I've always been great at making friends. I've just never been especially good at making female friends. Of my own age.
No, I don't think I qualify as one of those women who go around saying that they can't be friends with other women, other women baffle them/are mean/catty/etc., and they are only 'good with men'. Yes, it's true that for about the last twenty years or so, my honest-to-goodness best friend has always been a guy. Yes, it's true that I do make friends much more easily with men than I do with women.
It all comes down to the age thing--I am good with women quite a few years older, or quite a few years younger than myself. I have a very good group of girlfriends, the youngest who is 8 or 9 years older than me, and the oldest is exactly twice my age. They're from what I guess would be described as blue-collar backgrounds. Out of all the women I know right now, they're the ones I felt most at ease with and feel I have the most in common with, as a woman, despite our very different backgrounds and lives and general day to day concerns.
Maybe it's because of the eight year age difference between my sister and I, which never played into our relationship, much to the surprise of everyone and the fact that I was not just P.'s little sister to her friends. Maybe it's because of the eight year age difference between my younger cousin M. and I, who is pretty much like a second sister to me, and the same easy relationship we had that also extended to her friends.
There have been two exceptions. First, there was my three years in high school attending an all girls school, which kind of necessitated my making good friends with girls my own age, especially since I was never a loner or one to just sit on the fringes of cliques and groups. And I did just that, forming, in a way, a clique of my own with six other classmates. Granted we were a bunch of like minded, semi tomboys, with a more than a slightly conceited awareness of our own intelligence and general smart assery. Nevertheless, we were a tight bunch, helping each other get through the insane rules and regulations imposed on us with as much disdain and disregard as we thought we could get away with.
The second instance was in college.
***
The first time I met K. it was under the most cliched circumstances; our eyes met across a crowded room and we just knew we were going to end up together.
It was the spring semester of our freshmen year. The class was Static Mechanics, a required course for all engineering undergraduates, regardless of which major they'd declared. Because of the way major classes played out, that particular session (8:20AM class on Mondays and Thursdays, oy) was mostly populated by my major (EE) and K's major (Chem E), with a smattering of Mech Es. Given that this was a mixed class (i.e. multiple engineering majors), there were a fair number of girls, especially since we had the Chem Es, who had the highest ratio of female to male students than any other major. It also meant that the typical wardrobe of choice for about 90% of the females in the class was a combination preppy/clean look, with some 90210 knockoffs here and there. Jersey hair was still making waves (or I should say, hitting the ceiling)--although as someone who had adopted that hairdo until the first semester of college, the less I say on that the better.
I was already sitting in my corner seat at the end of the aisle, next to the stair path between one section and the next, way up in the amphitheatre shaped hall, having claimed my usual three seat barrier (the two seats, directly and one over, in front of me, and the seat next to me) to dissuade anyone, especially my friend J. (whom I liked but not at 8 AM) from trying to strike up a conversation that early in the morning. The rows were so closely placed, one after another, that even my 5' 4" (almost) frame was uncomfortable sitting in a seat with the desk flipped over my legs, feeling I was about to turn over the flip desk any time I made the slightest move and moved my knees that felt were hitting my chin. I had no desire to follow the side saddle, binder precariously balanced on a crossed leg stance taken up by the other girls in my class; the classic 'slouch in the chair and drape legs over the chair in front' look, adopted by most of the guys, worked for me (some of them could sit up straight in their chair and drape their legs comfortably over...how I envied them their height).
About 30 seconds before the start of that first class, there was a loud bang of the door, a flurry of curses as someone tried to maneuver their way down the teeny stairs between the two first sections of the hall, and finally sat down with a lot of banging and shuffling. I looked up, I looked over and I did a double take as the person right across the narrow path did the same.
Black boots. Black leggings. Very old (Blue Peter?) t-shirt, flannel shirt, and oversized, well worn denim jacket (me); Metallica(?) t-shirt, flannel shirt, and an authentic vintage army jacket I coveted immediately (her). The only other girl in the class who had adopted the slouch/drape position and barricaded herself as I had.
Before the first lecture was over, we had annoyed everyone within earshot with our undercurrent of commentary.
***
As it turned out, we had a lot more in common than just our we're too cool for engineering dress code. We both had grown up outside of the U.S., raised in families where you lived and died by and for your parents and siblings. We'd both come to college, knowing full well the cost to our parents, and not just in the monetary sense.
We'd both gone a wee bit wild our first semester where the boys were concerned (while maintaining a perfect grade point average, it should be noted), finally far away from our parents' mostly strict rules of of engagement where the opposite sex was concerned (preferably none)--although we both realized that ours was a family with a pretty open, healthy and positive disposition towards the merits of sex itself.
We'd both chopped our very long hair off, as a way of declaring our independence. We both agreed that I needed to go shorter and that she needed to grow hers out longer.
We both were majorly crushing (and lusting) after a guy named Scott when we first met (not the same guy, thankfully).
Possibly, what made our friendship work was that other than the common classes we took, and the study group (of two!) we'd meet up for in the student engineering study center (where we gossiped and dined on our fine diet of Mountain Dew and Snickers bars--god, to have the metabolism back again!), we never did anything together. That was the beauty of it: we were each other's complete confidante, with no strings or judgements attached, because we simply didn't move in the same social circles outside of our mutual classes and would never, ever have any conflicts of interest in matters of importance (boys, boys, and more boys. Sometimes men. But mostly boys).
For two years, she was my best friend and I was hers. It goes to show how much alike we were that we were neither surprised nor upset by the circumstances and inevitable growing apart that made us just good acquaintances, by the end of our senior year.
***
In our sophomore year, we had to take another mandatory course required for all majors: Economics. By this time, we'd developed a shorthand of sorts for discussing the events of the past weekend and the upcoming week with each other. We also used our school's e-mail system, which had finally moved off the crappy VAX system to the new Unix based one, to keep each other current, and often started conversations picking up from our last e-mail exchange.
Despite our best efforts to ignore everyone else in the class, we still managed to attract attention. Partly it had to do with the emphasis we placed in trying to not blend in, through how we dressed (which usually meant as unfeminine a getup as we could get away with, without actually, you know looking ugly and quite possibly looking cute). Partly it had to do with fact that in our immediate engineering circles, we both had gained somewhat a reputation for being carefree and fancy free about our intimate relationships--in other words, we were the perceived sluts of the Asian/Indian (me) and Latino/Hispanic (her) subcommunity in our classes. Something that amused us greatly, since we sort of got that distinction well after what we fondly referred to as our semester of sleepovers and were (fairly) monogamous, by that time. (In retrospect, part of the beginning of the end of the great friendship was when we finally settled into our respective exclusive relationships. Boy what sheer stupidity that was. But I digress...)
Or it could have been that it was hard to ignore us because of all the singing we did in class.
I am pretty sure it started from something silly, like maybe a line used by the prof. teaching that first class we had together that reminded me or her of a lyric, which we probably started to hum or sing and then carried through to its conclusion. Given out competitive natures, it quickly morphed into something more than just mumbling words under breath. By the time we were three or four weeks into the semester, we'd started to play a game of back and forth lyric exchange to a particular song (mostly something that was popular at the time). We did try and do it through writing at first, I remember, but that got boring (and took too long) very quickly and so we progressed to actual sotto voce singing. By our sophomore year, some of the people who were in our class had picked up on the little competition we had going and would actually try to get in the game by suggesting songs, during class. (Of course we pretended not to notice at first--and then would proceed with the song suggested, if we deemed it worthy. Oh, we were so full of ourselves!)
The best part was that we kind of ended up having a closing song each semester; one that we'd sort of sing back and forth as a sign that we were done for the day. I know that we picked the third one solely because of our love for all things Aidan Quinn; it should be no surprise that the first one was the original one that started the whole thing. The middle one? That was prompted by our Econ. prof going off on a tangent about the meaning of life in the meaning of a lecture, which cemented the song as the swan song of choice for the semester.
End of the World (As We Know It)-R.E.M.
Life is a Highway - Tom Cochrane
(I'm gonna Be) 500 Miles - The Proclaimers
