Plum Wine and Pad Thai

My co-worker and I have a deal where every Friday that our boss doesn’t show, we go to a long lunch at the thai restaurant down the street.  Today was one of those days.  We order a few glasses of plum wine and pad thais, and dish about work, about life, about each other.  I’ve worked with her for nearly a year now, and for as small a staff as we are, it’s a real travesty that I know her so little.

She was talking about being stressed; deciding whether to renew her lease, going through a breakup, thinking about taking another bar exam. 

Hold up.  Breakup?  I love how she just snuck that in there.  She told me she was okay; break-ups are just always hard.  I said something distanced, yet designed to be comforting; something like “boys are jerks, don’t worry, you’ll have moved on from him before you know it.”

Except.  Her soon-to-be-ex is not of the male variety.

I consider myself a very open and accepting person, but still I’m surprised by how readily I assumed she was just like me.  I also hate how easily she accepted my gaffe in judgment; like she gets that all the time.  That must be so hard.

I probably shouldn’t have taken such a long lunch, retrospectively, as it basically dashed all hopes of hey, it’s an unsupervised Friday, I think I’ll take off early and go sit by the pool.  Hopping into the elevator to find the executive vice president, though? And knowing that she knows I was there till 6 on a Friday? SO worth it. 

And yet here I am, sitting here in my living room while all the cool girls of the world are out and getting all ready for the SATC movie.  If I was back at home with my *real* friends, I like to think I’d be joining that throng.

I was never a fanatic fan of the show; I never watched it in primetime, but I have come to really enjoy it now in its on-demand form.  I’d like to see the movie, but I think more for the sensation—beacause it’s just “what you do.” It’s not something I’m cloying to see so badly that I’d force J to endure it.

I’ve lived here for a year and a half, and have no friends to call up for a girly movie night.  How is this? (or, more accurately, how sad is this?). I have friends, don’t get me wrong. My best gal pal hates the show with a fiery passion.  A handful of my other friends are of the uber-Catholic variety, and thus even admitting that I think about sex would probably earn me no more phone calls.  The rest are cool girls, from college and otherwise, but not really the buddy-buddy type.  Great to call and say, hey, I’ll be in the city, let’s get dinner, but easy for me to write off as “not that serious.” I could probably organize something with them.  It’s undoubtedly an indication of how much I care that I haven’t.  If this was a movie I was dying to see,or something I really wanted to do, I’d find people to go with. 

Still, though, sometimes I don’t really know what drives me to just sit here and wait for life to happen.   I want that close Charlotte-Miranda-Samantha-Carrie bond, but I don’t know what makes me think I’ll get it if I just stare, willing the phone to ring.  Something to work on this summer, certainly: take friendships more seriously.  And work to build them up.

Till then, I can’t say I mind this sort of Friday night; I’ve uncorked a bottle of wine, am cooking a giant vat of mashed potatoes (so. freaking, delicious), and have cranked up the Brad Paisley.  Not at all a bad way to go.