Category Archives: Friends

Wedding attendee

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I’m getting ready to travel to my friend’s wedding in Phoenix this weekend. This will be the first non-family wedding I’ve attended without a plus-one as an adult, and it immediately reminded me of my friend who hates attending weddings without her partner and plus-one. I wonder how I will get along with my friends’ friends, because I’m sure as you know, for the most part at weddings, you will spend probably 10 percent or less time actually talking to the bride and groom. My friend is very opinionated, so I’m sure she also has a lot of friends who are like this, too. I actually am a little sad that my own friend table at my own wedding didn’t seem to “click” that well. I guess their individual personalities didn’t really mesh that well even though they all had me in common. Or maybe they just didn’t drink enough.

But if all else fails, I will still have her dad to chat up, as I always loved having him visit her in college. He was always so kind and generous, and would offer to take me out to eat with them, and we always ate interesting food together — Indian once, Ethiopian another — whatever cuisine you wanted, he’d enthusiastically agree. It was such a happy and welcome break from the mundane dining hall food in college. I remember those moments fondly because I remember thinking, how does someone my age have a parent who is this interesting and funny and witty? He’s a father’s age, but he seems to look at the world the way we do — he’s liberal, open-minded, loves to try new things, and is so creative. This is a world I was unaccustomed to, and I can’t wait to see him and his wife again.

 

“Karaoke monster” friend

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Tonight, we went to meet my friend visiting from out of town at a karaoke bar. She’s a self-professed “karaoke monster” who Chris finds particularly interesting, especially after she’s had a drink or two. Why does Chris like her? In the past, he has said that she seems confident, she can talk about anything and seem comfortable, and she doesn’t shy away from controversial subjects. Chris doesn’t think this of a lot of my friends.

After a few hours of hanging out and having a lot of back and forth banter, I realized that I’ve never dated or been with anyone who really liked or got along with all my friends. I realize that’s a bit hard considering that I’ve never really had a single “group,” and so my friends are all very different from disparate parts of my life, but I’ve never had any partner readily accept all of them. One of my friends, who loves to co-mingle all friends as much as possible, once said that she doesn’t understand why people don’t “all just get along.” I think you only “all just get along” when you have no opinions and no desire to truly be yourself, because like Bill Maher says, if you are not offending anyone while saying what you think and being who you are, you must be a pretty dull person, or you are not truly being who you are at the core.

La-dee-da

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I set up time today to meet with a friend at a nearby coffee shop to the hotel where Chris and I are staying at in downtown San Francisco, but after some thought, I realized… why am I asking her to meet me at a crowded coffee shop with terrible acoustics when I could just invite her to the hotel lounge during prime afternoon tea time hour, where she could have access to whatever food and drink she wanted? I called her and asked to meet at the hotel instead, and as soon as she walked into the lounge… I wish I recorded her facial expressions changing. Like me, my friend is very expressive, and she shows all her emotions on her face. I’m sure Chris might have likened it to my face when I first walked into the British Airways International Lounge at JFK airport, when I’d never been into a single airport lounge in my life other than the terrible and bare-bones United lounge in LAX. She was blown away by the food setup, the access to drinks, the massive floor-to-ceiling windows, and the overall decor.

“Is this the life you are used to?” my friend marveled, as she sat down to enjoy her just-made latte and crustless mini egg salad sandwiches. “So la-dee-da, aren’t you? I could get used to being you! Can I just stay here even after you leave?”

We ended up staying in the lounge for about three hours, and Chris was even able to join us and meet this friend for the very first time. Chris made the fancy hotel and lounge seem like no big deal, like this was what he was used to given his hectic work travel schedule, and my friend marveled even more. She was not used to this type of travel. And for the longest time, neither was I.

As I thought more about it as we sat down together for that time, I started feeling like somewhat of a disappointment, like a Stepford bride who relies on her husband for all the money and luxuries and pleasures she enjoyed. I don’t get this type of experience or treatment on my own or through my own work; I get these privileges because of the work and accomplishments of my husband. And what’s worse is that he’s had it way harder than me as someone who isn’t even a U.S. citizen and had to prove himself as a foreigner; I’m natively born here and I’m nowhere as accomplished as he is. He’s set in his career and enjoys every minute of it; I’m still wandering around, figuring out what the hell I’m really supposed to be doing and what my purpose is.

These are the first world conflicts of someone who is privileged, or “la dee da” as my friend said.

 

Evolution of the mind

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When you have been friends with your friends for over two decades, it’s easy either to note the evolution in their characters and beliefs…. or not. Sometimes, we turn a blind eye to our friends’ changes because we want to see them how we always saw them — as the great people we originally loved and became attached to. But for me, I think what’s been a very strange change is seeing one of my closest friends, who I’ve always considered a deep thinker who has shared her feelings, stop doing that and stop probing to find out more about why I think the way I think. Before in high school, she used to always challenge my behavior or voiced opinions. She always cared about the family drama I had to deal with at home. She always seemed to want to understand. Now, she seems to zone out when our third friends asks questions to find out more about anything about me that may be sensitive or personal. It’s like a lesser desired level of understanding. Or maybe she just wants to remove herself from understanding because it takes too much effort, is too tiring because a lot of the facts are negative, or just wants to have more superficial relationships now. I’ll never quite get it.

Getting older

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If there is one thing that unites pretty much all of my friends, it’s that they all love to eat. Some have smaller appetites than the others, but they all enjoy eating food and see eating as a pleasure in life, not something they do simply to survive. One of my oldest friends from middle school has always been a stick, and she’s always had the largest appetite. She’s also known for eating slower than anyone I’ve ever met in my life, and after you are done eating, she has just barely scraped the surface of her dish, and then slowly will inch her way to your leftovers on your plate. We were on the phone tonight, and she said that in the last two years, she’s realized her metabolism is finally slowing down, and she cannot eat as much as she used to. She’s managed to surpass me in weight even though she is two inches shorter than me, and the bridesmaid dress she wore to my wedding stopped fitting a month after the wedding. She asked me for advice on how to lose weight and what I did to lose weight four years ago.

This is part of getting older — realizing that you can’t do all the things you wanted to do and eat all the things you want to eat without consequence. It means recognizing that your body is changing and that you need to slowly adjust what you are doing to it to treat it right, otherwise it will come back and be very mean to you.

New York couple friends

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I think in our time together as a couple, Chris and I have really only made one net-new couple friend in New York City, and we just happened to meet one half of this couple during my friend’s nonprofit food tour last year. I feel this way about individual friends, but couple friends are even harder because all four people need to get along to a certain degree, and that makes it even harder to make the relationship sticky and to continue to want to see each other and spend time with each other. We had them over for dinner tonight, and we talked about everything from family to travel to our futures. When we are with them, something happens that rarely happens when four people are all together who are parts of couples: we all listened as one person spoke at a time, and few side conversations happened. That almost never happens with my other friends and their partners, and it’s probably because someone’s conversation is going to bore the other. It was so refreshing, and I relished every second of it. It didn’t feel like we were at war to be heard because everyone just wanted to listen to each other. It was like a utopian conversation.

It’s so nice to feel like people actually want to listen to what you say and respect what you have said.

Hanging out in the South

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Last night, Chris and I had dinner, broke through an Escape Room, and had drinks with my friend and her friends in Little Rock. For the first time probably since college, I was surrounded by people who were not from one coast or the the other and who were all in the sciences. Her friends are all specializing in different areas in the same medical residency program, and one of the friend’s boyfriends is a microbiologist working for the FDA. Their places of origin included Kuwait/Baton Rouge, San Antonio, Orlando, and Austin.

We were sitting at a table over drinks until past midnight, talking about everything from what truly defines Tex-Mex cuisine (the guys from San Antonio claim that Austin “Tex-Mex” is “whitified” and not real, and that San Antonio is the only city in the entire South where you can get “real” Tex-Mex) to immigrating to the U.S. as a brown Bangladeshi person from Kuwait, to what “diversity” means in different environments. One conversation I had that surprised me was that one of the women said to me that she found Little Rock far more diverse than Baton Rouge, where her family currently lives and where she did her undergrad and medical school studies. “In Baton Rouge, all I was meeting were people who either didn’t want to do anything meaningful with their lives and stay in their home town forever, or people who were obsessed with work, superficial, and frankly very uninteresting as people,” she said. She expressed annoyances that it was hard to meet someone who was a working professional, dedicated and passionate about what they were doing, who is also interesting and good to have conversation with. “It’s been easier for me to find that here in this residency program,” she said. “People are actually interesting, they’re from everywhere, and it feels diverse!”

We all live in our bubbles. I spend time mostly with people in tech, consulting, and the agency world. They are surrounded by doctors and biologists and others in the medical and science professions every day. I thought to myself that night that it would be great if we could meet people not just from different racial and geographic backgrounds, but also different professions. Some of the conversations I had that night were some of the most thought-provoking and stimulating I’ve had in a while. It was certainly a pleasant break from what I usually hear at my work.

 

Abusive relationships

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Today, my friend and I went to see Waitress the musical on Broadway. The show is about a woman in an abusive relationship who works as a waitress at a pie shop cafe, and she unexpectedly gets pregnant and doesn’t know what to do. She really doesn’t want the baby, but she feels too weak to leave her husband. The depiction of the husband in the show immediately reminded me of the abusive relationships I’ve seen, including ones that both my friend and I have been in, as well as other friends we’ve had through our lives who have succumbed to terrible men.

It’s really disturbing how even the strongest women can succumb to (verbally and/or physically) abusive men simply because of what we’ve been conditioned to believe are gender norms — that women need to be nurturing and accepting, that women have the ability to “change” the men they are with if they only try hard enough, that women need to “take care of” and in some ways even mother their partners. I still remember being in a terrible relationship when I was 19 and being in complete disbelief that all these awful things were happening to me… My friend even reminded me she didn’t realize how bad he was until it was almost over when I finally told her everything. It was surreal, as though it was all just a bad dream that I thought would end, but it took so, so long to end. But instead of walking away, I kept trying to believe things would get better and that he’d change, or maybe it was just a bad work day or a bad mood… classic women thoughts. I had a good friend constantly tell me to leave him, and when I finally did officially, it was the most liberating feeling ever.

The disheartening part of watching this musical, which both of us really enjoyed, is that it made me think about all the women out there in today’s day and age who are probably feeling just like Jenna the waitress, who feel trapped and like they can’t do any better than the loser abusive men that they’re with. There are too many problems in the world, and as many opportunities as there are out there for women, it’s sad when these opportunities aren’t made apparent to these women, and they think they have to put up with horrible sexist treatment that was normal fifty or a hundred years ago. I hope all women can be as strong as Jenna was in this show and leave their abusers, even if it means raising a child on their own. We don’t want to bring children into a world and raise them to think that abusive relationships are normal and expected.

A talk about nothing

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Tonight, I went to dinner with Chris, my two good friends, and their husband and boyfriend. We spent almost two hours chatting about a lot of random things, but really, it wasn’t like there was anything very substantial or serious we discussed. It was a really long talk with all sorts of tangents about seemingly nothing, yet the entire time, I was enjoying myself and the company of my friends. A talk about absolutely nothing was entirely satisfying to me, and the laughter that came out of it was genuine. And when it ended, I knew this experience would not happen again until the next time I’d come visit home, and it made me feel a little sad on the walk back to the hotel from South of Market. It made me realize that I really do miss having a friend group like this back in New York. I have individual friends I can catch up with there, but I don’t have the same dynamic with them the way I do with these two friends. We can’t really talk about nothing and have that be satisfying or sufficient for me. And then I thought, why is it that I haven’t made friends like that in my entire eight years in New York City? I guess I married my best friend (not that that’s a bad thing, of course). I guess I go through these same thoughts every few months, but it still makes me wistful. I could potentially leave New York City without a real friend group developed at all.

Or maybe the problem is really me. You can’t really expect to have the same dynamic with friends you just met as with the friends you’ve had for two decades, right? Maybe my expectation is too high. But can’t a satisfying talk about nothing occur between two strangers as easily as it can with two friends who’ve known each other for years?

Old friends, old feelings

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It’s funny how when you are physically distant from friends, you can feel emotionally distant, but when you are put together in the same space once again, everything feels normal and like you get each other again. Over the years given that I’ve been away from home for 12 years now, I’ve gone through fluctuations in feelings regarding how “close” I feel with a number of my friends, but I know deep down that when we’re together, everything feels comfortable and good again. Maybe that’s the test of real friendship that can withstand time and distance, that the feeling you have when you are reunited is the familiar warm, happy feeling you had when your friendship was seemingly at its best and shiniest.

It’s comforting to return home and know that I will have familiar faces of friends and hear similar laughter each time I come back. It helps me think of home as a potentially happy place versus a place that harbors a lot of negativity and impending arguments and explosions.