A $75 Friendship

I’ve always had a hard time seeing the lines between acquaintance, colleague, and friend. Maybe it’s because I moved around a lot as a kid and always had to start over with new friends. I have always been fast to let people in and lend significance to relationships that seem like friendships to me and are probably just acquaintance-ships to others. I still tend to relate to new people from a second grade declarative nature of friendships: you meet, you connect and you announce “we’re friends now, kay?”

The upside is I always throw great, inclusive parties. The next day I inevitably hear: “I had so much fun meeting so-and-so at your shindig.” Yes, I gravitate toward people who use the word shindig. The downside is sometimes I give away unearned parts of my heart.

Once when I was living in New York and planning a wedding for a now-defunct relationship, I shared an office at a crappy job with a cool girl from Westchester. We were instant best friends and cracked each other up with goofy banter all day. We did girl stuff on weekends. She was the one I’d cab it to when Agent Man and I had had an argument. I thought she was a soul sister; my safe harbor in this scary new city. I planned on asking her to be a bridesmaid.

Soon I left for a shiny new job at a comedy network that shall remain nameless. Suffice it to say, with all the backstabbing I was to suffer there, it’s a wonder I ever came back to work in the entertainment industry. But that’s a whole ‘nother blog post. On my last Friday at the old job, my friend and I said our teary goodbyes.

After my first week at the new job, I called her as usual to go for our Saturday mani/pedi. No answer. I left a message that night for a movie or cheapie Thai dinner. Nothing. I left my New York Best Friend messages for two weeks. Fuggedaboutit. I never heard from her again. I was apparently off her “can help with career” list and worth even less than an acquaintance.

Years later, I’m more understanding about people who need years to build the kind of depth of friendship that takes me months. I’m less surprised when people drop out of my life. And I have come to see the value in a friendship with some age to it. But being inherently naive, there are still those friendships and endings that shock me.

I moved to LA to go to the writing program at a Big Deal Film School. I had great teachers and maintained friendships and mentorships with them as I gathered their collective wisdom in my bag of writer tricks. I came to realize most were writers more or less like me. They just had more success and more seasoning. Though we writers can be a critical and resentful bunch, we pretty much like each other and often feel other writers are the only people really worth our time. After all, they are the people looking at the world with the same eyes we are: what makes this human animal tick and how can I capture it on paper?

So when I throw my aforementioned soirees, I tend to invite my former teachers. Often, they even come. I noticed though, that one teacher in particular repeatedly ignored my invites. I was disappointed because she was the one I identified most with and, truth be told, I wanted her to like me. Not like we had to be BFF but we could surely hang out. I thought. Truth be told, she was quirky and honest in her way and peppered her anecdotes with things she did and didn’t like about people. She was big on trust. I didn’t listen as well as I might have.

During her class, we’d developed a tight mentor-mentee rapport. I brought her my toughest screenplay problems and trusted her feedback implicitly. I was the student she turned to most often after she’d thrown a general question out to the class. She laughed at my jokes, lauded my insights and sought my opinions. I mistook this for friendship.

The thing is, with friends you are allowed to be yourself. They still like you. You are even allowed to mess up from time to time and, in my experience, as long as you apologize and do what you can to make it right, everything is A OK. Sometimes you even grow in your friendship from the molehill you’ve overcome together.

The rules of engagement are different - the mess-up quotient not so flexible where acquaintances are concerned. When only one of you thinks you are in a friendship you are on rocky ground. There are mountains to overcome indeed.

Through an absurd series of misunderstandings with this teacher I now find myself on her student blacklist. It would be comic if it wasn’t such a slap in the face. She’d sent out an invite to a lecture she was giving. I’d responded saying I would be there and asking if should I bring a check or mail it ahead of time. I never heard back so I assumed it was OK to bring a check. I showed up at the lecture, check in hand. She was surprised to see me. Annoyed even. But she took it in stride. She’d never gotten my email it turned out. That should have been my first clue.

By some random brain fart, I spelled her name wrong on the check and got a terse email informing me of this the next day. I responded with profuse apologies and immediately mailed off a corrected check. Honest mistake, right? No big deal, right?

The next day I got an indignant email requesting payment immediately. It dawned on me at this point that she was still not getting my emails and understandably upset if she thought I was ignoring her. Surely though, a friend would know I wasn’t deliberately pulling dastardly deeds. I scrambled for her phone number, couldn’t find it, and sent another email from all my various accounts again in case it was an account-specific problem. I apologized again and relayed that the payment had been sent and she should receive it the next day.

As luck would have it, the mail was delayed. The next day, I got an irate email saying she was tired of me ignoring her, she was at the end of her rope and didn’t know what to do. This time, she did include her phone number. Clearly, her email service was not my friend. So I called and left a profusely apologetic message attempting to explain the previous emails, the check sent, the delayed US postal service, and offering to come by in person that day with a replacement check.

The next day I got a resigned email saying she’d gotten my voice message and “just didn’t know what to say.” Insert Scooby Doo “Buuhhh??” noise here. You say I should come over with the check if that’s what you need. You say it’s only $75 after all and you get that it has been a crazy misunderstanding. You say you’re still my friend.

After a final, terse “Check received” email, I saw the check cleared my account a few days later. I thought everything was back to OK and eagerly awaited the next lecture to which I’d promised to send my payment well in advance. But I heard a few days later that she was badmouthing me to her new class of students, many of whom I knew. This didn’t make sense to me. Don’t friends forgive and move on? Hadn’t she known me long enough to know how much I respected her and valued her teaching? Didn’t she know I would never deliberately hurt her? I sent another check for the next lecture with a friend who later said she’d rejected it. So she was just going to shut me out? This seemed completely ludicrous to me. And childish. I felt like I was holding onto a squirming cat who’d had enough of being petted and is about to bring out the claws. The harder I squeezed, the more she’d scratch.

I was distraught. What would I do without her guidance in my writing? How could I move forward with the script she’d been mentoring? I shared with my yoga teacher one morning how scared I was and how much I needed her to be my writing teacher.

My yoga teacher looked at me and smiled. “Maybe you don’t. Maybe you don’t need her anymore if this is who she is. Maybe you’ve learned what you were meant to learn from her and it’s time to move on.”

And just like that, the spinning circus of my upset over the whole thing just stopped. It got very quiet.

I wrote the teacher a thank you letter acknowledging her for the guidance she’d given and wishing her well with her writing. I let her know I was sad this was how she’d chosen to have things but I respected her choice.

In the silence I’d seen it wasn’t me. It was her issue with money and trust. Her walls. Her cynically colored glasses. It really was just a silly, simple mistake. And my writing would go on. As the days passed, many writer friends came forward and I learned I was just the latest in a long line of blacklisted former students. All had been dismissed for similar infractions. All had been sad to lose the mentoring of this talented and insightful writer. But all realized they were probably better off. The quieter I got, the more I saw this trust issue of hers was clearly having a major impact on her life. And I got sad. Some little girl fear about trusting people runs her life and I can’t reach out to her because she’ll never listen to me again. She's the girl in second grade who refused to share her crayons because someone had once eaten the red one. So she won't make that mistake again but at what cost?

2005 was an interesting year, friendship-wise. I grew some of my LA girlfriends into some of the richest, heartfelt friendships I’ve known. I lost a friendship with a good teacher which I then learned was not a friendship at all.

And I learned that with friends as with much of life, people only see what they want to see. A good friend of mine got into a disagreement with another friend. When she wrote a letter to repair the damage and assuage the friend with apologies, explanations and pledges of how much she valued their friendship, the other friend only saw inflammatory excuses and has in effect ended the friendship. She’s not willing to listen. At least not from her heart. Likewise, I doubt my teacher saw my apology letter in a favorable light.

Part of being a writer is being able to convey your heart and get people to connect with different characters in a story they otherwise may not have. I don’t think my failure to have my teacher see things from my seat is a reflection of my writing skill. I do think it means friendship is something more complex that a second grade declaration of “we’re friends now.” In friendship, just like in good writing, listening is key.

V-Day

And so once again, it’s the much-vaunted holiday of love: St. Valentine’s Day. The day where long single women like myself wear black and gather to piss a moan over a pint about why beautiful, intelligent, cultured women such as ourselves are still single and damn the happy couple at the next table. Yes, nothing reels the men folk in like a hardened, bitter shell.

People bitch about Valentine’s Day being a manufactured Hallmark holiday. Maybe. But I don’t even really think it’s the couples that push it. Most of my couple friends have forgotten about it. Or love each other enough to make it clear everyday. I think it’s all of us singletons who see the day as a howling reminder of our failure to be a wanted half of a couple. Quick, find a date, push the romance, create everything to look as we imagine it should.

Well my friends, that is what we do in this town. We create images and realities and some people get paid a lot of money for it. And everyone else pays their ticket price to believe in it for two hours.

I almost had a Valentine’s date. I think. There’s this guy I’ve been flirting with. I’ve not been sure if he’s a friend or potentially more. I got the sense he was interested in moving our friendship along. So I asked him over for Valentine’s dinner. I misread his diplomatic ‘no’ as a coy ‘maybe’ and pushed the issue only to get a definitive ‘no’. Fine. Good. I hate guesswork.

Why exactly did I get to the point of thinking he was interested? Again, I’d like to blame it on the movies. Up on the big screen, lives are told in shorthand. When a guy and girl fall, there’ll be some iconic event meant to represent the progress from friend to lover. We see John Cusack share a dog walk with a girl and we know he’s saying he wants to love her for the rest of his life. She stops and smiles and we know they’ll love happily ever after. We see John Cusack holding a boom-box aloft and blasting a Peter Gabriel love song and we know he is stating his undying devotion.

So my problem is I tend to read the small things normal people do as the shorthand to relationships. I forget that people do things – I myself do things – because life is small moments and not every one is a metaphor for something else. At times the grammar of screen relationships I work on overtakes my reality. Oh that time you changed your plane tickets to stay with me? Clearly, the next scene is us sharing a tender hopelessly-devoted-to-you moment. That time I cried and you said you’d do anything to help me? A definitive moment to cut to our happy relationship.

Hey, I’m the first one to say I am naive and hopeful, am I not? So misread potential date aside, why is it that Valentine’s Day is the enemy of single women everywhere? Why is it that the fact of not being in a relationship is seen as a failure? Perhaps it’s success. Perhaps it means we didn’t get caught up in the world of a guy who didn’t deserve us. We didn’t give up our own dreams to support someone else’s. Perhaps it means we have more to offer the world at the moment as a singular force.

I am not wearing black today. In fact I’m wearing white. I’m taking today to pamper myself solely for me. Not in order to please or impress anyone else. That feels new. And nice. I’m taking time today to remember all my fabulous single friends who I know will change the world. I know my world is better for them being in it. Tonight, I’ll light a candle to celebrate my friends who’ve found love. I’ll pour myself a cabernet, cuddle with my big dog and watch Love Actually again imagining what finding love would feel like.

Meanwhile, does anyone have John Cusack’s number?

Instinct

Sparrows don’t have to worry about freezing to death. They have a little cue in their primitive brains that tells them it’s time to head south for the winter. I can’t tell you if it’s triggered by wind direction, falling leaves or a dropping barometer. Maybe a little birdie tells them...

We, on the other hand, live in places like Greenland, Siberia and the Yukon. We defeat the problem of it being too darn cold with our big brains. We invent things like engine block heaters, down coats, and electric foot warmers. In effect, we circumvent any instinct that may be asking us “Have you thought about Hawaii this time of year?”

In “Who Moved My Cheese?” the author is basically saying that our human ability to get hung up on the way we think things should be derails us from making the most of life. In his novel, “Galapagos,” Vonnegut takes it one further asserting that our big brains will be the cause of our evolutionary undoing. I think he may be on to something. Without the ability to daydream, expectations would never be unmet. Without the ability to pine for someone, a relationship failure could never hurt. We’d just move along, finding the next cheese. For better or for worse though this, along with the opposable thumbs, is what makes us human.

I believe a happy life rests somewhere in between animal instinct and heady reasoning. The trick is finding the right balance.

As a young woman I always heard married women talk about finding him. “You just know he’s the right one.”

How? You just know didn’t seem like much empirical data to go on. I was a geek and an outcast and tried to learn life from watching the cool kids. Give me behavior patterns to research, popularity to track. Telling me I’d just know gave me nothing. A boyfriend remained the ultimate unattainable cheese. Through college, I would hold my crushes up to this rubric. Is this knowing? Is this flutter in my belly love? Or just the Snickers I had for lunch? Instinct seemed furthest from my dating failures. I looked for guys who fit lists I’d made or who seemed, based on observed behavior, to be boyfriend material. I once dated a sweet guy who had recently lost a lot of weight. “He still thinks of himself as fat and therefore undesirable,” I reasoned, “I have to get to him before he realizes he’s a commodity.” I think the President would have approved of my strategery. But it still didn’t work. What sounded logical in my big brain didn’t touch my confused heart.

Then one day it happened. I met I guy I hadn’t planned on and I just knew. I became one of those super-annoying happy people that goes around spouting platitudes such as “when it’s right, you just know.” I got obsessed with trying to fix up all my single friends with all of his single friends while we planned our wedding. Reason was out the window. I was basking in just knowing.

But in the end, it wasn’t right. It didn’t last. I didn’t know. And then a whole new terrifying chasm of doubt yawned before me. If I couldn’t reason a love and I couldn’t rely in instinct to know one when I found him, how on the Sam Hill am I supposed to not be alone forever?

I know women are supposed to have great intuition. And I work on honing mine, I do. I knew John Kerry was going to win the election. I felt it. I knew John Taylor was going to be my new best friend. I saw the planets aligning. I knew that last script was going to be the flawlessly hilarious one that had the studios in a bidding war. The pages spoke to me.

“Learn to listen to your intuition” my girlfriends tell me. Why would I keep listening to someone who keeps getting me in trouble? Unless you’re trapped in Leave It To Beaver, you eventually learn your lesson and stop listening to Eddie Haskell.

So now what?

“The Universe is just getting him ready for you, and you for him,” one friend tells me.
“More will be revealed,” says my yoga teacher.
“God has a plan for you and a love for you,” my sister says.
“There’s a lid for every pot,” philosophizes my Irish aunt.

But I want someone to love. Someone who loves me.

"You can't push a wet noodle," intones my dad.

OK. Forget the noodles. Back to the cheese. So if the cheese book holds any water, I should eschew emotional entrapment and just putter on my merry way and I’ll get to my cheese sooner rather than later. Meanwhile I’m focusing on relishing my singleton-hood as much as possible. Much to my big brain’s annoyance I can’t explain it but I feel that someday I’ll look back and think “I can’t believe I was ever worried about this. I just should have known.”