New Year's Revolution: Friends Are Like....

Dear Friends,

Welcome to 2012! Normally, I would have written after New Year’s Day but I wanted to do it at least after the hype of being in a new year. I also did not realize that this is a leap year, so there will be an extra day and also extra time. So I am happy to see a new year but I am hoping that the same shit from last year will not creep in. With that said, I am going to start this blog with something my mother asked me on New Year’s Day: Who are your real friends? What’s funny is that the word real is something that most people today do not click with. We live in a world where our friends can be in other countries, cities, states, or continents. Real friends are hard to come by because people want people of like minds not people to hurt them or use them. So my first blog of 2012 is going to answer that question: Who are your real friends?

I remember something I saw in one of the Madea plays about people are either here for a reason or here for a season. I definitely believe in that because in my life, there are so many people I forgot because they were not real friends to me. Even when I remember these people, I laugh because they were only in my life for their purposes.  I have said that I do have real friends but most of them I know tend to not want to deal with me. Most people these days have short patience and even shorter tolerance for shit. My thing is that friendship in the 21^st century is skewed because of what I said earlier about location of the friend.

Something else that comes to mind is that friendships are like trees. When you start a friendship, it is like growing a tree. You have to water it and tend to it. Some friendships bloom into something else because there is something there. People say that men and women cannot be friends because sex comes into play. I believe them because sex is something that comes up. No matter what men and women cannot be friends at all. What intrigues me even more is how same sex relationships end up. We all hear stories of how two women in college can make out or how two men got drunk and had sex. Now I am not against same sex relationships, but I think even those relationships start off slow and grow. I guess my point is that a friendship does grow into something else but it depends on something.

Friendships are just like relationships. You have to make things new and interesting. What’s weird is that a lot of my friendships I do treat like this. I do have friends I go to lunch or dinner with. I do find fun things to do with my friends. However, I try to keep in mind that most of my friends are women and they either have lovers or see me as a brother. I still do things to make and keep friends. It is not that hard to do that but some might see this as wasted time because most men end up having sex with their female friends and vice versa.

So my answer to that question is simple: I have real friends. I have friends that are close to me and some that I could call on. I use to think I was alone but as I started this year, I have people that care if I live or die. I also have people that I feel are close as family and some that were more than friends. I do think men and women cannot be friends but I have done my best to not date anymore of my friends. This is not the end of this issue but that’s all for now.

Eugene Chandler III