this is not about comedy. it’s about friendship. as are most of my discussions, lately.
yesterday, i had a rather depressing encounter with a very close friend. no, she wasn’t the source of my depression. it was her friends.
you all know how much i hate dirty restaurants. food frightens me to no end but it’s overwhelming in a place that holds itself under the banner of “fast food”. i would much rather live next to an explosives laboratory than to a location wherein items of vague edibility are placed in hot substances, coated, and then served in paper packages to herds of youth.
i digress.
when i got a call from my friend, she invited me to one of these places and said that she was going to meet her friends there. i thought to myself several things. i wanted to see my friend. i didn’t want to be in this place. i don’t really know her friends and i’d like to meet them. they’re not going to show up, are they? ah. we have hit the point of the thoughts.
i had a feeling that they would disappear and that my friend would be sitting, all alone, in a terrible place, wondering why she wasn’t worth enough to her friends for them to show up and eat with her.
she’s not a flaky person. but anyone would start to wonder if a whole group of people simply didn’t bother to arrive at a restaurant with you. alone is bad.
so, of course, i went. not to eat, mind you. but that’s a story for another day.
it took me ages to get there. the police were blockading my neighborhood, curiously enough. i think there was a gas leak that needed to be repaired. and on top of that, traffic was mindnumbingly painful on the kingsway. but i made it. as she was finishing. which gave me cause for a lot of thought, since then, about what one can and cannot do to one’s friends.
i don’t like alone. being with one other person is nice, of course, but i’m a group animal. i love doing things in packs. but alone is bad and the rest, i shall cover later.
i have noticed a trend in this city, since i moved here, that people commit to things and then back out. often without telling anyone. my friend in the restaurant is very, very forgiving about these things. i am not. i don’t like to see people hurt that i care about. i think it’s bad. and when friends do this to you over and over again, it certainly necessitates the question — are they really your friends?
not to misunderstand me here, of course, dear reader. i’m not saying that you should question your friends if they call you and say that they have to stay late at work and can’t meet you somewhere. or if they text-message you at the last minute and cancel because their mother is ill. that’s different. it’s when they simply don’t tell you. over and over again. and have no real reason other than that they don’t want to. are these the kind of people that you are going to continue to trust?
there you have it. my rant.
i trust my friends. if they’re going to do something with me, that’s great. if they’re not, i expect that they’ll tell me. and they do. and that’s perfectly fine. what do you expect?
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