Seriously, how am I supposed to eat Phö noodle soup with chopsticks? Is it so designed to require my dependency on a spoon thus identifying me as anon-skilled and non-Vietnamese diner? Is there a secret to slurping broth with two sticks? I was no further to finding the answer to these questions last night, having left Phö-Bo-Ga in our little Chinatown last night with slurpy resonate splotches on the chest of my hoodie.And how am I to distinguish the hot sauce from the hoi sin sauce when they both come in the exact same bottle? Only by ingesting heaps of each on chow me in and then realizing that one makes my eyes water, nose run and tongue burn while theother does not. As my fellow diner S pointed out, this would be the worst place for a first date-unless, I pointed out, the goal of said first date was to illustrate how unskilled and messy one was at eating a meal, and how runny one's nose can become after ingesting a heaping dollop of hot sauce.

But we were not on a first date, we were on a friend date. We were free to slurp long noodles off of chopsticks, then drop noodles back into soup and splash broth across our fronts. There were no second glances at each other's attempts to fit a long slab of beef into one's mouth without utensils with which to cut it. We laughed with red faces, made jokes about the most awful and inappropriate things, answered cell phone calls without worrying about being rude, because we knew it was OK with the other.

We had an episode of "The Girls Next Door" for dessert, followed by the second half of the Pussy Cat Dolls reality TV show. Without the presence of my friends,I would otherwise not admit to watching such mindless TV in such a public forum.We talked about farts and waxing and laughed shrieking laughs with wide eyes and open mouths. We shared our anxieties about running the 10k at race weekend this spring for the first time, and elaborated on how great it is not to be a running man because we heard their nipples chafe and can bleed when their shirts rub against them.

As much as I miss the man who makes me the luckiest girl in the world, I smile big with squinty eyes at how lucky I am to have the best girlfriends ever-better than any sitcom writer could create.