Old Habits Die Hard

It is 1:10 in the morning.

I came home this evening from tea/dinner with friends I’ve not seen for a long time, only to find I had to scale my own gate to get in because I didn’t have my remote control with me. Hubby is out at a dinner and dance function so he has the remote control in his car. I didn’t drive and mine’s safe and locked in my car. Chico, who drove me home, gave me a helpful leg’s up across the gate. Thankfully he did, I’m not the tallest person I know.

One cat is curled up on my side, grooming herself and the other is, Pixel, the horribly obese brown cow is lying on his back with his belly exposed to the world. Trixie, my other beautiful brown cow, just came in and is sniffing at something in the corner next to my bed.

The hubby is still out. My toothbrush is in the overnight bag we took to Melaka which I guess is probably still in his car since I can’t find said overnight bag anywhere in the house.

I’ve taken a break from Niffeneger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife to fit in some writing before I waste most of my day tomorrow trying to capture everything I want to write down now.

It’s been an eventful evening.  I say eventful because meeting up with friends is always an event. It is even more so when it is with a friend you haven’t seen in about three years who decides to surprise everyone with his short return home from Detroit. He would have cooked up an elaborate plot to try to surprise me other than that early morning call last Saturday. But as is typical of him, he admitted he was just too lazy and dispensed with the plan. As a result, I was jolted awake by a phone call at 12 in the afternoon.

It is a comfort in today’s time-warp age where everything travels at DSL-speed, that some things never change and old habits die hard.

Dinner proved just how true this is. We reverted back to our own juvenile ways; talk laced with sexual insults and connotations, sarcastic insults hurled around like ammunition at WW2 (that was more likely me than anyone else), major bouts of eye rolling and hearty laughter, recapturing the bygone days of our much inebriated college youth, and finding out new little know jewels about ourselves.

It is momentous when old friends get together. Especially old friends separated by distance.

We discover that certain people never change. We find out that we ourselves are still the same. Friends who we know used to be reliably unreliable at keeping dates are still reliable in not showing up. Those who usually do show up fashionably late still do so with aplomb. Those who are reliable are, thankfully, still very much so.

Those of us who are vulgar are still throwing insults and vulgarities around. We who adore physical abuse, still slap people around heartily. Like I said, old habits die hard.

We may adopt slightly different personas at work, but when friends get together, we revert to our basic selves. For if we cannot be ourselves in the company of friends, where so can we expect to be ourselves?