Is that how it goes?

Is that how it goes?

In a private karaoke room with friends, co-workers, and (oddly) co-workers' mothers there was enough laughter and joy and ham-titude to make all the follies of this week seem ridiculously small. The Stevies, the Brittanys, the Mariahs... it's strange, how singing along to these pop songs with a microphone can be so much more satisfying than singing along to them in your car. Forget about the LA recording scene, in our tiny room, everyone was a star. Especially Paul. He can sing them all, but when Eminem's 'Forget About Dre' started coming out of his mouth, the look on the faces of my co-workers' mothers nearly sent me out of the room. Paul wasn't the only one who knew all the lyrics - now Lana was chiming in and the two of them together were throwing their arms around like the real Dre and the real Slim Shady. Having tried to avoid eye contact with anyone, I finally turned to Justin who was in stitches and laughing so hard that he had to literally lay down. I wasn't sure what was more inappropriate - the obscenities flying around the room like fireworks, or Justin's (and my own) inability to contain our hysterics. Is that how it goes? That situations that are already awkward are made more-so by our laughter? Or does laughter mitigate the silence that surrounds situations in which we do not know how to act? Soon we moved on to more culturally appropriate power-ballads, but I'll still wonder what was going through the heads of the mothers, and whether their embarrassment was greater than my own.

Is that how it goes?

Five friends sitting around a table, gilded by bare bulbs on a Friday night. One friend on the verge of leaving as we silently contemplate melting a plastic monkeys tail. Did I say leaving? I think I meant going. When does leaving become going somewhere else - is it half-way between here and the destination point? Is it that walking away from Bar Marmont (Adieu, Adieu, he said) he was leaving, and as he pulls onto the 405 one last time, he is going? Going home, going somewhere exotic, going to grad school. My friend Oscar is going, now gone. And so are the afternoons meticulously interpreting the scribblings of children and evenings drinking cocktails out of tea cups. Don't people know it is so much harder to leave than to go? With friends like mine, I guess I'm just a lucky so and so.