So, what's stopping you from having friends?
Last night, Maggie calls to say she's got a pair of Sox tickets, because a game that was rained out in April was rescheduled for Memorial Day and her friends had plans. I asked why she didn't ask that guy at work she liked, and she said she didn't have his home number and she just found out she could have the tickets. Makes sense, I say, and I'd love to go.

I no sooner get off the phone and Carter's giving me a dirty look, and I know what the argument's going to be about before it even starts. Look, I say, this jealousy thing is really not cool. Mags and I are friends, we're going to be friends, and we will, on occasion, do things without you. We're that "just-friends" kind of girlfriends, just like you and I are. Carter gets mad at being referred to as a girl-anything, and it's downhill from there. I get reacquainted with the floor.

So, today I meet up with Maggie at Boston Beer Works before the game and tell her about it, and she's sorry she didn't include Carter, but I tell her it's okay, it's not like he's my boyfriend any more. We're not joined at the hip, and at some point we've got to have individual lives. It's good to have someone to let it out to, because Carter can really be as needy as the kid he appears to be, but he insists he's not. It's frustrating, because he was so practical and honest about his life before, but now he can't seem to accept that this is the rest of his life, that he's not going to wake up and find himself back in his original body. That ship has sailed. I don't want to tell him how to live his life, but just to live the one he's got.

Mags, of course, wished she could help; she said she'd try to find ways to involve him in stuff. We spent a bit of time hanging around outside the ballpark, looking through the souvenir stores. Maggie thought one of the new pink Red Sox T-shirts with the player names on the back would look just darling on me; I pointed out that I might not be Carter, but I still don't do pink.

The game itself was just ugly - we had decent seats out in left field, which got a little chilly by the time Derek Lowe was just losing it in the sixth inning. It's been so long since I'd gone to a game that I forgot that while it might be good shorts and t-shirt weather outside the park, somehow the grandstand structure creates this wind tunnel effect.

We stayed until the end anyway, just in case, and I arrived home just in time to get a call from Kate, who wanted to know if I felt like hitting the Brattle for the Dietrich double-feature. I asked Carter if he wanted to go, and he just glared at me. I figured he was already in a mood, so I might as well go without him. The he gave me crap for just doing what I felt like without regard to him, but, geez. I mean, it's not my fault he doesn't feel he has a fulfilling social life if he doesn't even make an effort.

I hate fighting with Carter. It's like having a fight with your boyfriend/girlfriend, best friend, and brother/sister combined. Heck, I even took the long way back from the Harvard Square (out to Park Street on the red line, back to the Harvard Street station on the green line) just to delay any confrontation. He was asleep when I got home, but I'm afraid we're going to have it out tomorrow.

-Marti
- posted 11:47 PM - - (archive use only)