A follow up to Sex and the City: Friendship Forever?

I did reunite with Monica last year when I flew back to Taipei. It was exhilerating to see her in person. It felt like the time took us back to the year when we first met at Hua when we were 25.

We were catching up. I got married. She got a degree from university T just the way she had wanted. BLAH, BLAH, BLAH. But deep in my heart there was this one thing that had really bugged me for all the years.

I started venting about the disappointment from the friendship I thought we had.

"But you need to know that those people were your colleagues, NOT your friends..." she said. "You worked together. But it did not mean that you were friends."

HMMM, REALLY?

Lets see. For me...colleagues do NOT spend time together. Colleagues do NOT hang out after work. Colleagues do NOT shop together for clothes or makeup. Colleagues do NOT feel bad when they turn down a request for a flavor. Colleagues do NOT talk about their family, their new romance or their relationship's ups and downs.

But freinds DO! Friends share a lot more private moments and emotions in our life. And I truely did treat them as more than colleagues but my freinds.

In 1998 President Clinton was reported to have an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a White House intern. Clinton then came out and made a public annoucement that he did NOT have any sexual relationship with that woman (Lewinsky.) Later for months all the media could talk about was whether they had an affair or the president had been lying. Until Lewinsky turned over a semen-stained blue dress, despite Clinton's denial, to prove their relationship. Clinton then admitted on national TV that his relationship with Lewinsky is "not appropriate."

But why did Clinton deny he had sex with Lewinsky? He was not the first or the last politician that involved sex scandal anyway. Besides this is a country that favors givng people a second chance. (Or third chance. Or fourth chance.) Clinton later stated that he believed the agree-upon definition of sexual relations excluded his receiving oral sex. In another word, he thought his receiving oral sex from Lewinsky was NOT part of "having a sexual relationship."

What happened to Clinton? He was fined $90,000 for giving false testimony. His license to practice law was suspended in Arkansas and later by the US Supreme Court. The House of Representatives voted to issue impeachment against him. But he was aquitted all charges and remained in office till 2000.

Something is simply BLACK OR WHITE. There is just NO grey area.