Friends Like This

Making friends is so easy when you're a little kid. Pretty much all you have to do is live near someone your age and boom - companionship. It's like, hey nice bike, let's play fort. Easy.

As a grown up proximity alone does not a friendship make. I mean, I'm friendly with most of our neighbors, but I certainly don't want to invite them over to play fort, let alone talk to them for more than 5 minutes. I'm fond of the neighborly smile and wave from afar.

Even when I am able to determine that I have a few things in common with someone, I have to build up to committing to hang out, meet for dinner or drinks or what have you, and even then it's sketchy.

Making friends as an adult is a crap shoot. Start to make friends with a new person and even when things seem to be going great and you're getting along the next thing you know they try to recruit you to sell Amway for them, invite you to their next Klan meeting or try to get you baptized.

It can be terrifying because not only does this loony have your number, now they think that you are friends. Then I have to be the dick in the situation and be all like "I'm sorry I can't come to the quilting bee/cockfight/candle party, but I'm just crazy busy for the rest of my life."

The scariest thing anyone ever said to me in an overly eager tone was "we should be friends!"

Back off freak. It doesn't work that way, and besides you don't just blurt out a sentence like that. Weirdo.

I realize that I am dazzling to look at and have been entertaining you with my captivating, dry wit at this cocktail party non-stop. Don't get me wrong you've been a lovely audience, but I cannot make a commitment to a friendship based upon this encounter. I need facts. I need a list of hobbies and interests. I need to know that you are not going to go home from this party and dress your pet ferret up like Snow White and then leaf through your collection of clown porn.

Not to say that I'm not weird or that my friends aren't all freaks. I am weird and my friends are all weird, but we're all the same kind of weird, just in different ways. A certain je ne sais quoi of weird. Whatever it is - it works.

Anyhoo.. at this point I feel I'm rambling on a bit so I'm going to wrap it up. I'm sure you have deduced from reading this blog I don't have many close friends. The few that I do have live far away. I was missing them all very much this long Labor Day weekend and was thinking about how hard it is to make friends when you're an old weirdo and how lucky I am to have such great old weirdo friends.

Why Do We Live Here?

Western Michigan blows.

It blows especially hard this time of year, when I swear to you it snows every goddamn day. I bundle up in the morning like a fucking marshmallow. A fashionable marshmallow in my fur and velvet earmuffs and Calvin Klein parka, but still. It's hard to sashay around and maintain maximum cuteness in all this gear. I might slip on the layers of ice and snow that have been building up since it began snowing nonstop at Thanksgiving and break a hip or chip a tooth and that ain't cute at all.


There is a 4 block stretch of road on my commute that I've started calling "the Black Eye express" because of all of the pot hole induced boob jostling.

Why hasn't somebody invented a form of pavement that doesn't buckle, cave in on itself and disintegrate in cold weather?


Why don't they bring back full service gas stations so that I don't have get out of the car to pump gas? I would pay extra for this. I really would.


What moronic clan of mouth breathers decided this type of environment was habitable enough to build a city that my husband would be unwillingly transferred to hundreds of years later causing us to move away from our beautiful and cozy home in a place where it doesn't snow every goddamn day and I never once dreamed of owning a parka, waterproof snow boots or any type of fleece whatsoever? ? ?



Here is a photo that I took while I was driving to work this morning.

(Insert blood curdling scream here.)

I realize that the roads were shitty and that I probably shouldn't have taken my hands off the wheel long enough to take a photo., but I felt it had to be done and look I'm totally fine.