This Is Why I Have No Friends

It has been made clear to me that if I am going to entitle my blog "This Is Why I Have No Friends," I'm going to have to explain the meaning behind the title, lest I give off the wrong impression.

Gather around, my friends, Romans, countrymen and assorted people who wandered past merely to sniff and huff and possibly catcall to one another from the back row (don't think I don't see you back there just because you're hunching, PROFESSOR), and let me bend your lended ears for a brief tale.

It all went to hell when I hit puberty. Actually, it likely went to hell well before then, roughly around the time I learned to speak. With speech came limited reason and with limited reason came arguments, as can only be expected when you are a square peg being forced, bang by bang by bang, into a round hold approximately half your size.

My mother had expected something different when she sent away for a child. California, she reasoned, would be the place to go for a blonde, chipper, bouncy little thing with Berkeley brains, Hollywood looks and Napa Valley class. It was a bit of a cruel joke, really, that instead of all that she got me. Chip and bounce galore, yes, intelligence up the wazoo, pretty enough...but no Ivy-league ambition, no intention to try out for cheerleading, the focus of a drunken gnat and oh yes, the tendency to think of oversized sweatshirts as the very height of fashion.

It bothered her.

Intensely.

This is not to pass judgement on her, necessarily. I was no barrel of monkeys to raise. Well. Actually. I was a barrel of monkeys to raise, with all the implicit noise, chaos and broken dishes. I imagine that there is nothing more frustrating for a teacher to be saddled with a daughter who was smart yet did no homework, affable yet had no friends, attractive yet unkempt.

It was the social thing that got to her the most, really. My mother is the sort who judges value by who sees it. Popularity is important to her; she's a popular woman, friendly, charming, outgoing. Everyone likes her. And I tried, I really did. But I have never been and will never be good at people, and when you're a kid, you can't fake it quite as well as you can in later years. Not when your brain moves too fast for your filtering to keep up, not when everything is exciting and worthy of commentary and you just...can't...keep....your fucking.....mouth........shut.

It bothered her, intensely, and the botheration burrowed in there, and she was desperate to get what she wanted from what she had.

She may have said some stupid things.

Done some stupid things, too, but we're not going to go there, as this was purported to be a BRIEF tale and the people in the back row are beginning to get rather snippy. 

In any case, whenever something went wrong or broke, whenever I did or said something she didn't like, whenever she asked me to do a chore and I forgot, there was a favored phrase that very swiftly rose through the ranks to triumph at the very top of both the Most-Frequently-Used and the Most-Psychologically-Fucked-Up: "You know, this is why you have no friends."

The sneer in her tone is impossible to convey; the effect it had on me is something that still occasions bitterness on a bad day.

In any case, it got to a rather ridiculous level. Forget to take out the trash? "This is why you have no friends, you're so irresponsible." Play a video game for more than the permitted fifteen minutes a day? "This is why  you have no friends, you're so lazy." Neglect homework? "This is why you have no friends, you're so stupid."
Babyish.
Distractible.
Scatterbrained.
Clumsy.
Disobedient.
Head in the clouds.
Unfashionable.
Messy.

And, of course, friendless. Mustn't forget that.

This went on far longer than it should have.

It took a Christopher and a Christopher sense of humor to lampoon it. When he heard it the first time, his eyes went distant and angry, as they frequently did in those days when he was regularly exposed to the charms of my mother, and he said nothing...he never said anything directly to her, he would always wait. Afterwards, he exploded for awhile, ranted for awhile longer, spat curses at the heavens for allowing it, at the nonpresent mother for doing it, at me for putting up with it.

And then he did what he does best.

He looked at me, eyes aglitter with mock solemnity, found some minor thing that I had done wrong in the past few days, and said, "You know. This is why you have no friends."

And then he cracked a smile.

Read too much Kafka? This is why I have no friends.

Type too fast? This is why I have no friends.

Am very very bad at Zuma? Clearly, this is why I have no friends.

The more surreal, the better, and I'm going to come back and edit this later, righ tnow I'm late for CHEMISTRY LAB SHIT SHIT SHIT.

<3 pu