Friends of Friends

I’ve known Stefanie for a long time, but aside from Adam and Cara, had never met her friends until about a month ago, when I happened to be in Seattle on her birthday. She organized a brunch at a modern styled restaurant with good food and bad service. I sat across from Stefanie, between my friend Molly (who didn’t know anybody else, including Stefanie) and a wittily-dressed girl accompanied by her recent boyfriend. Somehow, I quickly found myself in a conversation with the boyfriend about breasts, which encouraged the girl between us to start stretching her back and attempting to touch her elbows together behind her.

Eventually I looked to see what the rest of the table was doing and noticed an emaciated person with wan skin had appeared next to Molly. “Oh, there’s new people here,” I observed aloud. “Are you discussing anything more interesting than breasts?”

“We’re all about nutrition here,” Molly dryly replied.

“Oh god, I’m glad I missed it then,” was my snarky response. I didn’t find out until later the sickly-looking girl was in fact one of two people at the meal employed as nutritionists. In retrospect, I probably immediately soured our interaction. The nutrition lovers were fondling sugar packets. I suspect this is a normal activity for them.

“These have little messages on them!” someone sang gleefully, and read an inspirational cliché from one.

“The last thing I want to be getting advice from is a sugar packet.” To me, this is funny. For others, apparently not so much. I started to get a bit self-conscious.

The girl next to Molly tried to strike up a conversation with me. “Where are you from?” This is one of those questions I can’t stand, because I truly don’t know how to answer it. I have lived in cities, towns and rural country scattered throughout multiple states.

I replied, “I’m currently staying in Iowa with my brother,” and then internally mulled my obvious overstatement, as I actually hadn’t been in Iowa for several months and certainly wasn’t “currently” there.

“What are you doing here?” she demanded. I took her for someone who unintentionally comes across as hostile. To contrast, I decided to poke fun at my previous statement.

“I’m not here; I’m a hologram.”

“What do you mean by that?” she continued, unblinkingly. I noticed she had some kind of faint foreign accent and guessed she didn’t know what a hologram was.

“I’m working on a new technology, whereby I can eat breakfast at my brother’s place while appearing to be doing so here by projecting an image out from this restaurant’s security camera.” I proceeded, looking up in hopes that there was a security camera nearby.

Her eyes traced mine to the ceiling. “I don’t understand.”

Wow. This girl is stoic. I felt the whole table staring at me and buckled under the attention. “I’m joking.”

“I don’t know you well enough to get your sense of humor,” she hastily replied, scoldingly. I couldn’t quite read whether she was irritated, offended or simply unamused. I slumped back in my chair and ate my Eggs Florentine, which were delicious. Ms. Stick-In-the-Mud ordered something in the Eggs Benedict family as well. Soon after receiving them, she asked me, “Is your yolk runny like this?”

One of my greatest irritants is being served poached eggs with hard yolks. I send them back. “Yes. Poached eggs are supposed to be runny.”

But this runny?” I looked, and she had removed the albumen, leaving the yolk naked but unbroken. Maybe she was thinking of eggs-over-medium or medium-boiled eggs? I have no idea.

“Yes.”

“I think they make them better at Such-And-Such.” I didn’t reply that, since she obviously didn’t know what she was talking about, her opinion didn’t matter. I just thought it.

While poking at her food, her imminent trip to Holland was briefly acknowledged. Her husband’s job was taking her there. I believe this is how the conversation turned to dairy. Somebody, probably one of the nutritionists, started talking about deep-fried butter, which immediately reminded me of the Iowa State Fair. One major attraction at that godforsaken festival is a life-sized cow carved entirely out of butter. According to fair goers, this Butter Cow is world famous. Turns out, nobody has ever heard of it… which is why I spent about the next ten minutes explaining why a joke involving deep-fried butter balls and a butter cow is funny. But I digress.

Stefanie is very fond of cupcakes. I don’t have a problem with cupcakes aside from the fact that they are disgusting and girlish. The only thing cupcakes are good for are throwing at things. When the topic came up, I said that last bit aloud, just to be ornery. I have never lived as if life were a popularity contest.

It is very comfortable to surround one self with familiar faces. I was glad Molly was there to witness my current uneasiness in this group of strangers. While others seek out those who will reinforce their beliefs and opinions, I cherish those who will let me be skeptical, challenging and outspokenly honest without worrying that my effrontery will be misconstrued as a personal affront. I avoid those who insist upon polite conversation, as I don’t see the point of it. This often leads to a situation I think of as the friends-of-friends effect. I know Stefanie well enough to know she fully expects me to say something disparaging about whatever topic might surface, and surely won’t be affected by it. The other people at the table, however, are inevitably going to perceive me as being a jerk to their cupcake-loving friend.

Putting myself in their shoes, I am reminded of an evening spent around a friend’s backyard campfire shared with Rachel, over a year after we’d broken up, and two of her friends whom I’d never met before. The three of them had spent the day rock-climbing up the side of some mountain cliff. One of the guys couldn’t stop chiding Rachel for giving up halfway. Because I knew Rachel was severely afraid of heights and wouldn’t have even thought of attempting such a thing while we were dating, this guy really pissed me off. The two of us bickered well into the evening. Finally, instead of finding late-night food at nearby Javier’s, they stupidly decided to trek all the way to that trendy jambalaya restaurant under the Morrison Bridge while I fell asleep on the couch.

There is something enduringly fascinating about the perspective that each of us has on each other. We know our friends in a specific context, which is probably radically different from how their other friends know them. Our modern over-connectedness seems to be trying its best to eliminate this, however, giving us a multitude of ways to keep in contact with others without having to interact with them on any kind of personal or unique level. Cyberspace encourages us to connect with as many people at the same time as possible, which nudges us toward a neutral, sterile, democratic existence. I overtly fight this tendency, and can only imagine what skewed image those who only know me through my blog posts or Facebook rants must have of me. Even so, I’m still even more flagrant in person….

With the yolk still somehow intact, Molly’s anemic neighbor asked for a to-go box. A waiter said he would be glad to box her food and reached for the plate. Recoiling, she declared she would do it herself. I thought this was motivated by her desire to not include the yolk, but was surprised when she scooped it into the container. Only later did I realize she might have been saving it out of scientific curiosity. I myself wonder how long that thing can survive without breaking.

When Stefanie’s birthday brunch bill arrived, the girl sitting next to me suggested we just subtract the $60 groupon on the birthday girl’s phone and split the remainder evenly between the invitees. Because of the size of the group, a tip had already been included on the bill. Using my phone as a calculator, I determined that utilizing the suggestion came to just shy of $12 apiece, and suggested that we could all just pitch in $12. Everybody seemed fine with that, and I contributed $24 to cover myself and Molly, who had only ordered a pancake, since she’d already met up with an acquaintance for a slightly earlier breakfast while I had played a round of disc golf. But after everybody else had paid, the uptight nutritionist gathered it up, pulled out her Blackberry, and fussed over the money for several minutes. Oh, for fuck’s sake, I thought to myself and awaited the inevitable.

“There's like over two dollars too much here!”

“We were kind of a pain of a group, anyway, since more of us kept arriving at different times. I don’t see any problem with slightly padding the tip.”

“I think we should all take back fifty cents.”

The girl next to me piped up. “I mean the service wasn’t that great, but, Jesus, who cares!” Finally, somebody other than me was getting annoyed with this chick.

“Thank you!” I sighed, throwing up my hands and rolling my eyes as loudly as possible.

“I’m only going to pay $11.50.” I couldn’t determine whether the others didn’t hear or we all just chose to ignore her. Maybe I was just hearing things. It was time to go.

“We should find some time to get together before you travel to Europe,” the girl next to me offered to you-know-who, presumably trying to regain the peace after her outburst.

“Well, if you want to figure out the details, I’ll see if I can accommodate,” she snottily replied. Then she made an expression, as if it occurred to her she was being a bitch and regretted it. “I’m over my head with things to do before I leave.”

I don’t know anything about this person. Perhaps she was under a lot of stress. But the mystery that nags me most is- how the hell is she married?