I always seem to be in conflict with myself over my friends. You see, as far as I can remember, I'm not sure I've had a "best" friend since I was in middle school (funny enough, that friend ended up being in the top ten all time prize winners on Jeopardy and I'm sitting here blogging anonymously) and I don't know why, but I feel sad about it.
I divide my circle of friends into 2 categories, the inner circle and then everyone else. The funny thing is, unlike most other people, my inner circle is crowded. Crowded with people I've been friends with for 20+ years (I'm in my mid 30s). I've heard countless people on the outside looking in comment about how odd it is how close we all are. How we're all involved in each other's business constantly. How cordiality is completely void in our relationship because it's not needed. We're tight. We all mesh well and play our roles beautifully.
But that's the problem, maybe? My wife tells me that I'm an idiot for constantly worrying about why I don't have a single best friend when I have 5 friends of equal value. She says that most people that can't define a best friend are people that don't have too many good friends. I shouldn't be so forlorn because I have the opposite problem, but here we are? I don't know why I can't just be happy with such great relationships, maybe I just like hierarchies. It gives structure to the world, right? This person is the best, the next person is not as good. Chrome is the #1 browser, IE is for grandmothers and morons. America is #1 and you are not! That's how the world works, right? So how can I have 5 number ones??!?! It defies nature!!!
I finally whittled it down using a pretty good and broad metric, even though it's kind of arbitrary and not necessarily having any correlation to the actual value of that relationship.
About 15 years ago, my friend T was desperate. I love the man, but it's true. He's the nicest, most honest, and mild mannered man alive and in your early twenties, that means not too many girls were knocking on his door at night. There was one party where he ended up sucking face with a girl that most of us agreed was not attractive at all. She was hideous. She was huge. Sure, as I look back on it as an adult, to use the names that we did (specifically regarding her weight) , not the most shining moment of my life, but I was 21 years old and stupid. Heck, it's 13 years later and I'm still pretty stupid. Anyway, he made out with this person through his very thick beer goggles and we were absolutely relentless in mocking him for it. I had taken pictures and made sure to keep the negatives as he inevitably destroyed the pictures. Well, one of our other friends, F, somehow found the negatives and destroyed them. Even though he was included in the chorus of people mocking him. It was a real lesson as to how close friends can be. Here's someone that epitomized the male friend. He would call you the worst possible names that you could possibly imagine, but if anyone else did the same, he would take a baseball bat to their head. It was that moment that T said that F officially became his best man. When all his closest friends circled him like the bunch of vultures that we are, one of us had the sanity to realize what T really wanted to have done. On a separate note, I'm really glad digital cameras are now the norm because when T eventually runs for office, I'm definitely going to blackmail the SHIT out of him.
How does this relate to me? The person I dated before I met my wife was just an awful human being. She was one of those people that is so bad and so completely amoral and so completely jealous that they turn you into that same person. Needless to say, when I finally broke up with her for good (ooohh it was a long and terrible roller coaster ride that lasted about 6 months longer than it should have), she decided that the best way to try and get me back or get back at me (she didn't make a huge distinction between those two) was to tell as many people that would listen. I mean, she was telling people things about me that were criminal! Literally! She told some people that I hit her! Me! Yeah, you don't know me very well, but trust me, violence is not something I would ever commit against anyone, let alone a woman I was involved with. She tried to tell people that I was indifferent about her father's struggle with the big C. Again, anyone that really knows me knows that I'm never going to be the person that doesn't care about someone else. The worst part about this? People love a good story, especially when it involves dirt like this. Validity takes a complete back seat to salaciousness. Who cares if it's true as long as we can point our fingers at a villain. In the end, it really cost me friendships. Some people I was really starting to value. What did I do? I realized early on that I didn't want to get caught in the mud with her anymore. As I wrote before, her ugliness is something that affected and stained me. She really turned me into the worst version of myself and as soon as I fully came to realize that, I didn't want to have any part of it.
So where am I now? It's years after all the madness that went over with the woman I refer at Voldemort and while I'm stronger for having been through that conflict, I did not escape without some scars. What's worse? There are still some of my absolute inner circle that keeps ties with her. Yeah, superficial social media ties, but ties nonetheless. Some of them even interact with her from time to time. One of them even minimized it by saying that oh well, it's only FB or whatever, and I get that. People nowadays tie their self worth to the number next to their friends list. And for some people, their loyalty to their social media "friends" seems to trump the horrors those friends may have committed on some of their real life friends. Granted, I don't put a whole lot of stock in this, no matter the language I use to describe it. Sure it hurts that they won't give up this stupid thing, but it's really mostly just ego. Luckily, there are exactly TWO people that I am friends with that have completely cut ties with she whom shall not be named. One of them is T and it's by default because as a teacher, he has decided it's best for his career if he doesn't have a social media presence. The second, A, she is also one of my very best friends and I'm pretty sure she rejects Voldemort because she understands that a line in the sand was drawn when the language Voldemort used was put out there and she decided it was in her best interest not to straddle it. So, while I would take a baseball bat if anyone else would talk to my friends the way I talked to them, there are two people that I definitely hold closest to my heart and all it took for them was to click "unfriend."
I divide my circle of friends into 2 categories, the inner circle and then everyone else. The funny thing is, unlike most other people, my inner circle is crowded. Crowded with people I've been friends with for 20+ years (I'm in my mid 30s). I've heard countless people on the outside looking in comment about how odd it is how close we all are. How we're all involved in each other's business constantly. How cordiality is completely void in our relationship because it's not needed. We're tight. We all mesh well and play our roles beautifully.
But that's the problem, maybe? My wife tells me that I'm an idiot for constantly worrying about why I don't have a single best friend when I have 5 friends of equal value. She says that most people that can't define a best friend are people that don't have too many good friends. I shouldn't be so forlorn because I have the opposite problem, but here we are? I don't know why I can't just be happy with such great relationships, maybe I just like hierarchies. It gives structure to the world, right? This person is the best, the next person is not as good. Chrome is the #1 browser, IE is for grandmothers and morons. America is #1 and you are not! That's how the world works, right? So how can I have 5 number ones??!?! It defies nature!!!
I finally whittled it down using a pretty good and broad metric, even though it's kind of arbitrary and not necessarily having any correlation to the actual value of that relationship.
About 15 years ago, my friend T was desperate. I love the man, but it's true. He's the nicest, most honest, and mild mannered man alive and in your early twenties, that means not too many girls were knocking on his door at night. There was one party where he ended up sucking face with a girl that most of us agreed was not attractive at all. She was hideous. She was huge. Sure, as I look back on it as an adult, to use the names that we did (specifically regarding her weight) , not the most shining moment of my life, but I was 21 years old and stupid. Heck, it's 13 years later and I'm still pretty stupid. Anyway, he made out with this person through his very thick beer goggles and we were absolutely relentless in mocking him for it. I had taken pictures and made sure to keep the negatives as he inevitably destroyed the pictures. Well, one of our other friends, F, somehow found the negatives and destroyed them. Even though he was included in the chorus of people mocking him. It was a real lesson as to how close friends can be. Here's someone that epitomized the male friend. He would call you the worst possible names that you could possibly imagine, but if anyone else did the same, he would take a baseball bat to their head. It was that moment that T said that F officially became his best man. When all his closest friends circled him like the bunch of vultures that we are, one of us had the sanity to realize what T really wanted to have done. On a separate note, I'm really glad digital cameras are now the norm because when T eventually runs for office, I'm definitely going to blackmail the SHIT out of him.
How does this relate to me? The person I dated before I met my wife was just an awful human being. She was one of those people that is so bad and so completely amoral and so completely jealous that they turn you into that same person. Needless to say, when I finally broke up with her for good (ooohh it was a long and terrible roller coaster ride that lasted about 6 months longer than it should have), she decided that the best way to try and get me back or get back at me (she didn't make a huge distinction between those two) was to tell as many people that would listen. I mean, she was telling people things about me that were criminal! Literally! She told some people that I hit her! Me! Yeah, you don't know me very well, but trust me, violence is not something I would ever commit against anyone, let alone a woman I was involved with. She tried to tell people that I was indifferent about her father's struggle with the big C. Again, anyone that really knows me knows that I'm never going to be the person that doesn't care about someone else. The worst part about this? People love a good story, especially when it involves dirt like this. Validity takes a complete back seat to salaciousness. Who cares if it's true as long as we can point our fingers at a villain. In the end, it really cost me friendships. Some people I was really starting to value. What did I do? I realized early on that I didn't want to get caught in the mud with her anymore. As I wrote before, her ugliness is something that affected and stained me. She really turned me into the worst version of myself and as soon as I fully came to realize that, I didn't want to have any part of it.
So where am I now? It's years after all the madness that went over with the woman I refer at Voldemort and while I'm stronger for having been through that conflict, I did not escape without some scars. What's worse? There are still some of my absolute inner circle that keeps ties with her. Yeah, superficial social media ties, but ties nonetheless. Some of them even interact with her from time to time. One of them even minimized it by saying that oh well, it's only FB or whatever, and I get that. People nowadays tie their self worth to the number next to their friends list. And for some people, their loyalty to their social media "friends" seems to trump the horrors those friends may have committed on some of their real life friends. Granted, I don't put a whole lot of stock in this, no matter the language I use to describe it. Sure it hurts that they won't give up this stupid thing, but it's really mostly just ego. Luckily, there are exactly TWO people that I am friends with that have completely cut ties with she whom shall not be named. One of them is T and it's by default because as a teacher, he has decided it's best for his career if he doesn't have a social media presence. The second, A, she is also one of my very best friends and I'm pretty sure she rejects Voldemort because she understands that a line in the sand was drawn when the language Voldemort used was put out there and she decided it was in her best interest not to straddle it. So, while I would take a baseball bat if anyone else would talk to my friends the way I talked to them, there are two people that I definitely hold closest to my heart and all it took for them was to click "unfriend."
