Rock the Vote or A Few Words on Sexual Politics

Okay, so now Jim is moving to Denver, and I am sad.

I mean like embarrassingly sad.

I mean like the summer after 3rd grade when Amy Harrison moved away to Texas, sad. Somewhere in a drawer I still have a photograph from the last afternoon she spent at my house. I remember we curled our hair all fancy and put on flowered dresses. In the picture, she is standing next to my parents' bird bath smiling and holding a sign--green magic marker on loose-leaf--"Bye-bye Amy Harrison 1981," it says (my idea, I'm sure). I never talked to her after that. Back then there were no cell phones, so no free long distance calls between Iowa and Texas. There was no email. And at 9 we were still a little young for productive letter writing. So that was the end of that. Full stop. Bye-bye Amy Harrison.

As for Jim, he was the first new person I met when I moved from Minneapolis to Omaha in 2003. At the time he was the acting manager of the Barnes & Noble store I was trying to transfer into. My initial impression of Jim was that he was kind of a dick, actually, which he may have been (and still may be, though I've apparently grown accustomed). Regardless, over the past few years we've become friends. We've bonded over our shared sordid past in retail management, our affinity for eclectic music, the fact that we've lived in the same cities during opposite years. My son, Lucas, and Jim's boy, Noah, are only a few months apart in age. Jim gets my obscure pop-culture references, my seemingly random Seinfeld remarks. He is capable of volleying repartee when properly engaged, he writes (or intends to). We are, in a sense, late-onset college drinking buddies. Only instead of college it's work, and instead of the drinking, well, we work (okay, so the analogy falls apart here, but you get my point).

See, as a general rule, I consider myself quick to gain acquaintances but slow to make friends. It just takes so much time to get to know people and honestly, at this point in my life, I already know a lot of people. The trouble is that most of them live too far away--Honolulu, Charleston, Minneapolis. And the few good friends I have here...well I'm sure they'll be the first to tell you that I am downright shitty about finding time to get together. I am just so stupidly busy juggling schedules--Ron's work & school, my job, the boys--that I rarely actually get it together enough to venture out with friends. I do, however, somehow manage to get my happy ass to work 3 days a week (most of the time), and although the store is not technically a social club, sometimes it may as well be.

Anyway, at this juncture I am unsure how to continue. The friendship, I mean, and that's part of what makes me sad. As what you might call a "late bloomer," I have always had good male friends. Until I started dating (my senior year of high school), I was always the sidekick, the one you took along so your mom would let you go out with that boy. And usually that boy brought along a friend too, a kind of pity pal to entertain the sidekick. Those pity pals became some of my best friends. In college, I was also often just one of the guys. I shot pool, tossed back Jack with no chaser, decreed killer Asshole rules. Trouble is that now, out here in the land of the grown-ups, there are certain expectations, a kind of Harry/Sally stigma to it all. See, if Jim were a girl and moving to Denver, it would be easy. I mean, you call, you visit, you have pillow fights, etc. But the whole boy/girl/married thing requires a different kind of etiquette. I mean I don't really think you call, do you? And I guess the pillow fights are out (not that girls actually do that--I just threw it in for the male readership). In a way, it kind of feels like 1981 all over again. Minus the fancy hair & pretty dresses.

But I'm not crying in my beer just yet. It is 2007, after all, and there is email. And Ron & I are going to be in Denver in September, so I'm sure we'll look Jim & Tracy up then. In the meantime, I did what you do to commemorate such important rites of passage (or what you did in 1987 at least)--I made him a mix tape. So life goes on. It's just that starting this week, work will feel a little more like WORK. Not that there's anything wrong with that...