i love you, girl

In high school, a bunch of the girls in my senior class referred to me as "Our Antonio," in reference to the character on the show Wings who crashed the ladies' slumber party and fit right in. That's how I've been most of my life. I've almost always had more or better female friends than I have had guy friends. Maybe it was just because I was repressing a lot earlier in my life and was afraid of revealing my less-than-macho status, but I could always be more at ease with women.

Sometime around college, I became more comfortable with guys as friends and discovered that, really, it doesn't matter. Gender shouldn't be as much of an issue as it is. A friend is a friend is a friend. Still, I really liked the male relationships in 'I Love You, Man.' The movie did a great job of not being homophobic or even heterosexist in a movie where it would have been really easy to go for the easy queer jokes. Ironically, I went to the movie with two good female friends and ended up hanging outside the movie theater last night, just chit-chatting after the theater people turned off the lights and locked up.

The new thing was I snuck into the movie. Yes, you can say it's wrong but you didn't have to sit through Year One before going into I Love You, Man. If I hadn't snuck in, I may have just went to the ticket office and demanded my money back for that stinker of a movie. I'm kind of surprised that it's the first time in my 33 years that I've ever snuck into a theater but I generally have known people who have worked in theaters who have let me in for free.