Friday, April 04, 2008

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.

6 comments:

Susan M said...

I love Doris Day.

When my husband and I were dating we had a "serious booth" at a local Dairy Queen. It was sort of secluded from the other booths and we'd always get into deep discussions when we sat there.

Unknown said...

Pretty funny post. Who says there isn't anything to do in a small town? :)

I love Doris Day too..."Pillow Talk" is GREAT :)

Cynthia said...

"Send Me No Flowers" Doris Day and Rock Hudson. Sometimes those old movies are just the right thing for a Friday night. I also like Bye Bye Birdie. (not Doris Day, of course, but a fun one.)
I think high school girls need girlfriends more than they know. You can get through a lot of junk in your life with a good friend to laugh about things with. Actually, we all still need girlfriends to laugh with I guess.

Anonymous said...

Ha ha I'm laughing already. I've started a list of people we could do drive-by's of - and their accompanying trigger songs. But now, we have digital cameras at the ready to capture their reaction!

I'm also making name-cards. I want to be Tirzah. And does the movie have to be Doris Day? Why not Debbie Reynolds? Or Cloris Leachman? Either one.

I swear I had a hamburger last night from Carlos O'Brian's that I commented out loud reminded me of Bob's Big Boy on Scottsdale and McDowell...

Suzanne Barker said...

I think you had a great teenagerhood. I remember having a girlfriend who was 2 years older than I. Sandy was great because one, she could drive way before I could and had her own cool truck and 2. She worked at the theatre and gave me free passes all the time. I remember seeing Dr. Zhivago. She worked at the metrocenter movie theatre when it was brand new.
Twice we went to a triple feature at the drive in. I remember buying hostess O's to eat there. They were like jelly filled donuts only they stll had a hole in the middle. Because they were covered in powder sugar, we had to lean out the window to eat them in order not to get her truck messed up. We saw Billy Jack and Walking Tall.
We both had horses and did some fun things. We went camping with them a couple of times. We worked some competitive trail rides as TPR teams (checking on the horses to make sure they were ok).
Brought back lots of memories... I may have to write an entry on my own blog instead of taking up all your space!!

Anonymous said...

Losing weight is a good way to "de-stress".

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