how to not make friends

you know how sometimes you meet someone & you decide that you really want to be friends with them before you even know them at all? well, i had one of those experiences with a lady who lived on our street when we first moved in here.

we'd been living here for a couple months & it was summer, so naturally brooke & i were sitting in the driveway in the baby pool trying to not sweat to death. we don't have a usable yard due to hills & trees, so the only flat space for our pool parties is the driveway. i try to place the pool over the oil puddle so as to keep the child's feet from scampering through the oily sludge & therefor soiling the swimming water. but i digress.

so brooke & i were splashing around in 7 inches of water, when up the hill comes a woman & a little girl about brooke's age. they were coming over to introduce themselves & welcome us to the neighborhood. they were dressed nicely, clearly having just come from work in a place that had some dress code standards (unlike my job cleaning houses where i dress as gross as i want & no one notices or cares). i was sweating all in my greasy hair & probably had some bugs & dead grass stuck to myself in places i couldn't see (as in, anywhere below my boobs). i was wearing my tacky bathing suit that came from walmart & didn't hold up my monster fun bags because i wasn't anticipating socializing with anyone other than brooke, and i didn't want to dirty up a good one.

they introduced themselves & i crawled, dripping, out of the kiddie pool to try to reclaim some of my dignity. we discovered that our daughters are only about 3 weeks apart in age & they were also home on many of the days that we were, so we'd make perfect play date buddies. i really wanted to become friends with this woman. i wanted our daughters to be buddies because we didn't have anyone else in the neighborhood who we knew & it would be really convenient to have someone just one house down.

she told me that her husband had mentioned wanting to drop over & say hello ever since we'd moved in, but he thought that i'd be scared to have a big black man who i didn't know show up unannounced at the door. and because i'm always really classy & tactful & think quickly on my damp, dirty feet, i said, "that woulda been fine! i love black people!" she looked at me strangely, so i tried to fix it by saying, "before i met my husband, i dated LOTS of black guys." umm... that didn't seem to be fixing it. maybe actually it was making it worse.

awkward silence... and on that note, she left & walked back home.

we'd made arrangements to get together at their house a couple days later. i showed up at the designated time & they weren't even home. hmm... i probably should have taken a hint, but nope, not me. i called & we set up a time on another day. and they were home that time. we walked into the living room & there was a huge, very unique rug on the floor & i had a flashback to a duplex we'd gone into when we were looking for a place to rent a few years earlier. right then the husband walked into the room & introduced himself as chris - same name as my husband. and that's when it clicked and i realized that these were the people who had owned that duplex & were trying rent out the other side. i'd spoken to the husband at the time & he'd told me that he had a wife & a daughter the same age as my girlie. i'd thought then that it would be interesting to share a duplex w/ another couple where the men had matching names & the girls were the same age & that i could probably be friends w/ the wife.

i thought it was pretty cool that even though we'd passed on that duplex at the time, here we were living next door to them after all. it felt like destiny. i told my new friend later, after her big black husband was gone, the story of how i kind of  knew them & how we should be friends because of the destiny & all. i told her that i remembered their names because i'd carried her husband's name & number around in my purse for months after we'd met at their duplex years before.

whoopsie doodle - here comes that pesky awkward silence again....

we didn't become BFFs.

and the moral of the story is, if you meet someone & you want to be friends with them, don't look dirty & trashy & then give the impression that you have the hots for their husband.

the end