Sep 8, 2004

Blogger hates this post because it is an epic poem. (Not Greek, though.)

Warning: autobiographical crap ahead...

There is this girl I went to school with from about fourth grade on. We were good friends when we were little, but then she became one of those girls who was getting noticed by the popular crowd while I was not. (Every girl out there knows where I'm going with this, I bet.) She started pulling that trick where she'd be all nice to me when it was just the two of us, at each others' houses, but in school she'd ignore me and point and giggle and gossip and stuff. And I totally had, like, no other friends, so I just took it. Blah blah blah, low self esteem, fast-forward to high school. At that point I DID have a tight group of friends, and I'd see her around and I suppose she had her own friends and was doing fine, but there was a period during senior year when she had a crush on one of the guys in my group so she'd hang out with us a lot. The guy didn't really like her back, and she didn't mesh so well with us and our sense(s?) of humor, so it all kind of tailed off. At that point I was doing my own thing and didn't really think about her.

So, graduation, college, etc etc. Her parents still live in the neighborhood so every so often my mom would tell me how they'd run into each other at the grocery store, and would tell me what this girl was up to lately. (She was at art school in NYC.) Fine, great.

College graduation, blah blah. I lived at home the summer afterwards as I was about to go to London for a year(!), for an art program. My parents find out that the girl is living at home too, and they GIVE HER PARENTS MY NUMBER. Arghhhhh. She called, wanted to go out. Fine, I will go out once. We're not bosom buddies, but it's one night, so fine.

Okay, it sucked. We went for a drink, and first off, I was frightened by her appearance. She had always been very tall, big-boned, and brunette. Now she was tall, emaciated, and blonde. She was wearing a shirt that was very low-cut in the back, and as I sat next to her I could see all her vertebrae and stuff. She didn't have a drink, because she said she didn't like "being drunk." Whatever. But all night she was going on and on about the ex-boyfriend she had lived with in New York, and their nights of coke benders followed by wild sex! Aiiiiii! I was petrified of her by this point. A big night for ME at college involved, like, a keg.

When I told her I was about to go to London she got all excited, because, ohmygod, SHE was about to move there too! Great.

I didn't see her anymore that summer. Then I was in London, and waaay at the end of the year she emails me (because, yes, my mom gave her parents my EMAIL ADDRESS TOO), and asks me to go out. I went out.

Oh, for fuck's sake. It sucked again. The night was pretty much her telling stories about another ex-boyfriend, and the coke and wild sex, but also at this point she had stories of all the modeling she did too. Which would have been awesome, and really entertaining, but she was just dropping names left and right so it just came off as kind of annoying. It was topped off by her dissing my London art school because I would "never really learn anything about art anywhere other than New York." Alrighty then!

So, I didn't see her anymore that year. Got home to DC, blah blah, time has gone by. A few months ago I got a mass email from her about how she's pregnant and getting married. I guess she had mixed feelings about it all, because it was in a tone of "yay, bring on the fatness and domestic crap, yay, I'm so pregnant." I wrote back and said (sincerely) congratulations and best of luck, and that I was excited too because I'd just gotten into grad school. She wrote back and ignored both the baby and the grad school thing and was just like "ohmygodyou'restillinthearea? let'sgooutIamsobored." I just never wrote back, because she kind of annoys me, and I don't feel like we've hit it off very well, and also I get the feeling that she's just using me as a warm body to go out with because she's bored.

THEN (sorry, almost over) last week one of my high school friends ran into her, and the girl asked my friend about me and whether I was still in the area, and my friend said yes (argh) and then realized what she'd done and told me. And, of course, yesterday I got an evite inviting me to the baby shower. I have not opened the evite yet. I'm just going to open it and politely decline, and then ignore any further emails. I mean, god. Isn't that sort of a naked display of greed, to send an invite to someone you've seen in person twice since high school graduation in (oh god) 1997?? Without even first sending a how-ya-doing email?

I don't know if I am out of line on all this. Am I out of line?

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