my boyfriend. I presented him with a sort of half-hearted, now-or-never ultimatum that seems so silly and juvenile in retrospect.

His response, though, was neither of those things. I’m not getting the words right, but it was something along the lines of didn’t I realize our friendship was better and more enduring than any romantic relationship could ever be. He was letting me down easy, I knew. But he wasn’t lying either. I knew that, too. And, surprised at how unhurt I felt in that moment, I also knew he was absolutely right.

In the twenty years since, he’s been proven right more times than I can count. Last week, Charlie was on a TV show (he’s an actor) and I trolled him hard by texting his lines to him in real time in dramatic all-caps.

“This is amazing,” he texted back. “I’m standing in my kitchen and I can’t stop laughing.”

Yesterday my dad mailed me an old photo of Charlie and me that my dad “restored,” meaning he got a new photo printer and wanted to test it out. I stared at the photo and let my mind unspool for awhile before texting Charlie and asking his permission to write a blog post about our friendship. 

“Um, sure!,” he wrote back. “I want you to be able to express your beautiful self, Goody Bak!” 

He was invoking one of a million inside jokes—this one a rather cerebral reference to my last name and Arthur Miller’s play, The Crucible—where every female character in 1692 Salem, Massachusetts was called “Goody” so-and-so.

This morning, while Paige was getting ready for school, I had this thought:  Every girl deserves a boy who, after three decades of friendship, affectionately implies she was a witness in the Salem witch trials.

That Moldy Bath Toys Moment

I'm a firm believer that you can fall in platonic love with your friends, and that you can do so very suddenly, in unexpected and seemingly insignificant ways.

If you reflect back on some of your closest relationships, you'll probably recall at least one experience early on in the friendship when you first realized you were meant to be. 

It might be something big, like somebody stepping up for you (or vice versa) during a crisis. It could be one particularly deep and interesting conversation. But more often, it's something small and ridiculous.

This is what I've come to call the "moldy bath toys moment," and though I've had such moments since childhood, the origins of the name for this phenomenon are more recent.

Paige was around two years old and I was bathing her in a tub with a little boy the same age, whose mom I didn't know very well but liked instinctively. I can't remember what had us in that situation exactly, but somehow we were at this woman's house and both our kids were filthy, so we threw them in the tub together.

The kids began playing with bath toys, and one of them picked up a little rubber duck and squeezed it. A burst of wet, black, flaky, slimy mold spurted out of the little hole on the duck's flat bottom. The other mom started to apologize for her disgusting bath toys, but was stopped by my laughter and assurances that I had 100 moldy plastic bath toys in my bathtub at home with the same problem.

It didn't faze either of us in the least, and we let the kids continue their bath--with the moldy bath toys. Looking back, that was the moment I knew I loved her.

My point is this: when you meet someone who cares about moldy bath toys as little (or even less) than you do, well, you know you've got a friend for life.

Who Do You Call When You're Completely Fucked?

That's what friendship's most fundamental essence can be reduced to, basically: who you call when you're completely fucked.

Fucked in the head, or fucked in a sketchy situation of some sort, either way, a true friend is someone you can always call to de-fuck a super fucked situation, and you know there is zero chance of them fucking it up any further. 

De-fuck your child care emergency; de-fuck your broken outboard motor and stranding on a sandbar; or de-fuck your depressed, anxious, neurotic mental state. 

And you do the same for them. 

That's pretty much the whole point of friends in my opinion. To make your life feel just a little less fucked.

Laughing Matters

Making people laugh hysterically is a bigger high than any drug in the world. It's why I started O.H.M., and it remains my main inspiration for this blog.

When I sit down to write most days, I imagine my friends' faces responding to my stupid antics, like here when I did my "Steven Tyler mouth" to prompt selfie-ready laughter. All the Alaskan women in this photo had traveled a long distance for a wedding we were in, and we had a blast together with ample laughing and some crying. 

But let me take a brief detour from laughter to talk about Georgia in July. All I can say is that shit ain't funny, especially for someone who lives in Alaska and is probably exposed to hot weather literally maybe once or twice a year on vacation, if that.

It was about 100 degrees this weekend, which is 25 degrees hotter than it almost ever gets in Juneau. My mind anticipated intense heat, but my body went into revolt. Due to a variety of factors including forgetting to eat and drink, I literally suffered some version of heatstroke unlike anything I've ever experienced in my life. 

At one point, I laid on the bench of a restaurant booth asking Geoff in a semi-delerium if he thought I was going to die. He claimed "not today," and he was right. All it took was a freezing cold shower, two hours of nudity in an air conditioned hotel room, a plate of vegetable Pad Thai, and about two gallons of water to bring me back from the "dead" and turn my pee from powdered Tang into normal urine-colored liquid.

During my aforementioned delirium, I heard Paige yell out, "CANNED GREEN BEANS!?! SHE'S USING CANNED GREEN BEANS?" 

Paige and Isaac's Netflix obsession of this particular trip was a show called "Worst Cooks in America," which they've been devouring with a headphone splitter on our iPad whenever we have downtime in a hotel with wifi. "I want Rashida to win," said Isaac hopefully. "NOOO! DON'T PUT PEANUT BUTTER IN THE CHILI!," he cried in desperation.

And even though I was barely conscious at this point, in the naked air conditioning phase of my pseudo heatstroke, I laughed out loud into my pillow. And it felt great.

Love is Showing Up

I was recently asked to put some thoughts into writing on the theme of love for two close friends who are getting married next weekend. So that's what I'm doing, but I won't speak only to marriage/romantic love, which is a limiting way to talk about love in my opinion. Marriage (especially with kids) could just be a vast government conspiracy to promote abstinence anyway, but that's depressing--especially on the eve of a wedding--so let's not go there. 

Instead, let's talk about showing up, which are the two words to which all forms of love can be reduced. I hesitate to quote Woody Allen, because he's gross and creepy. But he was right when he said (or supposedly said) that 90% of life is showing up. I'll take that a step further, to the conclusion that 90% of love is showing up.

Our time--especially our in-person time, is valuable and increasingly fractured. We parcel out tiny slivers of our time each day in service of smoothly operating and managing the machinery of our daily lives. We go through the perpetual motions of that grind, all the while distracted and diverted by pings, rings, and screens. 

Now more than ever, showing up for someone, in person and not distracted, is the ultimate expression of love, because it offers the single most valuable thing we as human beings have to give to each other: our undivided time and attention.

So what do I mean when I say love is showing up? There are lots of examples, but here are a few:

Love is sitting with someone during their chemo treatments. Love is driving to someone's house in the middle of the night when they're scared because one of their family members hasn't come home yet. Love is bringing someone their favorite magazines and candy just because. Love is helping someone pack up their belongings from their parents' house when their family disowns them for loving the "wrong" person. Love is listening with acute attention and empathy. It's accepting someone as they are--with all their limitations--and without trying to fix them or solve their problems for them. 

In short, love is taking the time to show up for people, and then following through. It's making the effort to set aside your own ego and priorities, and make someone else's life a priority for awhile. It's the ability to recognize the things that matter to other people, to know when you are needed and wanted, and then simply showing up to truly be present with them in those moments.

So yeah. 90% of love is showing up for someone. The other 10% is not getting mad when they pick all the M&M's out of your trail mix.

Blood from a Stone

Have you ever tried to get someone to talk to you when they don't feel like it? It's actually an amazing exercise in futility and the perfect embodiment of the AA serenity prayer: the serenity to accept the things you cannot change, the courage to change the things you can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

When someone isn't giving you what you want in life--either in romance, friendship, at work, or otherwise--it's like trying to get blood from a stone to get that person to give it to you. I'm not talking about material possessions here. I'm talking about emotional investment and certain desired interpersonal interactions, whatever those may be.

I thought of this today when someone sent me a Modern Love column from the New York Times. The author told the story of a difficult breakup in which she, the dumpee, was reminded of the memories of a lost love through their shared Netflix queue. The column ends with the woman deciding to "say nothing" in response to a check-in text from her ex, accepting that she "can't change the way someone else feels" about her, so she changes her Netflix password instead.

It was a poignant, sad, well-written, and funny column. Except I was struck by the fact that this woman was not, of course, "saying nothing." Quite the opposite, she was literally publishing a very long account in the New York Times of a breakup, which the initiator himself was likely to read. In her own way, she was still poking and prodding around for a response, or at least for the last word.

These interactions can be distilled into one very basic idea: you can know intellectually that you "can't control how someone else feels," as the author of this column does. But there's a wide gulf between intellectual insight and the emotional insight you need to feel that this is true. To have serenity about it.

I can remember many occurrences of this throughout my younger adulthood and even into the present day. I would feel a certain way about a person in a particular situation. I would want that person to feel or say something in response. I would want to do that thing Adele wants to do in Hello and "meet to go over everything." Of course, this is always the last thing anyone on the receiving end of these overtures ever wants to do. 

That person is a stone. Which is not to say they are cold and unreceptive in general, although they often are. But they are cold and unreceptive to you. Who cares why? It doesn't matter, because it's never about you, not in the way you think it is, anyway.

It took me a long time to realize this. I'm still figuring it out in many ways, and have explored this theme before. Trying to get reciprocity, responsiveness, or security from someone who won't or can't (it doesn't matter which) give it to you is like trying to get blood from a stone. You're constantly asking "why?" or "why don't they care?", when really you should be asking yourself "why do I?"

Like all of us, the author of that modern love column might still be seeking an answer to that last question. 

I hope she gets it.

Old Friends

There's something about the friends you've had since childhood that penetrates the core of your psyche in a unique and powerful way. I've always prioritized my friendships and staying in touch with people. Even before the internet, and certainly before social media, I was very intense about that. Maybe it was because I'm an only child, or social, or both. Whatever the reason, I'm still really close to people I've known since age 8 and even younger. 

Two of those friends drove many hours just to spend an afternoon with me today, which is even more special because of Alaska's distance. My life feels very bifurcated, in that my adult life as a parent and my adult relationships are in Alaska, and my past life and childhood will always be on the east coast.

Weird thought: when you're two days old, you're twice as old as the day you were born. Think about being in grades 1-12. 12 years is not nearly as significant an amount of time to an adult as it is to a child, because it's so much more of a child's life relative to how long they've lived. And that's why what happens in those years, when you're a developing human, matters so much. And childhood friendships are a huge part of that.

These are the friends who know you like no one else ever can or will, simply because the opportunity to be known in that particular way has passed. These are the friends whose paths crossed with yours because of decisions the adults in charge of your lives made, like where to live and where to send you to school or for the summer; but who hurtled along with you on that happy, sad, awkward, and often terrifying journey of childhood and adolescence.

They were in those universal trenches of development with you. They know your families of origin, and often their secrets. You've spent hours in each other's childhood bedrooms talking about nothing. They were part of your stupid mistakes. You made each other laugh until you almost peed your pants--it's rarer to laugh that way as an adult, isn't it?  You cried with each other over breakups and took road trips with the same mix tape stuck in the tape deck of your busted car. You didn't realize how free you were, because you were so busy just trying to grow up.

Stephen King (one of my favorite writers) put it so accurately and so poignantly at the end of the novella Different Seasons, better known for its film adaptation, Stand By Me: 

"I never had any friends later on like the ones I had when I was 12. Jesus, does anyone?"

Sounding Like a "Drunken Hyena" to a 12 Year-Old Boy is My #1 Squad Goal

If you've ever read this blog before, you know I'm a person with goals. I'm EXTREMELY goal-oriented. 

I guess you might call some of my goals "untraditional" though, since they aren't stuff like "be present" or "exercise 5 days a week." They're more things like, "finish coloring the negative space in this adult coloring book with a blue metallic gel pen," "think up some stupid observation and blog about it," or "spend less money on lunch." And sometimes, you don't even realize you had a particular goal until you've achieved it.

That's what happened last night, when I was hanging out with two of my sister wives. The one who hosted us texted the next day to report that her 12-year-old son, who was in self-imposed solitary confinement upstairs, told her we sounded like "drunken hyenas."

This was one of those moments when, with the help of two good friends, I achieved something remarkable and unexpected: sounding like a drunken pack of hyenas to a 12-year-old boy.

#SquadGoals

8 Signs You’re in a Toxic Friendship

Like math, friendships are hard. There's lots of advice out there on how to recognize what the Internet calls a “toxic friendship.” But until now, there's never been a really easy way to tell that you're in one. That's why O.H.M. wrote this handy guide to figuring out if you’re in a toxic friendship:

1. You always think of those three little words: The first three words that come to mind every single time you see your friend in person, on social media, or get an email or text from your friend, regardless of the content, are: “What an asshole!”

2. You fantasize about battery acid: When it comes right down to it, you realize you’d rather dunk your head in a vat of battery acid than spend one more second even thinking about your friend.

3. You fantasize about bonfires: You fantasize about burning everything that reminds you of your friend in a giant, dramatic bonfire, recording it, and uploading it to YouTube for posterity.

4. You fantasize about lobotomies: You often wish there was some way to undergo a quick, painless, Total Recall-esque lobotomy that surgically excised any and all memory of your friend/friendship's existence while leaving the rest of your brain intact.

5. Your friendship is a one-way street: Despite knowing you for many years, your friend always talks about themselves and never asks any questions about you. When they do, it’s usually something like, “Wait, remind me: What’s your son’s name again?” Also, you are usually having this conversation at an inconvenient time, such as while driving, and it sometimes causes you to literally drive the wrong way down a one-way street.

6. Your friend plays hot and cold with your emotions and you can’t count on them for jack shit: One day they’re there, the next day they’re gone. Your friend is like Casper the Friendly Ghost, except less friendly. Also, the last time they were supposed to pick you up from the airport, they texted to say their mom was in the hospital, but you later found out they were secretly just fucking your ex.

7. Your friendship is centered on a Superfund site: The only place your friend ever wants to hang out is a Superfund site while wearing a Tyvek suit and an industrial-grade respirator; and while shoveling toxic sludge over a fence and screaming, crying, and unloading on you in a scary Darth Vader-respirator voice.

8. You actually just hate your friend: Even though your friend ends every interaction with a saccharine "LOVE YOUUU!" and you holla back with, "LOVE YOU TOOOOOOOOOOOOO," you’re pretty sure your friend fucking hates you as much as you hate them.

Tools of the Trade

I want to be the kind of person who doesn't need a hammer, shovel, and icy steps to provide an outlet for anger and frustration. But as of the waning hours of 2015, at least, I am not that kind of person.

By all accounts I should have been happy, and I was.

Mostly.

It was Paige's birthday. I had everything I needed (for the night and in general) and had barely lifted a finger, deferring all the work of things like making Harry Potter "Quidditch snitches" out of donut holes to Geoff, as usual. We had a house full of kids coming and I couldn't have them tripping up the stairs.

But something was gnawing at me, as "something" always does--quite inconveniently--when I am supposed to be feeling the most grateful and content.

The something is hard to explain, but it had to do with the intersection of past and present. Long, winding, complicated interpersonal relationships with lots of history, misunderstandings, phases, and frustrations.

Enter the shovel, ice, and hammer.

See, I had to clear the steps anyway, and I knew it was going to be hard work. I took one slug of whiskey straight from the bottle (to warm up, to warm up!), and began the daunting task of chipping away at our front porch glacier.

You have to swing the hammer to break up the ice, and then you shovel away the pieces.

WHAM!

I closed my eyes reflexively against the ice chips flying up into my face. I thought about all of life's vagaries; missed opportunities; the immutable character traits that for good or bad make us who we are; and the pointlessness of dwelling on any of it.

WHAM!

I hit the ice as hard as I could, conjuring mental images of the things and people that were making me angry, unhappy, jealous, and despairing for no reason and every reason all at once.

WHAM!

I summoned all of my stupid, boiling, petty, pointless rage and channelled it into the head of a hammer. I grabbed the heavy, metal shovel by its wooden handle and beat the steps repeatedly and with all my might, stripping them of ice, down to the sandpaper and wood underneath until I was out of breath.

I must say, it was all rather satisfying. The hammer and shovel: Tools of the neurotic rage trade.

But . . . what am I supposed to do in summer?