some nights, all i crave is comfort food and two hours of television. tonight, i had the comfort food (miso soup) but nothing worth watching on television (dr. 90210). it saddens me to see young girls wanting boob jobs. what do they know about anything at 18? but i remember being 18 and thought i knew everything. i suppose i did know everything that i was supposed to know but now i see that i lacked a certain amount of perspective. but anyway. you know how some shows are so bad they're good? like certain "true hollywood stories." dr. 90210 is definitely not like that for me. i don't find it at all redeeming or guilty in pleasure.
here's something that really bugs me: when i'm telling a good story, full of buildup and personal experience and a killer ending and the person i'm talking to guesses the ending halfway through and blurts it out. example: an old friend of mine once drank drano. she's no longer my friend and wasn't when she took the fateful gulp but it's a compelling story nonetheless. i was relaying this to a person i know and she interrupted and blurted out the end. it's so disruptive and rude and left me hanging. i lost my place and lost my pace and felt she did an injustice to the story. it's not just about someone drinking drano, it's also about how she came to drink it in the first place.
we were friends not by choice but because our parents were friends. when our parents hung out, we hung out. the situation was better for her than me; i never really felt the connection with her that she said she felt with me. so it was forced. that really sucked. it was a good lesson to me in the long run: to be polite and ride things out and realize that everything is not about me. but as an 8-year-old, i wasn't buying any of that. i didn't like her because she was a big copy cat and a wanker and bossy and i already had a best friend and her family was completely weird. when my brother and i spent the night (she had a younger brother, too), their parents would often walk around their house naked, which freaked us out. old hippies. carob eaters. organic cheerios. a deaf dog. sticky countertops. a strange scene.
when my brother J and i moved away, i thought we were off the hook. but to no avail. my mom and her mom still kept in touch and when J and i came out to visit my dad, it was mandatory for us to hang out with them. i did my time each summer and spent the night. by the time i turned 15, i'd had enough. i essentially broke up with her. she took it bad. i felt bad that i hurt her, but at the same time i felt relieved and empowered. i was about to start high school and needed some change.
things started going bad for her shortly thereafter. i heard about her through the grapevine of my mother, who was stil pissed that i'd ended the friendship. she nagged at me to call her and get back together as pals. i wanted nothing to do with it. anyway, the grapevine: she started drinking and rolling with a bad crowd but somehow ended up going to an ivy league type college in the midwest. thing went from bad to worse. she got picked up by the police while selling fake crack in a shitty inner city neighborhood. she was about to flunk out of school. was doing drugs and heavily drinking. then she drank the drano.
how? the story was she woke up one day and walked into the kitchen and grabbed her drinking cup from the counter, noticed there was some water in it, and drank it. but it wasn't water. her roommates said that each of them had their own drinking cups but they'd used hers to hold some drano while they were trying to unclog the kitchen sink. and that she just didn't know when she took a drink.
that's where the credibility of the story declines for me. drano is so stinky, so FUCKING CAUSTIC, even when you're pouring only about a quarter cup down the drain at a distance, the scent lasts in the bathroom for hours. no way you'd ever not notice it in your cup, esp. when you lift it up to your face and take a huge sniff. was she trying to kill herself? totally drugged out? i'll never know.
but anyway, she lived, barely. the esophagus is composed of a million little pockets that secrete saliva to help you swallow your food. the drano got into all those little pockets and corroded away. just awful. she nearly died but instead made a full recovery. she had a feeding tube but now has a daughter. i haven't talked to her since either right before or right after it happened. i can't remember. we're still not friends and i don't know if i'd recognize her if i saw her somewhere random.
i sometimes wonder why i tell that story. it's not really about me at all but somehow telling it makes it about me. which is somewhat shitty. i admit: telling someone that i know a girl who drank drano is a definite conversation starter, of which i am the star. but sometimes i think i'm heartless and into schaedenfreude to tell it. mostly though, to be honest, i'm in awe. and a good story is a good story. so there you go.