When I was a kid I was so embarrassed of the Chinese food place mats that declared that I was a rat. Rats were
the worse thing you could be; they were motivated by money and ambition, and they did not make lasting friendships. I was embarrassed about the less than charitable motivations, but I felt cursed by the friendship proclamation. I thought I was doomed to a
life of short-lived friendships, no one to ever reminisce with, no one to ever laugh back at my younger self with.
Turns out those menus are BS.
This weekend I celebrated my best friend's thirtieth birthday with her and a couple of bearded men, twelve years after the first birthday we celebrated together at a String Cheese Incident show with a couple of different bearded men. And there was a lot of time spent laughing at those girls who would drive all over to see silly jam bands, who never trimmed their hair.
And we just kept laughing.
We laughed while she waited on me at
Applewood, the restaurant she works at, and we squealed with delight when we
serendipitously ran into college friends visiting from California in front of a sort of random bar in South Park Slope. We laughed when we went back to Applewood for brunch and while we did some thrift storing. We laughed while our waiter made our table-side liver and onions at Sammy's Romanian Steakhouse. And we howled while we crowded into the ice cage at
Mehenata- The Bulgarian Bar, drinking vodka from ice shot glasses in a sub-zero drinking cave.
And Joanna even managed to keep laughing when she discovered she lost her purse over the course of the evening's festivities. That's why I love her; it's why everyone loves her.
I'm so grateful for my friend and for our friendship.
Now if only the material ambition part of that menu would kick in, I might be able to afford to go back there sometime. New York, you are pretty awesome, but you sure cost a lot of dollars.
