Thursday, July 26, 2007

The Alaskan Peninsula And My Friend's Physiological Changes Serve As A Metaphor For The Diversity Of My Friends

It's one big peninsula. Last night we finally got around to watching Grizzly Man. It was more confounding than it was compelling for the most part. The two things that'll stick with us will be Amanda's desire for a pet fox, and my determination that Alaskans are weird. The weird moments with Alaskan bureaucrats like the coroner and the guy who had the watch of the guy who got ate by a bear in his filing cabinet... wait that reads weird. a bear didn't eat him in his filing cabinet. he has the dead guys watch in the filing cabinet. Maybe this weirdness comes from being so disconnected with the country proper. Maybe that's what makes their politicians get away with such graft and corruption. Talking Points Memo has more about corrupt Sens. Stevens and Murkowski (both Republicans! imagine that!). These Alaskans in the movie all had a certain bug eyedness about them. Staring directly into the camera, speaking at weird clips, or in a completely detached tone, like the helicopter pilot who airlifted the remains.

So, speaking of weird, after my last post, I met myself halfway on my plan to walk to Whole Foods and get some pluots. Instead I walked up to Third Place to get some coffee, read, and listen to the ipod. Once I got there I ran into my old friend, Casey. I've known Casey since the first day of high school. Intermittent periods of not seeing each other filling in lots of gaps over the past nine years, months to years at a time. What's nice is that whenever we see each other, we pick up the conversation where it was left off. We were fairly close in high school, before I lost my shit, and she probably lost her shit too, I reckon. What was weird about seeing her today though, was she had changed physically. I should mention that Casey is a lesbian. She's always looked manish in her own way, mostly through the clothes she wore, haircuts etc. Butch would be the operative word. It's been a couple of months since I've seen her, and since then, the distinctly female characteristics of her have all but disappeared. There's hair on her legs, her jaw line is sharp, her voice is deeper than ever, and her chest is flat where it wasn't before. It didn't come up in conversation, probably because the porch at Third Place wasn't the right place to talk about it. I think she's probably taking hormones, though. Which, I mean, good for her. It's just weird to see someone you've known for such a long time make such a drastic transition in the period of a few months. It would probably have been less noticeable if I had seen her regularly, but it's a pretty drastic change. The difference is what strikes me more than the action.

As I walked home studying the pings of Joanna Newsom's harp on "Emily", I got to thinking about how drastically my group of friends has changed since that time in high school. My friends were (outside of the scattered punks and stoners) mostly black or homosexual. The latter moreso at the first high school I went to, Wake Forest-Rolesville. Which always struck me as strange, WFR was much less tolerant and much more rednecky than my second school, Wakefield. Now my friends are almost all white, I have no black friends. I miss that diversity in my group of friends. It has a lot to do with where I work. For the most part, my friends come from my surroundings. School at first, then workplaces. Glenwood Grill is the first place I've worked without any black or homosexual coworkers. Not that it's all white, we've got Colombians and Mexicans. It's just different, and I never really thought about it until tonight.

No comments: