Miles K

Friendship is a strange thing. As I see it, life’s a competition to obtain the most prizes which means that anyone else should be thwarted at every available opportunity. But apparently friends are a necessity, since otherwise we would never be invited to dinner parties, or cocktail parties or have anyone to testify on our behalf as a character witness. So the other day I was standing in the middle of Macy’s department store with my very best friend Matthew when he said, “Boy all these shirts and I can’t find a single one I’d want to buy.” I turned to him quite in disgust and said, “It’s not about wanting to buy them for yourself but making sure that nobody else has them!” (I myself wear four shirts at a time, just to let everyone know that I’d rather die of heat stroke rather then let someone else get their grimy claws on my clothing) so after berating Matthew I threw up my arms and sighed in annoyance for roughly a minute and a half.

The thing you really have to keep in mind is that when you’re friends with someone you’re not allowed to actively sabotage them. The irony though is that friends make the most tempting targets since they’re constantly exposed, letting you into their houses where you can just start putting stuff in your pockets until all three of your jackets are bursting with nick-nacks and expensive items from the pantry. And then they say, “hey I thought you were only wearing three ties when you came in here? Isn’t that one mine?” at which point you should ask for their car keys. Wait, that was the old me. The me that lost all of my friends and is no longer invited to social functions with free shrimp and alcohol, the new me would have given back the tie and sent a card somewhat like the following

I have been told that you cannot exploit your friends because that would jeopardize the friendship but if your friend has something which makes you jealous, it is not acceptable to destroy the object even if it would save the friendship to do so. So how is that consistent? What I now know is that there are many rules when it comes to friendship and someone should really publish a book detailing them. I’m probably not qualified to write that book as long as I still have everyone’s social security cards in my junk drawer but maybe this is a start

Everything I have learned about friendship:

1. Just because your friend is an organ donor does not make you “first in line”
2. Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, which means you are allowed to call your friend anytime of night and ask for a car ride, however this does not apply to rides from your house to a separate location
3. Publicly ranking your birthday presents is considered to be in poor taste
4. Never post pictures of your friends on facebook that they did not realize you had taken, no matter how flattering they may look in their sleep
5. Friends do not like it when you try to get them to fight each other to the death and become even more resentful if you tell them about an analogous event between your pet scorpion and a spider and how entertaining that was at the time
6. It is surprisingly difficult to throw a bird into a pool
7. Never let a friend into your junk drawer