The Death of the BFF

Dear Adulthood,

The bills are tough, but worth it to have a home of my own and the freedom to live in sin if I so choose. Responsibility often sucks, but hey, I get to have a dog and a cat and that's all well and good.

Mostly, you're much more difficult than people warn, but mostly it's all ok.
I only have one main complaint:

where does a girl go to get some bff's?


When you're a kid, it's so damn easy. She's the girl you sit next to in homeroom, or the girl 3 houses down that you got paired with because your mothers were friends. She's the friend that chooses the locker next to yours and also doesn't quite fit in. The first person you call when you get your license; the one that lets you sleep over when you're all upset that your crush started dating a total jerk. She ditches school with you, sits in the back of the bus with you, and knows every one of your secrets.

The last time I ever had to make the effort to find close friends was the first day of college, when you scramble not to be left out. To show everyone that you're someone worth knowing. And even that was pretty easy, because you were all in the same boat. There were R.A.'s, forcing you to sit in the common room together and play horrible games that you were secretly grateful for. There were those weird, older students that had done their time in the army and were now back, getting their free education. Your bff was the girl that walked with you, to ask them to buy you some beer.
And after that fear of leaving home was gone, you had a new group of close friends. The people that stayed up late, whispering secrets in the dark, bringing back the pinky-swear. The people that held your hair back, or whose hair you held, the ones you could call for no particular reason and would happily show up, so we could sit quietly together and enjoy the company.

But then college ended, and the real world began. And I'm here, on a different coast than the one I was familiar with, that's home to all those friends.
And I realize, when it's late like it is now, that I don't really have anyone out here to call. No one to sit quietly with. There are some truly fabulous people that I've had the pleasure of getting to know, but I can't call them bff's. I hope for some miraculous day that I could, but for now, they remain just lovely people.

Adulthood, you made making friends nearly impossible. Now, it's more like asking someone on a date. Awkward, and you damn well better have a plan. Don't expect to just sit around, no, no. Now there are guidelines, and weirdness, and smalltalk. You've made slumber parties taboo. But why should they be? When did they become so wrong? Damn you, Adulthood, because I loved those nights that we stayed up too late, giggling over our dreams. Those were the times that bff's were made.

What am I supposed to do now?

The Suckiest Bunch of Sucks That Ever Sucked.

As you know, I'm moving onto 29 in a few short short (oh god, they're so short) months, and I'm stuck in a brand new, dead-end job.  Oh yeah, I work for a brokerage, mainly doing data entry.  Evidently, I am not one of those fortunate people that always knew what they wanted to do and had the gumption to just go for it.  No.  I went straight to college out of high school determined to be a theater major.  Two years in, I realized something no one had ever told me:  theater majors are for sucks.  Because if you had any real talent, you would have gone to NY or LA, or some such place and made it.  You would NOT be interning backstage at your state school's performing arts center.  At least I had the wherewithal to realize this at 19 and decide to change that destined-to-serve-coffee-for-the-rest-of-my-life major to something a little more useful. 
So I went with pre-vet, because...I dunno...I love animals and physiology and even as a kid was obsessed with watching operations on the Discovery Channel before it, too, went all suck.  Along with my major, I switched my intern-ship and started doing work at the university's barn during lambing season.  Lambing season, if you didn't know, is the frikkin dead of winter.  In Massachusetts.  What I'm trying to say here, is that it was damn cold, and went a far way towards contributing to this sour-puss you see before you today.  The barn had no heat, and the intern was required to stay there at night.  This means (during finals, mind you), I would wake up and go to all my labs in the morning, followed by classes, my regular (paying) job, and then spend all night at the barn with the best possible situation being that I would end up being covered in placenta.  Yeah.  This, however, is not why I decided the vet-life was not for me.
The deciding factor was a small grey bunny.  Someone found him by the side of the road, obviously hit by a car, and took him into the clinic where I was working.  He had a broken neck and a totally understandable fear of all things human.  My job was to take him out of his cage and give him his IV shot.  But he struggled.  And little broken-necked Floppy got out of my grasp and fell.  I'm a tall girl.  He had a big fall.  I went home at the end of my shift, sobbing, inconsolable, and decided I could never go back.  I changed my major the next day.
To Wildlife Conservation and Pre-Law.  Oh yes, I was going to fight for animal's rights!  I graduated, worked a bunch of crappy jobs before landing a job writing legal docs for a law firm.  Where I realized the only people that are bigger sucks than theater majors are lawyers.  What a miserable bunch!
Which brings me to here.  Working at this suck job for a bunch of sucks, thinking about how much being an adult sucks.  I should have just been an astronaut.