I keep getting Facebook friend requests from grammar school classmates, people I knew 25 years ago when my hair was naturally the color of sand, my cheeks plump with baby fat, my pale skin untouched by the sun, setting me apart from my brown-skinned classmates like a scoop of vanilla ice cream on an enchilada plate.
I accept the friend requests and then click through to view pictures of my former fellow Girl Scouts, now married with multiple children, living in Rancho Cucamonga or somewhere else with track homes and strip malls. There’s a whole community of them out there in the boonies, people who were the popular kids when we were 10, now parents to their own 10-year-olds.
I browse the pictures of family trips to the desert to ride dirt bikes and children’s birthday parties at Chuck E. Cheese’s, and I try to imagine what my life would be like if I had followed their path – if selling Girl Scout cookies together had made me more like them, instead of teaching me that I kind of hated their gossipy, group-minded, often mean ways, which sent me running in the opposite direction, toward the creative, kind outcasts.
I don’t regret my route in life, but I do marvel at how far apart we are now. It was one thing for me to be on the other side of the playground, playing handball with the boys or inventing new recess games with the quirky foreign girl everyone else made fun of. It’s another thing for me to live this life I’m living, which sometimes seems ridiculous, even to me. But then that’s what I love about it.

For example, this week I was at a media cocktail party at a hip bar in a new condo community downtown. As I emerged from a bathroom stall, a man in a suit emerged from the stall across the way, and we stared at each other through the branches of a huge fake blue tree that was the centerpiece of the room.
“I knew I came into the wrong bathroom,” he confessed, blushing.
I washed my hands next to the fake tree. “It was probably me,” I said, admiring the sleek sink and the modern metal fixtures.
He was washing his hands too. “This place is crazy.” Perhaps he was referring to the bathroom stalls, which had glass doors that fogged over to provide privacy when shut and locked.

“I think we just peed in the future,” I said, and we emerged into the throng of journalists with martinis, pretending this was totally normal. For the rest of the night, I started every conversation with, “Have you seen the bathroom?”
A voice spoke to me from behind. “With a dress like that, you must be in PR!” I turned to see a slick-looking man in a stylish suit. I decided to take his words as a compliment, since it turned out he was in PR, and clearly had a high opinion of himself.
“I like your tie,” I said.
He thanked me, handed me a business card, and headed off saying, “I’m going to go find the photographer, since getting my picture taken is the only reason I come to these things.”
Then I met a writer in town from a Vegas newspaper, followed by three marketing gals, one of whom had tiny hands that creeped me out. She told me that she’d heard of my company because she just saw a promotion we were doing on Facebook that day. This let me know that the contest I’d worked hard on was already effective, since it had been live only a matter of hours and had already spread to someone with tiny hands who I met randomly at a party.
Over her shoulder I spotted cute guy I’d met on an online dating site last year. He recognized me, despite my new hair color.
“You have very distinctive features,” he explained, and since that could either be a good thing or a bad thing, I decided to take it as a good thing.
Without having ever met in person, we’d had a lovers’ quarrel by instant messenger, so on this our actual first meeting in person, we were already making up.
“We’re like Harry and Sally,” he explained to a spunky 40-something woman named Jill who’d suddenly set up camp next to me on the couch, whispering in my ear, “He cute, but he’s short.”
Jill ran over to a man holding what looked like a Cosmopolitan and asked him why he was drinking such a girlie drink. He insisted it was bourbon and was not girlie at all, at which point she asked for a sip. He took this as an opportunity to join us on the couch and tell us about his theories on men’s fashion, the role of blonds in movies, and the history of the dandy.
Another trip to the bathroom and I was washing my hands beside a short cocky man I’d met at a previous media party, where we’d quizzed each other on geography by drawing maps on cocktail napkins. “Didn’t we meet before?” I asked him, adding, “I was blonde.”
He studied my “unique features” and said, “Yeah! Are you the one I showed my extra large condom to?” He was referring to an incident at the last party where he’d simply pulled an extra large condom out of his pocket for show-and-tell, right in the middle of drawing me a map of Texas. “It made sense in the conversation at the time,” he insisted.
“No, it didn’t,” I said, leaving him behind and emerging from the bathroom, where I was instantly sucked into a conversation with a woman who does PR for porn productions.
On my way back to my sidekick Jill, I met a comedian to whom I for some reason told my life story. He smiled a lot and I felt like I was being really entertaining. His buddy tried to get in on the conversation, but was attempting to jump ahead to questions I couldn’t possibly answer without first laying the groundwork with some lead-up questions. He could tell I didn’t know how to answer him. He apologized.
“Look, you’ve got to spend a little time getting to know a girl,” I said. “Your friend here seemed to really care about getting to know me. That’s how you should talk to a girl.”
I was kind of appalled by the words as they came out of my mouth, but he seemed to really like my spunk. He smiled, revealing a shiny silver tooth. The photographer appeared and I leaned in, his arm wrapped around me, to pose for a picture.
I returned to the bar to say goodnight to “Harry,” who was talking to a pretty journalist. She left. Then Harry asked Sally on a date.
On my way out, a handsome Asian real estate agent gave me his card and told me about starting his own company. I encouraged him, even though I wasn’t really hearing what he was saying because all I could think about was the food I wanted to pick up on the way home.
At the valet, Jill studied my eyeglasses and said they’re not the right size for my small face.
I went through a drive-thru and came home to happily eat a meal alone, in a quiet apartment with a stack of books by my side and a cozy quilted bed to lie in while I wrote my story.