“This Is the Story / Of Some College Students / Who Were Always Screwing with Each Others’ Heads . . .”

Last night I was perusing through my old college journals, trying to see if I could find something to put on here, something fit for human consumption.  Given the two journals I looked at last night?  No.  They are filled with soap operas, friends stealing other friends’ romantic interests, power struggles at jobs and me being mopey and horribly pessimistic about my life.

But it’s interesting – I look back at that time in my life and cannot help laughing and actually reminiscing about it fondly.  In the span of two and a half years I made and lost so many wonderful friends that I tend to look back on the good times rather than trying to remember what it felt like when I read about the bad times.  We were essentially a group, the big clique in the dorm, made up of sarcastic, bitter and relatively pretty people who amused one another.  I look back at them and wonder where they are and how they’re doing.

There was Friend L, who is still in contact with me.  She provided me with the work power struggles as we both fought to keep our desk in order without killing one another.  Outside of work we rarely engaged in these struggles and managed to get along quite well; in fact, I’m one of the few who can get along with her at all.  We still laugh together about the old times but, if truth is told, she wasn’t there for the majority of them.  She didn’t experience the drama that happened in the evenings firsthand.

Friend Lo I’ve discussed.  If all goes well, I’ll be seeing her in October, more than five years after we last said good-bye.  My sister tells me that a friend of hers might be running the Nike 26.2 also (I’m just running the half-mary, though); I might get to hang out with my sister and my old friend that weekend in San Francisco.  Throughout all of college, she was the crazy friend, but the friend who ended up giving the best advice.  Since she didn’t live in the dorm, she could detach herself a bit from the situation and give us perspective; she could also play an integral role in it all when she wanted to.

Friend Yan (code name, dudes) was my major nemesis and love interest for the better part of the two years.  We annoyed the hell out of each other but were, frankly, strongly attracted to one another.  Of course, he immediately threw up the boundary of "I’m still in love with my high school ex!" which I respected – I get the feeling he was pretty nonplussed when I didn’t pursue anything and he felt he couldn’t rescind his earlier claim.  While we tried to avoid romance, we ended up messing with each others’ heads big time.  It culminated when we ended up in the same Latino Studies class five years ago and hurt each other badly with some pretty harsh words.  Besides the whole relationship thing, we got along relatively well when it came to watching hockey, homework and him helping me goof off during work.  Also?  Friend L really liked him and it was a long time before I told her we had a thing for each other.  She wasn’t mad, but I was a bad friend.

Friend Stevie’s Man was Friend L’s love interest for a brief span of time – he got the title of Stevie’s Man because he was dating someone named Stephanie when L wanted to get back together with him.  He was the kind of guy who thought you couldn’t be friends with women; it was either bed them or ignore them.  He tried to get all smooth with me while I was dating someone I called Poetry Guy (he was in my English 240 class, okay?).  He also tried to get friendly with Friend Lo.  Lo and I ended up comparing notes one evening and laughing until we had to close the desk for a good five minutes because helping people was out of the question for a bit.  He finally got a clue and became a good friend to all of us: Lo, L and me.  We had a couple of drinking sessions (for me, back then, that meant one drink) over the summer when we lived in the dorms, plotted to work closing together on Fridays whenever we could (it was fun because that seemed to attract everyone to the desk) and ended up being pretty good friends.  He joined the Reserves after college; I’ve no idea what’s happened to him.

Friend D was a sweet guy who really like Friend L and ended up dating her for about a month.  Friend L ended up dumping D because he was black; Friend L also did me the disservice of putting me in the middle.  D was a sweetheart up until then; we took GeoSci 222 together and always ended up sitting in the back of the class, complaining we could understand our Oceanography instructor at all and passing each other notes as if we were in high school.  We worked a couple of shifts together and would have great conversations about hockey, elusive love and politics.  But then L dumped D and he became militant and impossible.  He hated me for not speaking up about what was going on with L; I told D I was friends with the both of them and my only aim was trying to get them to talk and had encouraged L to confide in him, not me.  D didn’t buy it, and I ended up losing that friend.

Friend Malcom was Yan’s roommate.  Malcom encouraged both Yan and I to get together but we never listened.  Malcolm was also great for a laugh whenever you needed it, whether he liked it or not.  We still have a picture of him watching "The Golden Girls" intently, concentrating on the adventures of Dorothy, Rose, Blanche and Sophia.  He was also a touchy-feely drunk; when I was closing the desk late one night, he stumbled into the dorm and declared that Yan didn’t appreciate me, but that he would.  He invited me to his room, something I declined with grace at first, then with irritation.  He was so embarrassed he couldn’t look at me the next day.  "Oh, you were drunk" I rolled my eyes at him, and all was okay.  He also joined the Reserves with Stevie’s Man; he also had an adorable three-year-old daughter he doted over with due devotion.

Friend Flighty was my college roommate, who I found the other day studying in England.  We’ve been in touch since them, and it’s triggered the memories of her trying to date Malcom.  They were both poli-sci majors; she thought that it was a perfect segue into his good graces.  Turns out, though, he didn’t like to discuss his major outside of class.  No matter; she tried and tried again and ended up getting nowhere.  Flighty was disappointed; she found Malcom handsome (and he was), sensitive (just ask him about his daughter and his eyes would light up) and intelligent – everything she wanted.  Along with Malcom, she pushed me towards Yan while I protested fitfully.  When things with Malcom didn’t work out, she ended up dating a man slated to be married; this brought out extreme pissiness in Lo and me – we’re both of the firm belief that, once a cheater, always a cheater, so this could never end up in happiness for Flighty – as we worked to discourage her from dating him.  He’d leave long, complicated messages on our voice mail, asking that I not listen to them; Lo listened to them instead and berated the hell out of Flighty.  Yeah, we were nosy, but we cared.

There were the minor players, people who had come to our sphere of influence through the people who worked the front desk, people who came into our circle through the guys’ basketball tourneys, people we met in classes.  Everyone knew each others’ business as hard as we tried to keep it from one another; everyone tried to help each other, but we usually mucking it all up for one another.  We were complicated, messy, almost high schoolish in our machinations.  We had fun, though.