arbitrary labels.

girls have annoyed me since middle school.

not to bash all of my relationships with fellow females--some of the people closest to my heart are girls. they were my first best friends. we make scrapbooks, we make music, we plan study groups and homecoming logistics. we can talk about silly personal issues like clothes and periods and the superficiality of boy drama, and it's something all of us are concerned about sometimes, no matter how tomboyish some of us might say we are. on the other hand, patti is right. girl talk in excess becomes petty. shallow. often manipulative. like her, i'm fairly quick to grow tired of it.

hence my male friends now probably outnumber my female friends. probably. it's not like i've bothered to decide who in my life deserves the arbitrary label of "friend" and systematically count them all up. anyway, i'm still with patti here. generally speaking, guys don't constantly second-guess other people's motives. they don't need flattery. they'll take you as you are if you just return the favor. i've sat with them just doing chemistry homework, staved off boredom during math class by playing the mirror game with them, squabbled with them over violas during orchestra camp. have i had petty squabbles with guys? sure, but those problems are few and far between compared to how often i find myself disagreeing with other girls.

and now let's address this little thing in life called love. relationships. boy/girl drama.

i get sick of it. mostly the gossip and the girls' squeals and the guys joking about getting laid. relationships shouldn't be impersonalized like that, but that's a different rant for another time. and it's sort of funny walking up to couples during a dance and telling them to keep it parallel, but it's not that funny when you're in the couple. it's supposed to be a special moment.

the way people address love and relationships, you'd think that teenagers are out there for sex and the right to say that they have a boy-/girlfriend. the high school relationship is characterized by flirting, cheesy ways to ask her to homecoming, facebook officiality, and angsty breakups. obviously there's truth to the stereotype, but who said that's all it is? i guess it bothers me that patti fails to address the "friend" part of "boyfriend", because the relationships that last aren't the ones that are founded on physical desire--those would be the "five minute beaus" she was referring to. the ones that last are the boys and girls who've known each other for over a year before deciding to use the labels "boyfriend and girlfriend". the ones who hold hands but also laugh about parents' follies and the typos in news articles and everything else they've always laughed about. the ones who are, in the end, friends.

so yes, there can be platonic friendship with the opposite sex, sans romantic complications. (oh my god, patti, you just put into my head the hypothetical situation of becoming romantically infatuated with all of my male friends. ewwww -.-)

but sometimes it seems as though people need a reminder that relationships can be so much more than a mess of hurt feelings and complications.