no boys allowed in the room!!!!

i've come to the conclusion today (after talking with my mom and bff on the phone) that i should be happy that my female friends take the time to be my friend at all
i have one super close one, many who are formerly-close but currently occupied
i wish more people were willing to talk on the phone tbh
so tired of typing

A person that I have to beg repeatedly to be my friend can't really be my friend.
ugh so otm

i am really bad at phone conversations and wish i could express myself better via phone. i don't know what it is, but i feel uncomfortable on the phone

they're difficult! you can't see facial expressions or body language, you can't determine turn-taking as easily, etc. i have one particularly hellish memory of a phone conversation that i had in spanish that was the last time i talked with someone and i did not express myself clearly and left things very poorly.

still talking on the phone is something i have always enjoyed because it's usually the best i can get!

i will take letters/email over phone calls tbh. i feel like, for me, phone calls are a dim version of what the person is really like, or something. i cant feel like i'm really talking to them or that theyre really talking to me

man tbh i will take whatever i can get if someone i like talking with wants to correspond with me

hey btw roxy have you watched mask yet?! (not the mask, just mask)

i just actual loled! i forgot about mask!!

you gotta watch it!
cher looks so pretty
http://www.cyfraplus.pl/ms_galeria/fotobase/2395_c.jpg

sexy motorcycle!
http://htarts.s3.amazonaws.com/files/2013/04/mask-1985-01-g-630x473.jpg

awesome group shot, just imagine dylan carlson in there
http://api.ning.com/files/Jx8KmtZz6Stx-3DtvAGCuiHBampEt8e2lRAH7Q8EWbAybEU1sSAa*kTzHIhDHwQJSTZE0QH2P5-E7DYnBqDOurAd4UzqU4Mu/l9.jpg

When I was younger (like teens, 20s) I used to spend literally hours and hours on the phone, talking to my girlfriends. I don't even know what happened to that ability. Like, seriously, I think I have had one phone call with a friend in the past... 5 years or something. (It was about a month ago, I was very seriously at the end of my tether, and reached out to a friend who had moved, saying "can you just talk about dumb shit for 15 minutes because I think I'm losing it" and we talked about trivial annoyances.) Partly it's mobiles, like I actually find it physically uncomfortable to spend more than 10 minutes on a mobile before my ear gets really hot. Partly it's just fear and social anxiety and come on, who the hell wants to talk to me anyway, I'm a miserable depressing old bastard who just wants to talk about pop stars and council tax and boring philosophers no one reads.

I dunno, I feel like the one who gets phased out, because being around people who are severely depressed is no fun. Being around people with anxiety issues is difficult and tedious if you're not used to it, and very easy to write off as "drama" if you don't understand what's going on. And also probably a healthy dose of "BB is so boring now she's stopped drinking, isn't in a band any more, isn't cool any more, doesn't go clubbing any more" or whatever. The not-getting-drunk this is difficult. It kind of amazes me, the insane, crazy, fucked-up shit I would get up to when I was still drinking, and people would still somehow hang around with me. But now I don't get drunk, I'm just difficult and awkward, and just boring and sober and difficult and awkward is way, way less fun than drunk and dramatic, so... the end.

Sometimes I feel like... my life fell quite seriously apart about 5 or 6 years ago. I have spent the past 2 years trying to stick it back together again. But at the end of being that chaotic for that long, it's really hard both to find normalcy, and also to convince others that you're worth taking a chance on. Maybe I don't feel like I'm worth taking a chance on. Maybe I don't know how to trust anyone I haven't known long enough to have lived through the chaotic times with me and still have stuck around.

I am lucky to have at least 3 people who I have known for so long and so well that nothing I ever do is ever going to phase them ever again. But none of them live in this country. And I can't live in the country where they all live. This peripatetic existence we all live is shitty and not conducive to real relationships.

Man, I am a real "up" person today, am I not? Part of this is just PMT and part of it is still being fucked up in the head over the job thing yesterday. But part of this is just... waaaaahhh. I am lonely. I miss having a close girlfriend close enough by to go out for a coffee and a chat. I guess I feel less alone for knowing that I'm not the only one feeling this way.

(Oh, sorry, conversation moved on while I was typing that. Didn't mean to be so much a downer.)

i'm just posting pictures of cher! it's ok! you're def not alone.

can def ID with your first paragraph. i used to spend sooo much time on the phone as a teen, but i didnt feel like i had to perform on the phone back then. long silences were ok

Maybe I should post pictures. But I'd just post pictures of Brandon Curtis and Daniel Kessler and no one wants that. Ha!

I think that the long-times-on-the-phone thing were mostly about not ever having your own space while being a teen. Now I have a whole damn flat of mine own, I guess being on the phone to get space isn't so important? I dunno.

and let us let this thread be as much of a coffee and chat w/ a girlfriend as it can be. i need one of those, too.

xp oh that's true, i hadn't thought of it that way. it seemed like such an affront when mom would pick up the other line and start telling me to get off the phone. like, get out of my space!!!

(I only got online again to post the last chapter of the last book of the Deep Field trilogy, how did I get sucked into the gurl thread, you ladies and the conversations here are far, far too interesting!)

omg @ DF - is it new stuff??

No, no, I'm posting all of the old, original DF stories on AO3, one week at a time. Lots of it has been re-edited and "remastered" but it's still basically the same stories. This is the very end of LIAWOD I'm posting now. It feels like the passing of an age, but it's been so fun to see all those characters again. LOL.

I have done a new story in the ~Deep Field Universe~ but there's no way I'm posting the URL on ILX.

haha the worst was when one of your parents picked up the line to tell you to get off the phone and you were ~talking about sex~ and it was so embarrassing because OMG OMG how much did you hear. What's even funnier was that usually it was my Dad shouting at me because he wanted to get his computer to talk to some other computer in California, and it was supposed to be ~work~ but thinking back on it, he was probably posting to some early 80s proto internet discussion group, oh dear.

my friend's dad secretly taped our phone conversations using a hidden tape recorder in the ceiling that he had connected to the phone line (which was legal at that time in that place because it was in his name)

omg did you totally die

!!!!!!!!!!!

That is so fucked up! Why did he do that?

i had one best friend who went to a different school so we chatted on the phone all evening or met up to eat Monster Munch and listen to shitty reggae tapes
we haven't much kept in touch but she was the only person I would chat to for so long. I realllllly hate the phone now, can just about bear it with my husband.
anyway she has just had a baby! determined to be a better friend.

oh wait I just re-read, it was your FRIEND'S dad, not even your own? uuughhhh

yes i did die but then i kind of mentally reveled in the fact that he knows things about me that he can't unknow and he also can't let me know he knows, so who's uncomfortable now? ha

he was trying to conduct surveillance on his wife, who he believed to be having an affair (he was right but goddamn can you just talk to her about it?!)

i remember girls getting someone on the 3rd line and not telling the other person, people getting busted for gossiping that way

OK, that is super fucked up. Like - you think your wife is having an affair so you spy on your entire family and all their friends? It sucks, but still, confront her, don't take everyone else down with her. x-post to LL

It was suuuuuuper fucked up!

It's less of the secrets-sharing I miss, but more of the mundane chit chat - my BFF and I used to talk on the phone every night before I moved here, for at least an hour. That's why I like this thread, but also the ILS threads - the serious convos are great, but I love just shooting the shit with the women.

Cher was so freakin hot in Mask. I loved that movie when i was a kid.
Now I want a giant spiral perm.

I loved that movie so much.

I didn't use the phone that much as a teen! I knew that teens "did" that and I wanted to want to, because I was supposed to do that, but I just didn't have those kinds of friendships iirc. I had some friends but I think we, like, DID stuff, like go on church trips and bike rides and swim, but I don't remember hanging out for hours talking. I think I had books and my mom for that and friends were more like a social minefield that was sometimes also mean to me.

I can't remember the details of a lot of my childhood tbh.

(If my friends were mean to me, I was also unthinkingly critical and cutting to them, probably--I was not a kind young person.)

I definitely in high school told someone it was admirable that she didn't care about fashion--I thought she was frumpy and out of style but we were also v religious (her even more than me, she married a minister and moved to Mexico) so that kind of denial was encouraged. Anyway, she got mad obv because she HADN'T renounced fashion at all and I was insulting her. That kind of thing.

Terrible word + picture meme on fb the other day alerted me to the existence of this quote, which made me think of Lechera for various reasons actually:

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it's true I'm here, and I'm just as strange as you.”
― Frida Kahlo

that stuff about your youth is heavy.
i have mixed feelings about that quotation

this whole convo about friends has made me unpleasantly maudlin, like in a mournful way.

It doesn't feel heavy! But it also feels like it happened to another person. :) I don't feel like I became "me" until I was in my mid-20s or so.

Sorry about the quote btw, it was just a thought.

The funny thing about the woman who posted the Kahlo quote to my feed is that she's a total norm imo, but maybe she's not so normal in the Midwest, and even norms can be freaks on the inside.

Hm. My friends also weren't what you'd call rebellious and were mostly extremely "nice" girls. I, otoh, wanted to break things and fuck things up but was too controlled and wasn't accepted by any actual "bad" kids so I stuffed it down inside, I guess. I was pretty normal too on the outside.

Oh god I must be a terrible person, because that quote was on Tumblr with a bunch of Kahlo paintings above it, and I totally reblogged it, mostly because the paintings were awesome, but also because I liked the quote. But really, I guess what else are these image memes for but to prove what an awful person you are to the world.

http://captainawkward.com/2014/04/11/563-i-have-a-hard-enough-time-making-friends-for-myself-how-do-i-navigate-the-special-hell-that-is-arranging-playdates-for-my-children/

This specifically about making mom friends (something I'm not personally that interested in doing bc I feel like I can't devote enough time to my core group of beloved friends (hi LL I miss u boo <3)) but also contains great advice about making friends in general when you feel like a weirdo.

I liked the quote too! To the extent that I was being negative about it, it was in line with the ilx joek thread about picture memes, most of which are let's be honest, pretty bad (and also frequently wrongly attributed). I wouldn't have remembered or repeated it if it hadn't resonated for me!

I talked to my Mum on the phone for about an hour this morning, which kinda helped a little. It's good that we are both old enough now that we can kind of talk woman to woman, about our crushes and ridiculous things like that (and trying to stay off politics, because we agree too much and just start shouting, and off gender issues, because we disagree and also start shouting). And she natters on about Harrison Ford for a bit, and I natter on about my current crush's odd lack of eyebrows and she laughs and says "oh, now that sounds familiar, no wonder you have a crush on him". And then she started teasing me that she was going to go and see his band, because they are playing in Vermont, near where she lives! But then the phone starts crackling, and a reminder of how very very far away she lives, and how shit international lines are.

She told me to do some gardening, which kinda helped. But not really.

Also have any of you heard the This American Life ep where a woman (Starlee Klein iirc) makes tapes of her own oral history for a new friend? It's her solution to the problem of new friends not knowing your history/secrets.

oh don't be sorry! i just have mixed feelings about it, they're not strong, just mixed!
no one is a terrible person*

*there are some exceptions

branwell your mom sounds like a gem

hi carl <3 ;) <3
you are in good company as the many friends of lechera who also have infants have schooled me on what to expect. my problem lies in the fact that everyone i usually turn to is in the same situation -- newborns.

OMG how awkward. Like, imagine if someone gave you a tape of their oral history. It would be like a mixtape that was too personal to listen to, but too awkward not to, and wow, if someone ever made one of those for me, I think I would back away slowly and go to great lengths to never, ever meet that person again. x-post now

or little babies, like <2
the ones whose kids are getting a little older are starting to come back around though
maybe i should start making phone dates with them

i think i made it partially through that ep and had to stop because it was too much and her voice (sorry)

Wait, LL, are you parenting (or about to be parenting), or are you trying to deal with a social circle of friends who are all now parenting?

I just seem to have accepted that parenting is a cliff off which my friends disappear. And sometimes they reappear after 16 years when their progeny are able to drive themselves, but mostly they don't. It has got to the point when, even if I just hear that a new friend is "trying for a baby" then I start distancing myself now, because it's easier to do it before you've established an intimacy which will have to be broken, than go through the disappointment of when they fall off the baby cliff. I also recognise this is probably counterproductive, but it's just hard, bitter experience. I know this makes me a terrible person.

I am with you Branwell Bell on the whole tape thing. I would not be comfortable with that in the least. Also LL don't one of our mutual friends have a story about SK in which she comes off as a huge jerk? That always colors my feelings about her work.

trying to deal with a social circle of friends who are all now parenting?
^^ my closest personal circle primarily at this moment + everyone else who is already medium-lost
this is not something i desire for myself, i just miss them like super bad.

i think kelz had a story? right?