Friends, Friends, Friends....

 

My two best friends are Steph and Amy.
I met Steph while studying for physics in my dorm's common room freshman year. I think she was doing her laundry in the adjacent room. She kept me up until 7 am talking about something I have no recollection of, I did well on the final and the rest is history. I have nothing in common with Steph, she doesn't even like Woody Allen! Well she was the freak of her high school, and I remember my rainbow socks getting strange looks, and for some reason girls from the Bronx always wanted to dress me up for drag day. But I think the real reason she won my friendship was with her long strange-but-true stories about her friends and acquaintances. She comes from Pennsylvania, which is a state nearby where only the government sells alcohol. Their largest city, Philadelphia has lost half it's population since the communist liquor laws were passed. Steph does not drink alcohol, so she considers moving to that city to be a realistic option. To the right here is a picture I took of her in the Eiffel waiting her turn to look at the fog.

Steph is definitely the most well traveled of my friends, at times she maintained her GPA solely to preserve her membership in the Stern Scholars group. This is a group of students at the NYU business school who accept a cap on scholarships in exchange for free trips around the world with faculty and administrators of the school. She invited me along for the Paris trip, and she came with me to Berkeley when I was visiting a school out there last year.

I met Amy in August not long after meeting Steph, in Brittanis' common room. I actually remember trying to ignore her as she was with a group of pre-frosh that wanted to watch some 90210, Dawson type show. I, being a complete nerd, just wanted to read my books, in the company of people. But for some reason we ended up having a significant conversation. I tried to talk her into dyeing her hair green, but she would have none of it. In September she had been assigned to my dorm, and her hair was green, though she swears she does not remember my trying to convince to do it. Amy is a writer. Here's one of her poems.
 
 
Unwind your cricket legs, long and bent,
from around my face - I cannot breathe from
beneath your hairs

the rub of your bones, your long, dry skin against my thigh,
no longer runs smooth, but trips among the bruises and storm
of knotted hands
those old-skin hands, they wait for any opening, every opening
gripping the waves of my stomach 

over my hips, along my knees, beyond my moist pink toes, I reach
straining, flexing fingers, swimming against the flow of my forearms
just to catch a touch of those salty, pale, white hairs 

A.V.

She's actually not as fond of her poetry as she is of her prose, but I don't have the patience to type that so this will have to do. Amy recently moved back to Rhode Island, but I can't see that lasting long... After several months in R.I. Amy moved back to New York, she asked me to update this page.

I've known both Steph and Amy enough now that it is hard to imagine myself in a world where they do not exist.
 



Oh, this is Judy, she actually sent me a jpg so I don't have to scan it. She's in Hawaii right now. When I was in high school, she was Judy Supperer, with or without some extra p's and r's, now she is Judy Babcock. Amazing how things change in a few years. She tells me she had a crush on me, which I wish I had known about at the time. :) Anyway, we sang Yellow Submarine together at the top of our lungs at least once, which makes for a true friend in my book.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

The picture to the right is Vanessa (I think this was taken in 94), she is MIA. The last time I heard from her she was quiting school and joining a rock band as a base player. She brought me to a few fraternity parties when I visited her at Rutgers, those moments when I first tasted cheap beer made me apprecieate imports more that any can a of budweiser ever could.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 

This is another Amy... (This was taken in 95.) She looks really young in this picture, but I'm sure the guy holding the camera did too.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

The last picture is of the only ex-girlfriend I talk with at the moment, she like my friend Judy is married. Tis almost as weird personally as my younger cousin having a baby. I knew her first as Analiese Sand, but now she is known as Analiese van den Dikkenberg. This picture didn't turn out the way I wanted it to, it is a technical failure, but there is something about it which made me put it up here over the dozens of pictures I have of Analiese. She's probably the smartest person I know. She's in no sense perfect, she doesn't even love New York, but everyone has their faults. When we met we were both neurotic, now she's pretty balanced, and as balanced as I want to be.

I mentioned that Vanessa is missing in action, this is entirely due to my inability to keep in touch with all but the most patient of folks. I get wrapped up in some project for a couple months and expect everyone to call me the entire time. Plus, I hate telephones. When I use one it is usually to arrange meeting with someone. I must be the only programmer who feels cheated talking to someone via machine. Letters are ok, but it takes me a while to find the time to write one. So what it comes down to is a bunch of people like Andromeda Santos, Emily & Nicomis, and many others are lost to me. There have been so many interesting people in my life, and I never really think they'll disappear. But such is the way of things.

Look, ya'll my brother wears his lipstick better than I! He has a web page, it is more of a bandwidth hog than even this page, but he has a kick ass sailor moon pic on his page.