Affirmations

The other day a friend of mine told the group chat that he loved and missed us. I'm always curious what prompts that sort of message, so I asked, and he said he had just watched the John Candy documentary. I totally understood where he was coming from. If you haven't seen the doc, you should change that, because it's a lovely portrait of how beloved and kind he was to seemingly everyone in and out of his orbit. And a lot of the interviews are Candy's friends, Catherine O'Hara, Dan Akroyd, Bill Murray, to name a few, talking about how much they missed him or wished they had gotten to tell him how much he meant to them before he was gone. All of that is to say, don't leave things unsaid, tell your people you cherish them. It's a kindness that gets overlooked. I've been pretty laissez-faire about doing so in the past, and I know I need to be more thoughtful and present about what my friends mean to me. I don't think it has to be some grand gesture either, sometimes just showing up is what's needed. You have to treat them as an incredibly precious and finite resource. They're vital, as an outlet, a sounding board, a support system, and as people that you may desperately need to check you when you're wildly out of pocket.

Being cooped up the last couple weeks because of the snow and bitter cold reminded me of 2020, and how much the isolation drove everyone completely bonkers, and how we're still dealing with the ramifications of this growing collective derangement. People just love being mad now, at everything, it's their kink. I also think that this specific madness goes hand in hand with the much talked about but also wholly avoidable male loneliness epidemic, which to me is just unchecked delusions of entitlement. I, personally, don't love spending time with people that, as their entire personality, think they deserve every little thing gifted to them on a platter, and then squawk complaints like a helpless baby bird when they don't get their way. I doubt I'm the only one that avoids those sorts of people. They might not be so lonely if they worked on themselves and developed some social skills, or at least made an effort to be a normal person. One of my favorite sayings is, "If you run into an asshole in the morning, well you ran into an asshole. But if you run into assholes all day, well maybe you're the asshole." 

If you look around at America, there is so much hatred and cruelty to wade through, that whatever is a buoy in your life, you should cling to as a life raft. That buoy, to me, is enjoying the company of my people, be it family, friends, or possibly even a stranger that I share a knowing glance with while out and about. Shooting the shit, someone making you laugh unexpectedly, is a great feeling. What's better than being out with friends, stumbling into some ridiculous situation, and being able to marvel at the absurdity once it's over?  

On the flip side, it seems like so many relationships are transactional, or based in competitiveness. Who has the best life type shit, or I need to be close with this person because it will help further my ambitions kind of skullduggery. That just ain't it. That ain't friends. Those are stepping stones. You should never treat people like that. Speaking of ambition, my friend wrote a treatise the other day about where he envisioned his future self would be when he was younger versus where he is now, and him being fine with where he landed. I agree with him, cause in my head success is being happy in your life, wringing every drop of joy out of it, and not worrying about what other people are striving towards in their own. It's a longer way of saying what John Candy said to Steve Martin in a fraught conversation that started to unknot their problems in Plains, Trains & Automobiles, "I like me." If you can't like yourself how can you like and be liked by other people?