It's so hard to say goodbye to yesterday
Jul. 23rd, 2004 01:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
grammargirlSo it appears that this is the week of saying goodbye.
Haley and I went to the bar with Matt the Frat Boy and Co. last night. I shouldn't have spent the money on alcohol, but I knew that this would be one of my last chances to see him. Midway through a fantastic tennis match of a political debate between Haley (one of my most liberal friends) and Matt (one of my only conservative friends), it seeped into my head that Matt's actually moving away on Wednesday, returning home to Raleigh, NC for a short while before heading off to Denver for law school, and that once he goes I will in all likelihood never see him again, movie-moment small-world encounters and hypothetical trips to Denver aside.
Of all my current friends I met in college, I think I've been friends with Matt the longest. I've known Becca and Amy longer--Amy was in my orientation group and Becca was in three out of my four classes first semester freshman year--but Becca and I couldn't stand each other for the first few months and Amy and I didn't become friends until Becca and I did, towards the end of first semester. Matt, though... he was everything I couldn't stand about college boys, (read: fratboy, heavy drinker, big pot smoker, etc. etc.) but from moment one we got along amazingly well. He stumbled into my dorm room one night early in the semester; I was still in my staying-in-on-the-weekends-reading-Tolstoy phase (don't ask), and he was returning from a frat party drunk off his ass, a state that he was in pretty consistently every single weekend and the majority of schoolnights that year. So he wandered in his drunken state into my room, having hung out with my roommate on a few occasions but a complete stranger to me, and he sat on my bed and we talked about art. Between the two of us, my roommate Deborah and I had most of the Generic Freshman Dorm Art on our walls (i.e. The Kiss, that Picasso painting with the handful of flowers, a smattering of Van Gogh, one of the more famous Escher drawings, and so on). So Matt and I talked about art, and though he was drunk by god he was smart, and after that we were friends, simple as that.
Well, maybe not that simple. There was the time we made out in the Prescott lounge, and he wanted to do more, and oh boy I wanted to do more, but I was a scared little just-barely-freshman. I certainly wasn't secure enough by that point to be able to "do more" with no strings attached, and if the alternative was a choice between being a fratboy's girlfriend, with all I knew that entailed, and walking away... well, I walked away. I think I am to date the only girl that's ever turned that boy down. Probably explains why he was so eager to get into my pants pre-engagement, but that's another story entirely.
Anyway, he started dating![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
naiveinsight shortly thereafter, which meant both that I became friends with my darling Maggie and that it was okay to be friends with Matt again, and I've been friends with both ever since--even managed to stay friends with both of them through the horrible cataclysmic breakup mid-sophomore year. Hell, I'm now friends with both of them and Nicole, the post-Maggie-girlfriend-cum-fiancee, a feat which is sort of ridiculously impressive under the circumstances.
So much history with that boy, and on Wednesday he's packing up a U-Haul and driving out of my life forever.
And really, this is only the beginning. Tonight the 318 Cat kids, my oldest, though only sporadically close, circle of friends, are having a party to get rid of all the booze they've accumulated over the past two years of living in their house. This won't be nearly the ruckus it sounds like, since none of them are heavy drinkers and at least two and possibly as many as four of them have to get up for work at 5:00 every morning, but it should be fun nonetheless. Tonight is that party and tomorrow is our third annual Girls' Night, and over the course of the next month or so all of them will be going their separate ways: Amy's got a job in D.C., Becca's leaving to teach English in France, Eriko's going to grad school at UT Austin, Steve's moving to Boulder for the great rock-climbing.
I just found out that Shoshana's moving to Seattle in a week, and I may or may not even be able to get coffee or something and say goodbye before she goes. This is, of course, entirely my fault, as I am infamously terrible at keeping in touch with people. It says something that she's been back from Europe for a month and we've only talked to each other twice since then. As crazy as the girl is, and as much as we got on each others' nerves when we lived together, it will be weird and sad to return from New York to a basically Shoshana-less world.
Haley says I should think about the upcoming goodbyes as excuses to go visit people in cool places. I've never been to Denver, or Seattle, or D.C., and now I'll have friends there to be my excuse to go. But really, the greatest likelihood is that once I move to NY I'll spend at least five years poor as shit and in no position to eat, let alone travel, and knowing how bad I am at corresponding with people, what are the odds that I'll even know how to find these long-lost friends by then? I think of the friends from high school that I'm still close to now-- Jason and Amanda, basically, and I really only keep in touch with Amanda because she's Jason's fiancee. I've recently become friends withslammer2012, but we barely knew each other when I was in HS, so I don't think he counts. Mary Kay, the Best English Teacher Ever, to whom I still haven't gotten around to sending a copy of my thesis. I still talk to adam_oddfellow from time to time, and theoretically he's going to be my date to the wedding reception next month--should probably check with him about that. And really, that's it. I wonder if, five years from now, my college friends will seem to me like my high school friends do now, faded memories rather than real people? The thought makes me unaccountably sad.
More on this later, maybe. I have to get back to work.
Haley and I went to the bar with Matt the Frat Boy and Co. last night. I shouldn't have spent the money on alcohol, but I knew that this would be one of my last chances to see him. Midway through a fantastic tennis match of a political debate between Haley (one of my most liberal friends) and Matt (one of my only conservative friends), it seeped into my head that Matt's actually moving away on Wednesday, returning home to Raleigh, NC for a short while before heading off to Denver for law school, and that once he goes I will in all likelihood never see him again, movie-moment small-world encounters and hypothetical trips to Denver aside.
Of all my current friends I met in college, I think I've been friends with Matt the longest. I've known Becca and Amy longer--Amy was in my orientation group and Becca was in three out of my four classes first semester freshman year--but Becca and I couldn't stand each other for the first few months and Amy and I didn't become friends until Becca and I did, towards the end of first semester. Matt, though... he was everything I couldn't stand about college boys, (read: fratboy, heavy drinker, big pot smoker, etc. etc.) but from moment one we got along amazingly well. He stumbled into my dorm room one night early in the semester; I was still in my staying-in-on-the-weekends-reading-Tolstoy phase (don't ask), and he was returning from a frat party drunk off his ass, a state that he was in pretty consistently every single weekend and the majority of schoolnights that year. So he wandered in his drunken state into my room, having hung out with my roommate on a few occasions but a complete stranger to me, and he sat on my bed and we talked about art. Between the two of us, my roommate Deborah and I had most of the Generic Freshman Dorm Art on our walls (i.e. The Kiss, that Picasso painting with the handful of flowers, a smattering of Van Gogh, one of the more famous Escher drawings, and so on). So Matt and I talked about art, and though he was drunk by god he was smart, and after that we were friends, simple as that.
Well, maybe not that simple. There was the time we made out in the Prescott lounge, and he wanted to do more, and oh boy I wanted to do more, but I was a scared little just-barely-freshman. I certainly wasn't secure enough by that point to be able to "do more" with no strings attached, and if the alternative was a choice between being a fratboy's girlfriend, with all I knew that entailed, and walking away... well, I walked away. I think I am to date the only girl that's ever turned that boy down. Probably explains why he was so eager to get into my pants pre-engagement, but that's another story entirely.
Anyway, he started dating
naiveinsight shortly thereafter, which meant both that I became friends with my darling Maggie and that it was okay to be friends with Matt again, and I've been friends with both ever since--even managed to stay friends with both of them through the horrible cataclysmic breakup mid-sophomore year. Hell, I'm now friends with both of them and Nicole, the post-Maggie-girlfriend-cum-fiancee, a feat which is sort of ridiculously impressive under the circumstances.So much history with that boy, and on Wednesday he's packing up a U-Haul and driving out of my life forever.
And really, this is only the beginning. Tonight the 318 Cat kids, my oldest, though only sporadically close, circle of friends, are having a party to get rid of all the booze they've accumulated over the past two years of living in their house. This won't be nearly the ruckus it sounds like, since none of them are heavy drinkers and at least two and possibly as many as four of them have to get up for work at 5:00 every morning, but it should be fun nonetheless. Tonight is that party and tomorrow is our third annual Girls' Night, and over the course of the next month or so all of them will be going their separate ways: Amy's got a job in D.C., Becca's leaving to teach English in France, Eriko's going to grad school at UT Austin, Steve's moving to Boulder for the great rock-climbing.
I just found out that Shoshana's moving to Seattle in a week, and I may or may not even be able to get coffee or something and say goodbye before she goes. This is, of course, entirely my fault, as I am infamously terrible at keeping in touch with people. It says something that she's been back from Europe for a month and we've only talked to each other twice since then. As crazy as the girl is, and as much as we got on each others' nerves when we lived together, it will be weird and sad to return from New York to a basically Shoshana-less world.
Haley says I should think about the upcoming goodbyes as excuses to go visit people in cool places. I've never been to Denver, or Seattle, or D.C., and now I'll have friends there to be my excuse to go. But really, the greatest likelihood is that once I move to NY I'll spend at least five years poor as shit and in no position to eat, let alone travel, and knowing how bad I am at corresponding with people, what are the odds that I'll even know how to find these long-lost friends by then? I think of the friends from high school that I'm still close to now-- Jason and Amanda, basically, and I really only keep in touch with Amanda because she's Jason's fiancee. I've recently become friends with
slammer2012, but we barely knew each other when I was in HS, so I don't think he counts. Mary Kay, the Best English Teacher Ever, to whom I still haven't gotten around to sending a copy of my thesis. I still talk to adam_oddfellow from time to time, and theoretically he's going to be my date to the wedding reception next month--should probably check with him about that. And really, that's it. I wonder if, five years from now, my college friends will seem to me like my high school friends do now, faded memories rather than real people? The thought makes me unaccountably sad.More on this later, maybe. I have to get back to work.
