A Girl...: Circle of Friends

October 25, 2003

Circle of Friends

I've never had a huge group of friends, rather preferring to have one or two intimates I can hang out with all the time and never get sick of. When I like a person I really really like him (it's hardly ever a "her") and can't seem to get enough. Two of the people I could never be in danger of having enough of--especially since I've only seen them a handful of times in the last six years--are my two best friends, Ben and Brandin.

Ben and I go back to seventh grade. If ever two people were separated at birth, we are they. We met Brandin in high school, bonding over Jesus Christ Superstar because (1) we all appreciated its musical genius and its biting social commentary regarding the origins and practice of Christianity, blah, blah, blah, and (2) we saw that it offended all the Mormon kids and found that quite delightfully hilarious. Soon after, we formed a suspiciously tight circle and earned ourselves the label "the Trinity." With our raw power, we struck fear into the hearts of everyone at Hillcrest High School, oh yes. This not only led to the conflation of our already well-developed god complexes, but it also lent itself to some weighty symbolic poetry, the kind only a high school girl could conjure. I will spare you.

After much fun and much drama, much listening to minimalist music for hours on end, much watching of the world's weirdest movies, and many sleepless coed slumber parties much to the dismay of some parents, Ben went off to Harvard (oh, imagine the poetry that inspired!) and Brandin and I stayed in Salt Lake, where we barely saw each other because, well, Dylan happened. In the last six years we've made an effort to get together on holidays and summer vacations, whenever the three of us happen to be in town at the same time, which never happens as much as it should.

But although this all seems to be going down the road of how things will never be the same, they actually are the same. Freakishly so. When we three get in a room together, there's this electric current, a completed circuit that generates the most tremendous chemistry, if I may mix such a cloudy metaphoric cocktail.
We're never at a loss, never shrouded in uncomfortable silence, never awkward and obsessed with how much we've changed and how little we know each other anymore. So not The Big Chill. And it's not like we're back in high school again (and I send a personal thanks to J. C. Superstar himself for that), but like we've never been apart. Sure, we regress a little, gossip a little, give each other hell for past offenses a little, but in the end it's like we've been growing up with each other all these years after all.

After three years in Boston, one in Rome, two in New York, and summers in Germany and who knows where else, Ben started grad school at Berkeley and now lives five minutes away from us. Brandin's been with a professional dance company in Salt Lake for a little over three years, and last night performed at Stanford, about an hour away. After an awesome show in which Brandin did his thing, starring in little more than flesh-colored mesh briefs, we went out to the only place in Palo Alto open past ten on a Friday night and probably broke some laws by simply being out and about in the city past midnight. We ended the evening at the chi-chi Sheraton, where I spent an hour stroking the I-can't-believe-it's-actually-cotton monogrammed pillows, Dylan went at the complementary Starbucks coffee like a wino to a mini bar, and Teddy (I can't get enough of you either, man) was this close from trying to catch koi with his finger as bait. On the long drive home I smiled to think what handsome bridesmaids my boys will be.

To start off with, four pictures that are unrelated to this post but sure are pretty:

Driving across the Dumbarton Bridge(as seen in Harold and Maude, a movie I first saw with Ben and Brandin:

Ooooh:

Aaaah:

University Ave. in Palo Alto, just barely breathing at 7 pm on a Friday night = the everything University Ave. in Berkeley is not: khaki, klean, korporate. (There are more Ks I could mention, but three is usually enough for these people, no?)

The bathroom at Stanford's Memorial Auditorium that was so unnecessarily large that I couldn't ignore the voices that echoed between its cavernous marble walls as they begged me to take a picture, even if a photograph could never do it full justice: