RSSAs Long As You Can Make Me Smile
Sep 29
Humor, Relationships Humor, Smile Comments Off
Is it pretentious to have a requirement for my friends that they be able to bring a smile to my face? I was thinking about this over the weekend as I was aggravated with a particular friend of mine who seemed a bit standoffish (no names now, don’t be tacky!) Quite inexplicably, I assure you.
Okay, so maybe I might have said something. Or maybe I had excessive B.O. Or an awkwardly placed whitehead. Or maybe I might have made an ill-timed suggestion about bunking down with his sister (I swear, she told me she was over 18.) Or maybe I vom’d in his planter and forgot to mention it until the flies came. Or maybe I told him that shirt made him look like Bea Arthur. Or his hair looked like a wasp’s nest. Or accidentally stuck my [censored] in his [censored] thinking I was invited but really he was trying to get the [censored] out.
I can’t say for sure but it may simply have been my own dubious entertainment value that caused tension in our relationship. Immediately thereafter I began to question the foundation of our friendship. Maybe I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions. After all, a friendship that is so brittle it cracks after one (possibly exaggerated) wrangle isn’t really that much of a friendship to begin with? But for whatever reason, I felt a little put out by the cold shoulder and began to secretly plot my exit from said friendship as quickly as my two feet, four wheels or a pogo stick could carry me.
But in the midst of doubting our friendship and investigating that unexpected sore on my buttock that I could only feel and not see (I’m calling it a spider bite and that’s my story!) a strange thing occurred. We were sitting on the love seat, laying half on top of one another the way only good friends can tolerate, and it happened.
He reached across me to pick up a handful of Doritos off of my plate, smiled at me and then stuffed them en masse into his face and started to chew loudly. I laughed. Oh maybe it wasn’t funny really, but something about that moment seemed the kind of thing that only 4 beers and that warm fuzzy feeling of his thigh pressed against mine could generate. That or genuine affection.
It occurred to me then that anyone that can make me smile just for being so cute and adorably uncouth might be someone I could forgive this one time. It’s kind of like someone eating off your plate. if it’s one person, it’s endearing, for another, it’s repulsive. Then I figured maybe I should make it a requirement that all my friends be able to make me laugh. We can style a running Gong Show-like elimination through the rest of my life. Then I figured my friends wouldn’t think that was funny at all and probably be kind of resentful that I’m slapping some arbitrary requirement on them. After all, maybe I should be the one doing the entertaining?
So the next time I don’t meet the strict standards of friend and entertainer to my friends, they can just “air” Gong me and I will hang my head and disappear off the stage into affable obscurity. But if I do, I’ll have a smile on face because, let’s face it, that is kind of a funny thing to do to me.
