Que Sera Sera

It's been a weird week.

It's been busy. I stressed out about silly things I probably shouldn't have.

Sometimes I find that I no longer have a good way to de-stress.

It used to be that a good bubble bath worked - and I still really like a bubble bath. But sometimes when I am really busy a bubble bath feels like laziness and that stresses me out more.

I was thinking today about how when I was in high school I absolutely, positively had to have plans on a Friday night. On Saturday night it was okay to have plans or not have plans - but on Friday you HAD to have plans, otherwise you felt like a giant loser. And usually those plans involved something with my girlfriends.

There were 5 of us who hung out together in a sort of group. Sometimes one of us might have a date or some other obligation, but usually, there was always someone to do something with. This group had a sort of dynamic to it that kept it kind of held together fairly well. My best friend was Alicia. Then there was Kari, Tirzah and Tina. My second best friend was Kari. Kari's best friend was Tirzah and vice versa. Tirzah was Alicia's second best friend and Tina was Tirzah's second best friend followed by Alicia. Tina and Tirzah were sort of tied as my third best. Tina was Kari's second best friend. I don't know who Tina thought her best friend was. I think it was her horse. (She loved her horse and her dog, then boys, then us, so I think her need for a best friend was proportionally diminished by the animals and the boys).

Anyway we did a lot of silly things.

Sometimes we just went to the movies.

Sometimes we dragged main (or in the past tense that's known as drug main as well or we might say we were dragging main) sometimes we had a slumber party or a sleep-over (a slumber party requires more than 1 girl - a sleep over is just 1) and talked a lot about boys.

We often played a game which was played with PIT cards, but which was not PIT, but rather some sort of fortune telling game. I won't even go into all the details of how that worked exactly, it started by accident one time and weirdly, many things that were foretold in that game eventually came to pass (I still put a fair amount of stock in the fact that I was suppose to be both the fattest adult and the thinnest...I am waiting for that thinnest part).

Sometimes we went to the dance clubs (which was usually a blast)- we had two clubs in town, the "Galleria" and the "Connection". Often we were dancing with college guys who thought we were college girls. There was usually a fair amount of disappointment on their faces when they asked you how old you were or where you lived and figured out you were still in high school.

We had a "funny" booth at McDonalds. We always sat in the same booth and it was called the "funny" booth because we did a fair amount of giggling and laughing there. So you could just say to your girlfriend "meet me at the funny booth" and we all knew exactly where that was.

We loved to go to JB's Big Boy late at night and order HOT FUDGE CAKE. I don't know if any dessert in my life has ever lived up to that chocolately hot goodness. JB's was the only restaurant in town that stayed open late.

There was often giggly calling up boys on the phone and taking pretend surveys about which girls at school they liked (as if they had no idea what we were doing!) We had this thing when we started driving where we would just drive by boy's houses that we liked. Kinda in a stalkerish way. My best friend Alica had a weird superstition that if her favorite song came on the radio we had to hurry and drive by the house of the boy she had a crush on. It was a little crazy. He lived about a mile out of town so we had to book it out to the South side of town fast and make it to his house before the song ended. It was a Kenny Loggins song. Everytime I hear that song I think of the red interior of her mom's white Ford Thunderbird and driving as fast as we can to get to Gordon Harmon's house before the song is over. We hardly ever saw the boys we liked when we did this stalking routine. And if we did we totally FREAKED out and ducked down in the seats. Mostly it seems like those years were filled with a lot of shreiking and general silliness.

There were stupid girl fights too. At various times I think I was mad at all 4 of them collectively and individually.

But that stuff diminishes in memory over time and you just remember things like the time we kidnapped Tirzah on her 16th birthday, had a chinese fire drill in Kari's parents Suburban and almost wrecked the car in the process, picked up some college boys while dragging main and made them take us to a movie (after which we quickly ditched them when we realized they expected something in return for the movie) or got lost in the dark countryside driving Kari's parents Toronado around looking for the "KNOCKING GRAVE". I miss all of these things sometimes.

I miss the luxury of time we had then.

Sometimes when it had been a stressful week, or boys seemed stupid, or we were just tired, Tirzah would suggest we should just get together on Friday night and watch a old Doris Day movie. So we would. Honestly, those might have been some of the best Friday nights ever.


Our lives really weren't that stressful - but that was our way of just de-stressing. It was a perfect solution to a hectic or otherwise less than stellar week.


I can't even remember the last time I saw a Doris Day movie.

Maybe that's what I need.