posted 2019-03-12 01:12:45
I tried helping a friend of mine with math. She lives near the Canadian border, and I see her once a year. I like her a lot. I succeeded in helping her at the end of it all, but I think I ended up pissing her off in the process. It took me two hours to figure out how to explain trigonometrical concepts in words. Eventually, she was like -- "S, I just want to know how to do the problem, not how to do math!" and I'm thinking, lady, you're ... learning ... math? I mean, I wish you weren't, and you wish you weren't, but here we are, and it's math.
Remembering old math is weird. I studied math in college. I minored in it. I also haven't set eyes on anything relating to trig in over a decade. It's just not an essential life skill. My brain -- and my memories of Ms. D's dank geometry class -- had atrophied.
Granted, I was also fucked up on drugs from an insane dental procedure, so maybe that had some impact on my helpfulness.
That's how I spent today being paranoid that I damaged yet another friendship. My friend (Z, we can call her) spent an awful lot of time telling me that I wasn't helping her, and finally, when Z did figure out how to reach a correct answer, I think she was so disgusted with math she didn't want anything to do with ME either on principle, and the stress of that was way too much. At least I'm fairly sure she's not going to ask me for help again.
*
I lost a friend a few days ago. I'll call her Ari. I might have referred to her as something else in the past, but I've forgotten, so, Ari for now.
Ari is an oil heiress and a former neighbor of mine when I had my bachelorette pad in School City. (Those blissful three years when I was technically single but also kinda enjoying my life.) I didn't know about the oil money until I was deep into the friendship. We used to hang out in the City. I brought her to K's place in Third City, which is where we now live.
She was a fun activity partner -- and I made the mistake of introducing her to many of my friends -- but I saw flashes of something here and there: her ex almost put out a restraining order, accusing her of stalking him, all of her roommates were "psychos", which meant that she came to stay with me, rent free for six months, in the suburban town in which I grew up. I lived in a small house there, definitely too cozy for three people. I helped take care of my father, who was slowly losing all of his abilities, and during his excruciating decline I also had to take care of her because she was a bottomless pit of rage and emotion. Eventually, because she kept getting fired from her jobs, she couldn't get the authorization to stay in this country anymore. She went back to Britain, where she's a citizen.
I had been pulling a slow fade on her in the almost two years since then, but then she aggressively came out me out of nowhere in response to a text I'd sent her asking if she wanted her stuff back. She refused to send me her address, but taunted me with her request. I mean, what was I supposed to do, hire a private investigator to find her?
She texted to say that she was upset that I hadn't told her of my father's passing. Then, she commented on the money that I must have after I made a passing comment about working out at the gym. (She comes from hundreds of millions, to be clear.) Finally, she told me she was married, and when I asked to see pictures, she told me that I must think she was a liar and then ... demanded an Amazon gift card.
Obviously I wasn't going to send her one. I asked for pictures again to see what she'd say and then she decided I wasn't worth the trouble. "Don't bother contacting me again," she said. That whole conversation took about five minutes. We've now blocked each other on social media. She's still friends with my brother, though.
And I have piles and piles of her shit in my house. Goddamnit.
*
And then there was the friend who lived with the much older child molester. He was making it impossible for her to leave, so she called the FBI on him. He was arrested for possession of child pornography. She vanished, blocking everyone she knew IRL.
She was a close friend of mine.
That kind of hurts.