Meet my best friend Jennifer. I have known Jenn since I was twelve years old. We went to middle and high school, before going our different paths to college – her to the Southwest and me to Boston.
Jenn had many of the qualities that I admired – she was outgoing, funny, unafraid to talk to strangers. She performed on the drill team, rollerskated like a pro, and later got into team sports – everything from swimming and soccer to women’s softball. Pick a physical activity and she could master it, or at least keep up with and contribute to a less than diverse team. At home, she lived in a condo complex near the University of California, Riverside, with her single working mother and seemed to my eyes to enjoy a great deal of freedom and independence, with her summers spent with her father in a suburb of Long Island, New York. From early on, we wrote letters back and forth during those long summers spent with families, and as we moved around the country for college and jobs, the letters continued - she became a life line for me: she took me to Planned Parenthood when I had no healthcare and needed help. When I had an accident with some glass, she took me to her mother who taped my hand back together. When I was involved with the unstable and controlling married man, she told me what she thought about the relationship.
Some friends grow farther apart, outgrow one another, other friendships deepen. I’ve known Jenn now for twenty-one years – longer than I have not known her. As the years have passed, the scope of our conversation has deepened – when we were young, we rarely talked about our bodies, illness, careers, race, children, family, power and powerlessness, what it is to be a woman of color, but now it often feels like we think about the same things on any given day.
Last year, Jenn started a blog called
The Coconut Diaries. And as her writing practice has developed, I’ve been delighted at Jenn’s capacity to express herself through story-telling, humor, and a sharp wit. Reading her writing leads us to new conversations with one another about the things that we think about and experience every day.
I went through a period where I didn’t want to collaborate with anyone creatively, after a number of sour experiences – with women. I am occasionally coaxed out of this mindset by the friendly persistence of male colleagues that I deeply respect, but on another level I haven’t been interested in “getting the band back together” for quite some time. Like since 2006.
Jenn casually suggested the idea of a blog swap a month ago, a low stakes experiment where someone guest blogs for you. I’ve known poets to do trade-offs, and Jenn’s traded with women from her own circle. I sat with the idea and it grew on me. A lot. It was presented with such an easy and open quality, that the foundation for this dialogue quickly evolved for me into what felt undeniably like a collaboration that I could feel passionately about, in terms of shared ownership, communication, and creativity. One that doesn’t relate to the academic and intellectual worlds in which we each participate, but to life as we experience and live it.
Jenn is one of the first people I consult on major life decisions, matters of marriage, and race. I care how she thinks and recognize the value of her opinions, experiences and voice.
So we’ve come up with a plan – our version of “The View,” but less annoying, from two women of color who grew up in the strangeness of the Inland Empire of Southern California who are learning to come into our voice, and our power in our early 30s. It is our goal to make dual posts twice a month on topics that mutually interest us. If you are interested in suggesting a topic, please email Jenn or me, though we’ve got a loose plan for topics – expect postings on the inauguration, the Super Bowl, husbands and video games, rites of passage, and fathers and daughters.
You can leave your comments at
The Coconut Diaries or
email us, but I will not enable the comments here due to blog stalkers. I do not expect for these posts to interest anyone except for Jenn and me. This blog is not a performance and this is an entirely selfish act of ownership. I hope this blog swap will be a way to re-invigorate the medium of the online journal or daybook – this is a conversation between me and my best friend. I invite you to eavesdrop.
The ABFF is someone who just makes stuff happen. She plucks an idea from the cloud of ambition hovering above her head and crafts it into existence. She’s like a Top Chef contestant who looks at an apple and thinks caramelized, reduction sauce, etoufee, gnocchi; while you’re stuck on apple pie, apple pie a la mode, and, you know, plain old’ apple. In the wrong hands, this quality could be wretchedly annoying. If she were someone who shrugged and said, “I don’t know, I just ate less” or “It’s easy if you just (insert overly simplistic bulleted lists and steps and to-dos here).” But she makes things happen because she knows luck and waiting won’t get you as far as a solid network, a catalog of success, and attention to detail. It is her tireless attention to detail that turned a flighty idea into the newest way to give my blog some substance.
She Said/She Said is what The View would be if Sherry Shepherd suffocated in her own cleavage, Elisabeth Hasselbeck came out and ran off with Joy Behar, Barbara Walters died, Whoopi got a weave and Lisa Ling needed to add some street cred to her resume. This is a show where two early-thirtysomethings discover how our experiences with race impact our view of contemporary events, friendships, our spouse’s have a seemingly large interest in video games, rites of passages, and familial relationships.
In case you couldn’t crack my superior code, the “A” in The ABFF is “asian” (gasp!). We had a common friendship with a white girl in junior high that cultivated into uniquely shared experiences of matriculating as the only people of color in our Southern Californian circle of friends. There is something about being “the only”, “the first”, “that one” that bonds us. We drifted between concentric friendship circles in high school. My boundless need to fit in guided me towards the jocks, proms, prep rallies, shopping, movies, makeup, sports, church; while her gifts led her to choir, art, theatre, and an ungodly run-in with a perm. No matter how our lives diverged, we always wrote letters to keep in touch. I was floored by her fierce rebellion against tradition and needed to connection to life lacking superficiality. A life that was real and messy and rejected and sad. A life where strength, courage, challenge, and hope wasn’t in a tube of gloss.
So, we wrote. And wrote. Through college, the baby I didn’t have, the nervous breakdown, The Ex, marital doubts, career disillusions, every choice I’ve made in over 2 decades. She is the first person I dialed when I was called a nigger my first week in Texas. The one I consulted when I slept with the wrong guy. (OK, guys). The one who I cry to when my father measures my inches of success with a milestick. She’s as much a part of my life as anyone I share DNA with. The depth of my respect for her lies in her authenticity. That reality that resilience, success, pain, disappointment, passion, initiative, and risk often share the same space. She’s Jiminy Cricket. Glenda the Good Witch. This amateur blog’s muse. Motivation personified.
With all kinds of courage and drive, she left our little west coast cocoon and spread her wings in Boston, Colorado, Taiwan, Chicago, Dallas, and Seattle. She’s blazed her own path to become a published poet, much to the chagrin of the expectation that she become something more stable, like her brother the doctor. But I’ve attended her readings and wished they could see the fun gushing on her like she was Oprah in a little asian body. I’ve also seen her take jobs just left of her passion to pay the bills, but attended to them as learning opportunities. She’s unconsciously exquisite, deliberately talented, hopelessly devoted.
Ladies and Gentleman (yeah, GeekHiker, you’re still the only guy brave enough to hang out here), it is with great pleasure and little pants wetting that I introduce you to The ABFF. Love her as much as I do, or I’ll sock you.
