"Honey, for our 50th anniversary you can lick my butt"

It's strange being in University land where you talk to the same people every day and generally use e-mails to communicate with everyone outside of the uni-bubble. A really good e-mail can shake you up and make you cry and make you laugh until you want to pee, but the love in the written word is not the same as hearing the love in someone's voice.

Tonight when I was all alone in the house dreading the silence I picked up a message. Last week when I was alone on Tuesday I did a phone survey to keep from loosing my mind. This week I got to talk to Matt Brown. It was just so nice to hear someone's voice. God I was in need of some banter. My life is pretty hilarious right now in a kind of dark and depressing way and man was it helpful for him to make me treat it like that. I do enjoy my wallowing, but it's nice to wallow with a hint of humour about the whole thing.

When I hung up with Matt (that guy always leaves me wanting more) I signed on to msn in hopes of more human contact. My oldest best friend Helen signed on, said hello and asked if she could call me instead of doing homework. Of course I agreed and we proceeded to have the most satisfying phone conversation we've had since high school ended. Helen and I became really close in grade eight. We spent entire weekends hiding out at each other's houses and watched Dawson's Creek together over the phone. We still talk about the ridiculous screaming incident when Abby died and her image appeared in the mirror. Both of our parents came running down to see if we were okay. Helen and I fed off of each other's bravery, giggling, anger, frustration, laughter and confusion. We discovered sex and drugs, and boys and confidence and feminism. We stayed up late, we ate spinach pie until we could walk home, we made copious amounts of guacamole, sushi, and pancakes (all seperately of course) and walked from her house to the danforth at 11pm just because we were craving souvlaki. Our lives revolved around sleepovers, ridiculous chick flicks (she had a serious crush on Freddie Prinze Junior), and second cup. We discovered at an early age that we enjoyed the company of boys, and we were sexually attracted to girls, and it never seemed like a big deal to us.

At the end of grade ten Helen and her family moved to Michigan where her mother went to run the Women's Centre at the University. I still haven't been out there to visit her. We discovered long distance bills that year and how much it hurts to be away from some one you love. Some how we were able to maintain our tradition of spending New Years eve together for seven years despite her leaving. The summer I turned seventeen her mother's rich boyfriend paid to send us both to Paris for two weeks. It was a pretty amazing experience. Needless to say we've remained close. In the past two years our lives have become more complicated. We're both at school, we both have relatively longterm partners and we're both ridiculously busy. Helen remarked tonight though that even though we've been seperated by distance we are still so close to each other in terms of beliefs, politics and humour. We're both Women's Studies majors, we're both feminists, and we both still falter about the same issues of men and confidence. We just fit together and laugh together and it was so nice to re-affirm that connection tonight.

I was telling her that I'm doing a project on anal sex and we ended up talking about whether or not we think we'll be having anal sex anytime soon. She says "well, I think I'll save it until marriage, because you've got to save something until marriage. Plus I don't want to have anal sex with just anybody, it's got to be someone special". Brilliance. I laughed so hard. Considering the attitude nowadays that you're still a virgin even if you have anal sex, this was totall refreshing. I love that girl and the way she thinks. So yes, save it for marriage ladies.

Anyway, I'm really thankful that I have people in my life who want to maintain connections even though some times I'm too exhausted to do the work. This night could have been disastrous if it weren't for those voices.