Thursday, May 08, 2008

Making new friends

Maybe it's the pending departure of Frally (note! new blog!) to the deep dark depths of Ashburton that has made me more sociable and outgoing lately. I'm becoming an expert at Making New Friends.

The latest addition to my group of good friends is Rach. She is an Australian who I met on the internet (a very handy to way to find out just about everything you can find out about somebody, without having ever met them). I knew that she was moving to my town, and so knew she'd be desperate. Desperate to cash in on this, I arranged to meet her when she came to town late last year.

It was a good move. We clicked pretty much straight away, and within days she was inducted into the evil Linwood Ladies' League when she was invited along to a board game night at Frally's. There were a few tense moments when Frally decided that having a brand new potential cult member in our midst was the time to start rapping some Snoop Dogg song ("Fuck! Get fucked! You're a fucker!" or something like that), just to make sure that she wasn't a weirdo or anything. The rest of us suburban housewives held our breaths and waited to see how our new friend would react. "Awww fuck off" she replied in her Aussie drawl, and proceeded to beat us at Uno.

Excellent.

(Don't these Making Friends stories just warm the cockles of your heart? Such warmth, such friendliness, such openness...)


Today I met another potential friend, at the library of course. I sat next to her at Storytime (Frally on one side, this other lady on the other). It was halfway through the Jack in the Box song that I suddenly clicked that this lady had potential.

My thought process went something like this:

Oooh, is that an accent she's got? I love accents! Where is it from? It's soooo familiar, I can't quite make it out... AHA! Scotland! And not just Scotland, Glasgow! Great opening line to start a conversation, perfect! "Are you from Glasgow?" Yes! She is! Lots in common! Tell her that my husband is from there! Goodie, now to assess her. Check - she's in a library. She must be able to read, so all good so far. Check - she has children, two of them. Something in common, not just a nutter hanging out at Storytime by herself. Check - what are her kids' names? Oh good, nothing "cre8tiv", nice names, shows a certain level of class. Does she work? Maternity leave? Great, what did she do? Teacher? Fantastic, excellent....

And on it went. I'm a bit of a snob, I admit it. I prefer that my friends are intelligent, well-travelled and worldly. It's not a prerequisite, as other good traits can override lack of the above, but it helps.

Turns out she was your typical Glaswegian woman. She could talk the hind legs off a donkey. It was great! Made me feel like I was chatting with my mother in law or sister in law. And better still, she was starved of adult conversation from being a SAHM with young kids, and was very interested to hear about our mothers' discussion group. (More cult members!)

We've swapped phone numbers and will definitely be in touch. I'm still coming down from the adrenalin high!


And finally, I am now a member of the 57th best Pub Quiz Team in the land (I'm sure our national rankings will improve once the quizmaster remembers to submit our scores each week!). Every Monday night we head along to the pub and thrash the pants off the competition. We won $150 worth of bar tabs this past Monday - it's a VERY social thing.

We got into it through my youngest sister - turns out her and two of her friends had a team but were struggling to get extras along to plump out the team. Well, she didn't need to ask twice (well, actually she did, three times in fact) and now the team is happily plumped out by several Linwood Ladies each week. It's a blast. We're terribly bright. Frally gets ALL the celebrity questions right and I know what a kakapo is.

posted by cesca @ 8:23 PM | Blogger Comments ...3 |