The Boss

There are some people who go out of their way to avoid being stereotypes. Then there's my best gal pal and her family. She's of Italian ancestry. Her husband is of Italian and Polish ancestry. And they refer to their three daughters as “Wopollocks.” Again, her word, not mine. No hate mail, please. This family embraces the feisty, pasta-eating, passionate (note: passionate usually means people yell a lot), tanning, fitness-concious Italian-American mold that has recently been popularized and erroneously misrepresented by certain East Coast television shows that I will not mention here.


(I won't mention it, but I will post a picture.)


And perhaps it isn't their heritage that makes them who they are, but their East Coast roots. Both my friend and her husband were raised in New Jersey where looks matter a million times more than they do here, blood boils easily, families come first and the horses are very worried about the mob. (Was that a bad joke? I don't know. Being relatively removed from my ancestry, I don't really get upset about these things. So, please don't be offended. But if you are, I'm half Irish and half Swedish. You have my permission to accost me with as many “Swedish sin,” angry temperament, ABBA, Pope, whiskey and meatball comments as you would like. But if you really want to hurt my feelings, I'd just stick with the fat jokes.)
I've always had good friends who were female. But it's been, like, since the sixth grade the last time I had a best girl friend. Someone who I can talk about even the most disgusting of bodily functions with. I usually got along better with boys as a kid, since I was raised with only brothers. And if I'm going to be completely honest, armpit noises have always fascinated me more than Barbie Dream Date. (Although Barbie Dream Date definitely has its redeeming qualities, even if it did erroneously lead me to believe that every date would be accompanied by fancy chocolates, huge bouquets of flowers and a buff, tuxedoed man with good grooming skills and knowledge of ballroom dancing.) But now, that neurotic, hyperactive, Jersey-accented Italian lady who rolls her eyes when her mother calls, tans herself into a tizzy, spends an absolutely ridiculous amount of money on designer pants and mispronounces the word coffee... She's it. She's my best girl friend.
She's not what I would have expected. She's 14 years my senior. A mother of three. Unfairly gorgeous. And my boss. Well, my landlord, technically. I rent space from her salon. But she could terminate my rental agreement if I showed up in sweatpants that say “juicy” across the butt or something. I call her Boss. More as a term of endearment than anything else.
Much like jobs, boyfriends, good apartments, I've come to the conclusion that best girl friends come along when a person is least expecting it. I'm not going to lie. My college social experience was pretty miserable because while I am very good at keeping friends and treating friends well, I'm not so good at making friends. I'm weird, dorky and shy—a bad friend-making combo. Only having five friends, though, made studying a priority. I was on honor roll every semester! Whoop, whoop! Even the semesters I took math!
Now that I'm a grown up and at an age where I thought I'd be too old to have social engagements, meaningful friendships and, well, fun in general... I've found that I have those things. (I don't know what I was envisioning for life after college. A squeaky rocking chair, two knitting needles and Paul Harvey Jr. perhaps?) Granted, when I moved back to Wisconsin, I felt the need to compensate for the fun I missed in college. Went a little overboard. Not dancing on the bar while scantily-clad and inebriated-overboard. But overboard in the way that it seemed logical to say screw saving money for food, I want to go see a hip-hop show! (In Wisconsin, we call it hip-hap.)
It's refreshing to have a girl to do things with. Not that shopping and confessing my every neurotic insecurity with Brian isn't fun, but it isn't really the same. She keeps talking about taking me to Las Vegas, because I've never been. Every other day she says how we need to go to the mall. We signed up for a belly dancing class together. We just saw The Blue Man Group. We vent every morning to each other about toilet seats being left up and her kids being mouthy and my kitten slowly destroying everything I own. It truly is nice to have such a close female friend. Someone who I can talk about even the most disgusting of bodily functions with.