“Michael Brown Sr., dressed in an open-collar tan shirt and admitting fatigue, spoke for barely a minute, but the crowd hung on each word.”
There is a video game now available by the name of I Am Bread, and in it players can control a slice of bread that wishes to be toasted.
“Finding whatever you need to toast yourself isn’t that hard—just taking a look around each level and spotting electric appliances is usually enough, though there is an amusing puzzle element involved to turning on most of them. However, the game’s shoddy camerawork makes it difficult to look at anything that isn’t either right beside your bread or directly in front of you. If you somehow manage to climb into a cabinet or enclosed area, the camera immediately locks onto the bread and shakes if you try to spin it out of that space, reducing your visibility considerably.”
Play at your own risk. If you manage to toast the broad, please send me a screenshot and let me know if it made you want toast after IRL.
“Marquis’ desire to travel began to coalesce around the question of whether she could survive by herself in nature. First, she decided to ride a horse across Turkey. On that trip, she ate apricots off trees and slept with her head on her saddle. Muslim women bathed her in warm goat’s milk.”
mm that’s cool and all, touch trees all you want, but like…why not just bathe yourself though
AUNTIE FEE WAS ON THE STEVE HARVEY SHOW AND AWESOMELY LUVVIE WAS HERE FOR IT:
But I didn’t start cackling til she got mad that she had to make the bread on the show herself. “This shit shoulda been done” and she pointed to her brother June, whose fault it was, apparently. Because why should they bring her to cook on the show? What took me OUT was “I don intercoursed it up.” It took her saying it 3 times for STEE to even get it.
Auntie Fee just blessed me. Why have I not been using this phrase my whole life? For the times when you can’t say “fuck” outright like when the FCC is watching, why not use “intercourse.” This woman is a genius. I love her.
There is, apparently, a magazine called “The Gentlewoman” (POINT ONE) and they recently interviewed Aminatou Sou about her perfect life (POINT TWO):
P: That’s a fairly regular topic, let’s be honest.
A: Yeah, and relationships. Romantic relationships get a lot of ink, but nobody really talks about how much romance there is in being a friend.
P: I really enjoyed the episode about friends who return from the past – how to manage their expectations when they turn inappropriately needy.
A: What’s surprising is that our inbox mailbag is full of really sad break-up stories. It just goes to show that there hasn’t been a place to talk about this stuff, right? If you break up with your boyfriend, there’s a whole pop cultural narrative about how that will go. But what if you break up with your best friend, or they move away, have a baby or start dating somebody you don’t like?
Obligatory aside to point out that of course you don’t have to stop being friends with someone just because they had a baby; probably you and your friends are all deeply evolved people who love one another’s babies equally. Congratulations, how wonderful. Let’s talk about our worst friend breakups instead. Get RAW.
A VINEGAR PIE LOOKS GOOD AS HECK AND I WANT ONE, SOMEONE PLEASE MAKE THIS AND REPORT BACK TO ME ON WHETHER OR NOT IT’S GOOD AS AFOREMENTIONED HECK OR NAH
What D’Angelo Has Been Up To: A Timeline
The ongoing investigation of the murder — and its ensuing coverup — of Lennon Lacy:
Lennon’s body was found Aug. 29 hanging from a swing set from a dog leash and a belt. A medical examiner’s report ruled the death a suicide. Lennon’s family and friends immediately rejected the report, saying that the high school football player did not kill himself and was not depressed; in fact, the family claims, he was excited about an upcoming game.
“Someone killed him ’cause he was dating an older white woman,’” Justin Jones, 17, a friend of Lennon, told the Daily News.
Since Lennon’s death, the Daily News reports, the girlfriend, Michelle Brimhall, has “gone into hiding.”
On Friday the FBI—after prompting from Lennon’s family and the NAACP—launched an investigation into Lennon’s death. Local police told the Daily News that they are “still investigating Lacy’s death despite the coroner ruling it a suicide,” and it is unclear whether local authorities ever questioned Brimhall before “she went into hiding,” the Daily News reports.
“It is implausible for Lennon to have been able to act alone in hanging himself,” Dr. Christena Roberts, an independent pathologist hired by Lennon’s family, found.
The Ballad of Black Rodney:
used to be this dude in the LES whod ask for change and call himself Black Rodney and do the most perfect Rodney Dangerfield impressionv— DVS (@DVSblast) December 15, 2014
Black Rodney is where i learned many classic Rodney Dangerfield jokes. Only years later did i see actual Rodneys versions.
— DVS (@DVSblast) December 15, 2014
one time i was walkin to the train and i see Black Rodney tellin this girl “yea everyone knows me out here, yknow”. she looked suspicious — DVS (@DVSblast) December 15, 2014
so i walked by them and went “oh shit! Black Rodney???? yooooo! whats gooood? big fan!” homegirls face was magical.
— DVS (@DVSblast) December 15, 2014
i hope i got Black Rodney laid. I tried man…least i could do. — DVS (@DVSblast) December 15, 2014
I know who wrote that I Am Bread review! #collusion
ETHICS IN GAMING JOURNALISM !1!111!!!!!!!eleventy!!!
Vinegar pie is delicious, eat it frequently.
But don’t search for any recipe blogs about it because you’ll see “Why put MORE chemicals in your body that will give you cancer? Go NATURAL and ORGANIC!” and also “ew this sounds bitter” “think I’m going to throw up now” but also this comment They were a perfect dessert for poor farming families who didn’t have access to fancy ingredients like cream. Eggs, water, vinegar, and sugar were always on hand!”
Dude. Do you know what a farming family with a cow tends to have on hand? FUCKING CREAM. I mean, I understand the point you’re driving at, but…cream is not a fancy ingredient if you own a cow. Sugar is a luxury ingredient and you might not have it, but…if your cow is giving milk, you have cream.
omg condescending explanations! I was once trying to learn the rules of bid whist since thats the in-laws card game of choice (NOTE: I never learned, that game is better than me) and an internet overview described it as “popular with low income minorities; possible military origin”. I MEAN.
Is that for real, about whist? Because I totally thought whist was like, an old-fashioned super upper- and upper-middle-class English card game people played in sitting rooms before tea. (I fucking suck at almost all card games so I’d totally believe anything I read. Card games even sound made up. “Euchre,” my parents’ game of choice–WTF is that? That’s not even a word!)
ALSO I just looked it up on Wikipedia and apparently whist dates to wealthy young gentleman of 1728. Mmhmm, random internet overview, you suck and are making shit up.
Oh yeah, whist is ALL OVER Jane Austen’s work. Those peeps loved them some whist. Don’t know if that’s the same thing as bid whist though.
There we go, that’s where I got that impression.
Whisting to the fullest!!
I don’t know why this comment made me dissolve into giggles, but it did, so thanks!
Oh, it’s a Mallory-ism, I didn’t make it up! I wish I did though.
OMG flashback to the endless whist scenes in the Horatio Hornblower books. Naval battle, whist, naval battle, sailing math & logistics (you need a lot of math to sail!), coast battle, whist, why is the rum gone (seriously an important plot point in like, several books – SAILORS NEED RUM OK), naval battle, whist… Play-by-play, like the never-ending quidditch matches in Harry Potter, because obviously a super English card game is AT LEAST as exciting as sailing and fighting! Now that I think of it, the entire book series is pretty much a huge catalogue of CS Forester’s nerdy hobbies.
Soooo did any other little girls love these or was it maybe just me
“Rum, by God!” is a favorite quote around here, though I sadly wasn’t introduced to Hornblower until adulthood.
Euchre is only the best game ever, come on.
/Midwesterner
Close tie for me with cribbage, but yep.
/thread hijack
Cribbage is at least 500% better than euchre.
…but only if you lack the requisite 4 people (and copious booze) to play euchre.
I am a pretty crappy native-born Michigander because I can’t for the life of me pick up euchre. I lack that gene or something.
I play the shit out of some Thirteen, though.
Oh god, that reminds me, I have to study how to play Euchre again before going to my in-laws for Christmas. I just…don’t. get. it. Someone will explain it to me and it will make sense as they say it and then it just falls right out of my head. And there are teams! I can’t let my future teammates down!
Progeny of German Lutherans here. Euchre is a massive part of our extended family social gatherings. My grandfather is the champion.
Dutch Blitz, you guys. Come on.
SPADES sorrynotsorry
Basically the same as euchre.
Interesting! I had no idea!
Euchre is amazing. I feel like a traitor at the moment because I haven’t played in yeeeeears, but that was basically all I did at college.
My favorite card game is one that I think my dad and aunt made up as kids to make everyone playing Crazy Eights curse each other.
Yes you are correct. My friends and I would literally gather to play euchre three times a week in high school (also in calculus class) and we got to the point where we didn’t even play all the tricks, we could just play one or two and lay down the rest of our cards because we knew how the game would go.
/expat Hoosier
EUCHRE IS JUST SHEEPSHEAD FOR BABIES
/runs away
EDIT: Seriously though, Sheepshead is actually Euchre for people who like rules more than fun.
I agree wholeheartedly, and submit my username as proof.
Wait. Which is the chemical? The vinegar? I thought ACV was the cure for all the chemicals we use to clean things and stuff?
You know, I could go a whole lifetime without hearing about how dangerous “chemicals” are tbh. As a science type, it drives me up a wall.
Almost as much as people calling any polished stone countertop or tabletop or construction stone “marble.”
The recipe I was looking at called for both vinegar and artificial vanilla extract, so who knows, could have been anything at all. (Really it could have as we have established that EVERYTHING IS CHEMICALS.)
I read an article once saying not to use honey in anything ever because it contains a compound that is also found in liquid paper so obviously, eating honey is the same as straight-up drinking Wite-Out.
Ha, are you a geoscientist of some sort? Because my personal geologist and his geologist friends have been known to gather around “marble” countertops at parties, like, looking for garnets or inclusions or something. Geologists: Fun At Parties (???)
I am indeed. And we are totally fun at parties! Where’s Elyse??? Tell them, Elyse!
I would totally join in that. Much more fun than I usually have at parties.
I was once the lone non-geologist at an easter egg-dyeing party. They were all making jokes about surface tension and egg-cracking pressures and whatnot. At one point, I said something about how hilariously incomprehensible their jokes were, and the person next to me turned and said, “Aren’t you a geologist, too?”
“No, I’m, uh, I’m a poet,” I said.
“Oh, what kind of jokes would you make then?”
Several pairs of geologist eyes were now focused on me. “Probably something about how weird it is to boil, decorate, and hide symbols of the rebirth of humanity through divine sacrifice,” I managed to say. No one reacted in any way, even in terms of facial expression. A beat, and then the geology jokes started again.
fin
Also while I’m reading more comments, “White vinegar is not a food product, it is manufactured in a plant.”
Okay.
Also, someone posted an entire recipe for cinnamon rolls. Why not.
I…..where do they think most of their food comes from? That fancy organic milk still comes from a processing plant because nobody wants to drink cow poop. Also flour, sugar, and even WATER comes from FACTORIES.
OMG are factories the new chemicals?
I only eat food directly out of my backyard, or by purchasing it from an appropriately weather-beaten guy named Stan in the next town over. NO FACTORIES NEED APPLY.
::nod, nod:: Am assuming you also make all your own clothes out of your own hair and also live in a mud house with no electricity or running water, and that you walk to the next town over in your bare feet on unpaved roads.
That’s right. And when my frostbite gets too bad in the winter, I make homemade shoes by stitching together skins of animals that have died naturally in the woods.
What about Stan, though? Can you attest to his purity?
ETA: totally enjoying imagining what hair clothes would feel like though.
Stan has successfully completed my 5-step food purity test involving solemn vows and appropriated native rituals, so he’s clean.
My skin is crawling thinking about what hair clothes would feel like.
solemn vows and appropriated native rituals
Ok now I’m dead of laughing.
I feel like hair clothes would be kind of soft and smooth. Although I did once go to an art installation where this whole small room was covered in hair, with braids of hair hanging from the ceiling. Real human hair from like, salons and stuff. It STANK and was undoubtedly one of the most skin crawly things I’ve seen.
When you say hair clothing, I just have a flashback to a medieval lit class in which the professor explained that the wearer’s skin would sort of grow around the hair shirts. I’m pretty sure there was quite a bit of wounding involved prior to said hair garment being put on to achieve that effect, but it does tend to make me believe that hair would make a less than ideal clothing material.
(I also seriously hope I’m misremembering some vital part of that hair shirt punishment thing.)
NO NO NO NO NO nononononononononon nonono. Well, now I know what tonight’s nightmare will be. Ingrown hair shirts.
I think about the Nazis, who apparently used to have giant storage rooms full of hair from concentration camps and used it to make clothing. They also did other horrifying things with the body parts of dead people in the name of racial purity and “waste not, want not.”
(Never see Nuit et Brouillards (Night and Fog) you guys, it will scar you for life.)
Ingrown hair shirts are just about as horrifying, though.
::gagging::
hair clothing is probably not so unlike wool. it would depend if you spun it into thread or not, but as long as you washed the hair first (!) it would probably be good. Not as fine as rabbit or cashmere goat, but nicer than sheep, maybe?
That’s always the question though, isn’t it? WHAT ABOUT STAN???
Some mass-produced vinegars are made with petroleum products. http://www.fda.gov/ICECI/ComplianceManuals/Compli…
I go through a lot of vinegar for cleaning and pickling (I buy white vinegar by the gallon) and I believe Heinz specifies that it is grain-based. Also anything labeled as red or white *wine* vinegar is made from wine, obv.
But that’s not the same thing as having petroleum products in your vinegar. I mean, personally there’s plenty enough reasons to not use petroleum products as much as possible, but saying “mass-produced vinegars are made with petroleum products” isn’t a statement that means much by itself, in terms of health (from your same link):
“Practically and scientifically, pure ethyl alcohol synthesized from natural gas or petroleum products does not differ from that obtained by fermentation with subsequent distillation. Furthermore, foods in which one is used cannot be distinguished objectively from those in which the other is used.”
Yeah, I wish people would differentiate between food that “contains” shitty stuff and food that “involves” said stuff in the course of its production. You can make vinegar from petroleum, but you can also make fuel from corn. Doesn’t mean anything about either substance’s edibility or nutrient content.
And isn’t petroleum just decayed dinosaurs? Quite natural, if you think of it that way. And don’t get me started on “natural”. Hurricanes and arsenic are natural. Marketing language has thoroughly infiltrated modern discourse.
Oh sure, that’s not the same as having petroleum products in the vinegar, absolutely.* I was posting too quickly from my phone, and then was occupied for several hours afterwards, and probably shouldn’t’ve posted — I was just so proud of myself for finding an FDA source instead of a crazy unsourced anti-science hippie blog.
I struggle to figure out how to be a semi-crazy hippie organic hurf durf grow-your-own hyper-local weirdo, and also critical of corporate interests in medical and food systems, while not being anti-science. I am sorry that I didn’t take the time to word my post accordingly.
* It still squicks me out? Like, there is a way to do this that ISN’T OIL, why are we doing it the oil way? I dunno. See above re: weirdo.
Yeah I mean, why would we keep using this limited and soon to be exhausted resource when we could use, oh, I dunno, PLANTS. Oy. I hear you on balancing ideals and science; I think it’s possible for sure, but there’s people like Food Babe out there making us all look like wackos 🙁
OTHERS ARE CONDENSED OUT OF THE AIR ITSELF.
(Just did a bunch of reading about production of acetic acid: they make it out of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide! Magic!)
Cool!
soooo, I somehow read this as “manufactured in a plant” like the botanical variety. and. I am glad people are slightly less stupid than the stupid I thought they were?
I lol’d.
Do you dine on mince and slices of quince?
Yes, nightly. I also enjoy dancing hand in hand on the edge of the sand.
I have a recipe for vinegar pie! It’s in avery old cookbook that also tells you how to cook an entire pig or roast a boar’s head, and I keep meaning to try the vinegar pie recipe.
Maybe for Christmas, I’ll try it.
What is the cookbook? I … May have some pig heads in the freezer.
I’m not sure what it says about me that my first reaction to that comment was jealousy that you have a freezer large enough for pig heads, plural.
You have no idea. I also have several pig heads still attached to pigs running around my yard.
The Momofuku cookbook has a rather compelling recipe for headcheese that starts with a whole pig head.
I kind of desperately hope that this person thinks cream is milk that comes from Fancy Cows.
Being bathed in warm goats milk sounds decadent.. I guess? Does one rinse off after being bathed in warm milk? Can one only be bathed by others in milk? I just don’t understand…
(ETA: before I read the article I thought this was a story about a bad ass Marquise from several centuries ago, who did this amazing trek…. I am disappoint)
I was also initially misled about the Marquis(e). But it is pretty amazing she was attacked by a modern-day Mongol horde.
I’m imagining the smell of soured goat milk in my hair the next day, and I don’t think it would be worth the decadence of the initial bath.
Well, are we sure they were trying to help? Maybe it was a really passive-aggressive way of getting revenge after she took all their apricots.
The juxtaposition does kinda make it sound like they snuck up on her while she slept and doused her in the milk, which seems a method of revenge that is certain to deter your victim from future trespasses.
Yeah, I don’t think other people bathing you in milk counts much towards surviving in nature by yourself.
I agree with you, but that being said, why would I continue bathing myself like a chump when I could get other people to bathe me instead?
You make an excellent point. Though I can think of many other things I’d have others do for me before bathing me… But perhaps if you are in a position to have people bathing you in milk, your laundry and such has long been taken care of (also washed in goats’ milk?? maybe not…)
I’d be too worried I’d curdle in the sun.
Having someone bathe me sounds like a heretofore undiscovered circle of hell.
I want to know WHOSE APRICOTS SHE WAS STEALING and also what else she was eating, because while you can survive entirely on dates and milk, an apricot is not a date.
Also I am confused as to why anyone, when using Orientalist fantasies to make up lies about their life (I simply REFUSE TO BELIEVE that women just…bathed her? Unless she went to some sort of specialty bathhouse? Why do we need to specify they’re Muslims????), would pick one as rampantly nonsensical as being bathed in milk. Who wants to waste milk like that. Who even thinks that sounds pleasant. Just. What.
I have just started listening to Call Your Girlfriend and am enjoying it IMMENSELY so thank you for posting that interview!
FRIEND BREAKUPS, I AM A CHAMP WITH THOSE. The first is the most memorable, though.
The girl who had been my “best friend” from like, fifth grade all through high school stopped talking to me over the fact that I didn’t tell her I was involved in a sexual relationship with someone! When, in fact, I didn’t want to tell ANYONE, but a second friend I would also later stop talking to weaseled it out of me and told EVERYONE. How nice, right?
Things had been somewhat strained when college started – I moved away but stayed in state, she went to a tech school in upstate NY so we were really far away and didn’t talk/see each other much to begin with. Anyway, I was out at the campus diner with some friends in like February or something? Idk, we could use our meal plan after 10pm so we were there all the time and my phone rang. It was Then Best Friend, and I muted it because it would be rude to take the call while I was hanging out with friends at the diner. I called her back the next day and she went on this really weird spiel about how I’d “played out her trust card” and I was just…sideswiped. How entitled she felt to that knowledge threw me for a loop. So we stopped talking. Whatever.
The weird part came a few months later, as I was breaking up with said boyfriend for being a cheating, abusive douchecanoe. I get a call from her out of nowhere – she is in the hospital in NYC, they discovered she had severe Crohn’s disease, and had “died on the table but came back” (I cannot verify this claim, because we have very few mutual friends at this point) and I told her that I would visit her in the hospital. She never told me which hospital, so I never visited. I have seen her exactly once since then, at friend-who-weaseled-crap-out-of-me’s wedding, and she spent the entire wedding talking to my mother even though she was in the wedding party with us.
UGH
Oh! Weasel Friend and I also would later stop talking because she found Jesus and she felt that my atheism/non-belief/whatever you wish to call it was a DIRECT RESULT of that and a personal attack on her (uh, no, that’s been there for a while, and what you choose to believe or not believe is no business of mine).
There is a whole bunch of weirdness going on in all this right here.
i love the word “douchecanoe”
also, it’s extremely satisfying how you basically found both your friend breakups to be weird and mystifying, rather than soul-crushing.
I wish I could say I get it, re: walking across Mongolia with an abscessed molar, but… I just don’t. At all. More power to her, I guess, but the whole thing makes me distinctly, and hugely, uncomfortable.
Me too, FWIW.
“There’s this thing I wanna do. Hiking across the country, or some such. Oh, but I need money. So I’ll take notes and write about my hike. Yeah, that’s the ticket.”
Isn’t this how it goes?
Go meteors and Northern Lights! More SPACE COVERAGE, pls! I have this fantasy vacation where I sleep in modern Nordic hotel by day; watch the Northern lights by night; sauna/ steam at my leisure and only eat room service.
I sent my work gchat group that link and now we have decided we are going to take a vacation to Sweden to see the Northern Lights and I hope everyone else is serious about it, because I am completely in.
I am intrigued by these ideas and wish to subscribe to your travel newsletter.
Amanitou Sow! I did not know about her but I’m so inspired. A woman in tech (Google!) who manages to be successful without compromising her own ideals (Google.org!!) and just being all around cool! I’m going to have to start listening to her podcasts, even though I don’t really get how to… listen to podcasts correctly.
I’ve had many near-friend-breakups but there’s only one that ended up never getting fixed over apology baked goods and groveling. Part of it was that I was just collateral damage– my two best friends had a falling out, and I felt like I had to pick one, so I did and that choice lost me the other. I don’t regret the choice I made because I think she needed me more and I think I needed her more, but I wish it could have turned out differently. There’s no bad blood, I’m still friendly with the other girl, but the fissure was too wide. There’s also just… a lot of other layers that would need to be peeled back, and even then it might not work.
I have an iPhone and use the Downcast app for podcasts because the one that the phone comes with is awful. You just go in and search and then you can subscribe with automatic updates or just download the ones you want.
Amanitou Sow is THE BEST.
I’m kind of obsessed with her–she’s also super career focused and into management and just seems really ambitious and great.
Ughhh friend breakups. I went through a phase a couple of years ago of getting rid of the misogynist nerdbros in my life and this guy I’m still friends with was all like Super Concerned about it because of I dunno, Reasons or something. I was like “yeah or I could just not ever have to talk to people who make rape jokes.”
Another friend from that friend group had drifted around that time but then drifted back maybe a year or two later. I tried to help him with his dating woes but the main point of contention was that he refused to view women as people. He then friend dumped me over email saying that he was tired of being my “emotional punching bag,” and claimed that every single one of our arguments was about me freaking out at him about nothing. Whereas I remember those arguments as being about him being an asshole, each and every one of them. So I was like “yeah IDGAF” and peaced out.
But this brings me to my current conundrum. Concerned Friend is getting wed in the summer and some of these misogynist asshats will be there, along with his lunatic stepsister who tried to steal my partner, my ex boyfriend, and his irrational and unhinged mom who screamed at me for twenty minutes in her yard about a thing that never happened. I know if I don’t go to this wedding, it’s gonna be a big deal and maybe a relationship-ender, but I also do not want to go to this thing with all these people. Thoughts?
Go to the wedding. Avoid toxic folk but have a coolly polite greeting prepared when avoidance fails. You do not have to smile at these glass bowls. But show them you are an unflappable badass by taking the high road. Stay long enough to congratulate the happy couple and thank the hosts of the reception. Leave early if you’re not having fun.
If he doesn’t understand that you don’t want to spend time with his awful friends and awful family, then why bother?
Will there be nice people there as well that you can stick with and avoid the idiots?
Yes, a few. His brother and his brother’s partner are lovely and I’m actually much closer to the brother at this point in our lives, plus my partner, my BFF, and probably my sister who is coming as BFF’s date.
Stay home and pet the cat* instead, and rejoice in not having spent a miserable afternoon avoiding asshats, juiceboxes, and douchecanoes. That sounds hellish, and unless there is at least one person there you genuinely want to see, then avoiding drama generated by people you don’t seem to like very much isn’t a compelling reason to suffer.
*If you do not have a cat, borrow one.
I was expecting a very different footnote.
Yes, “pet the cat” seems a very good euphemism.
show up, be seen, leave early?
ETA I missed the part where you said it would be a weekend extravaganza – were it me (and I have had to accompany a wedding part member to a Thing I was less than thrilled about) I would show up, congratulate everyone, and then develop a bizarre allergic reaction that required me to spend all the rest of the available time reading a book in the hotel room bathtub. Or the hotel hot tub IF and Only IF the wedding partay does not impinge on that territory. Alternatively, a bizarre allergic reaction that can only be treated with a long trip to the local bookstore with cafe and wifi and my trusty tablet and a generous snack and coffee allowance.
Yup, or “food poisoining” that requires you to stay close to a bathroom. Everyone has had it, no one wants to deal with it, and the wedding party will make disappointed noises and then happily move on with the festivities.
White lies are a really important tool in situations like this. Always an option.
ugh this sounds so un-fun. i’m chiming in, though, to agree with the “show up and leave early” crowd. also, sometimes i end up having the most fun at the things i dread the most. i know that sounds weird! but, like, the mother of the groom is going to be running around tending to family — there’s probably a drunk great-uncle or someone who’s responsible for her developing her crazy behavior in the first place and she’ll probably be busy dealing with people she doesnt want to see either. i doubt you’ll even run into her, and you’ll spend the wedding eating nice food and drinking champagne with your own partner and friends. whenever you see her coming, spin the other way, back to the champagne table. and if the weekend really starts to feel unsufferable, yup, loving the allergy-need-to-read-book-in-bathtub strategy. if you don’t go, i think you’ll regret it.
“I won’t be attending your wedding because you have invited many people who have been jerks to me too many times to imagine that they will rein it in for one afternoon out of respect for you. I wish you and Soon-to-be-Spouse every happiness, and would love to catch up with you two in the near future. xoxo.”
Lie. Lie and say you got food poisoning, but your partner cares SO MUCH about the wedding he’s going, and friend is staying to take care of you. Have the friend complicit in the lie over for takeout and netflix but otherwise lie low. Write a letter after the wedding saying how you wish you could have been there on his special day, and you KNOW how happy he and his wife will be.
Your goal is to maintain the friendship and not suffer; telling the truth will end the relationship, refraining from telling the truth will result in you suffering. Lying results in the least pain for everyone. Since poop is involved, it’s reasonable that you wouldn’t spread the story around, so getting found out is unlikely.
I had a friend dump me in high school because she was hell-bent on becoming “cool,” and I guess I didn’t qualify! But joke’s on her, ’cause we ended up being friends again and are still friends and it’s lovely! Ha!
I am on the other side of this! I was a total asshat to my elementary/middle-school best friend because I acquired “cooler” friends when we hit high school, but we reconnected after college and I have apologized profusely for being an immature jerk and now we are very good friends again.
That vinegar pie looks more or less like a chess pie but with fourspice in it, and I can attest that chess pie is delicious. I usually use lemon juice instead of vinegar but I think the acid is supposed to cut some of the sweetness–otherwise you have what is very nearly a buttercream frosting pie.
“otherwise you have what is very nearly a buttercream frosting pie”
tell me more
VERY WELL.
French* buttercream frosting: butter, sugar, egg yolks, vanilla
Chess pie: butter, sugar, whole eggs, vanilla, splash of lemon or vinegar, sprinkle of cornmeal
*regular butter cream doesn’t have egg, usually
Oh my goodness, bookmarking with extreme alacrity.
I’ve perfected the break-up method of just fading out. It helps that I’m already sort of inclined to just never talk to people.
Yes, I am also good at this, and I completely understand when people do it to me, why make a big scene?
I’ve been accused of doing this because I just never talk to people. It’s a fine line.
I had to go through a nasty friend breakup earlier this year. It became apparent that a) I was not a person to him, but a projection, and projections are never supposed to object to anything he says or does, and b) all his complaints about life, the same ones, over and over, were never going to change because he was never going to do anything real to change them because he was too scared.
He sent me a whiny email a few months ago saying “whyyyyy aren’t you talking to meeee anymore, I checked with other people and they said the thing I said to you that pissed you off wasn’t that bad!” I was like, I made the right decision by not talking to him anymore.
Similar friend break-up here. I called out a guy who had been annoying me for a while, and he sent me two emails: one saying that he was sorry, and did I really want to risk years of friendship by being upset, and another saying, “Well, the other two people [who might have been affected] didn’t say anything, so it must have been okay.”
So much for those years of friendship.
Similar situation: never going to change anything about his life, always going to be looping the same narrative PLUS a lovely soupçon of “I’m going to treat a couple of our mutual lady friends with extreme shadiness and disrespect and then gaslight anyone who tries to discuss it.” SO. Fade to black.
I still get really sad about it sometimes because he’s a really fun, intelligent and enjoyable person when he’s on, but those good times aren’t even a little bit worth the rest, especially if he just flat our refuses to seek out any help. I have an email that I go back and read whenever I feel like maybe I’ve made a mistake.
When I was 17 I had a very good friend break up with me in an absolutely passive way. She just stopped replying to my emails or taking my calls, and blocked me on MSN Messenger (I am pausing here to give you guys time to stop laughing at the mention of MSN Messenger). I had no idea why because we hadn’t fought or said an unkind word to each other, and she lived a few hours away so I couldn’t swing by her house and demand an explanation.
A few years later I mentioned this to a mutual friend and she said that this friend had done the same thing to her as well. So maybe she was just some sort of friendship-vampire.
This happened to me as well, with a girl who had actually been part of my wedding party. I tried to contact her in multiple ways, short of stopping by her house we lived across town from each other), but she never responded. She did the same thing to a couple of other people we’re mutual friends with who I still talk to. We’re still Facespace friends, but she never comments or likes anything on my wall, so I never do on hers either. It’s just weird.
My former best friend, who was also my maid of honour, kind of did that. I can’t say we actually had a friend break-up but she just drifted farther and farther away from our circle of friends over time. It started with “I’m too busy with grad school and my internship to hang out” which morphed into “too busy to reply to emails or texts” and then “too busy hanging out with the friends I made in grad school/at my internship/at work” until eventually all of us just fell out of touch with her.
Oh my god, how my friends and I adored MSN Messenger. Sometimes it would get glitchy with our group chats, so we’d have to move over to Yahoo! and would then spend the rest of the night bitching about it. I’M TALKING ABOUT WHEN I WAS IN COLLEGE.
A friend of mine did the same thing at the same age! She just kind of stopped replying to me and told a mutual friend she didn’t want to have anything to do with her anymore, without ever explaining why. It got…weird, though, when her mother went over to the mutual friend’s house to beg her to go back to being this girl’s friend and to get me to be her friend again too, since she thought we were good influences. Our former friend friended us both on Facebook a few years back and started commenting on our posts like we were old friends who just fell out of touch. It is all very odd.
I was once broken up with by being de-friended on Livejournal for no apparent reason and it hurt for *years*. We were a few years older than 17, though.
But, again, the person made kind of a habit of it.
Someone once defriended me on Livejournal because I said I hated Jack on LOST. I mean, we did not have the same political or religious beliefs, etc., etc., but when I insulted Matthew Fox’s acting it was A BRIDGE TOO FAR.
We were both in our twenties.
Oh God, friend break-ups. I’ve never been through an ~actual~ break-up, but only that ugly, painful shit where your friends more or less stop talking to you and have new friends that are awesomer and cooler than you. Yeah, that was 2/3rds of my high school experience. It was pretty much The Worst. It was to the point where my former best friend and I were in the same class our senior year and didn’t speak to each other for 6 of the 9 months we were in that class. I more or less had no friends outside of class for half of high school. College was a relief after all that drama.
We’re still friends on Facebook, but we didn’t really do much about it until about two years ago when her brother died. It was awful and random and tragic, and I messaged her to let her know how well I remembered him growing up and how sorry I was and to let her know that I cared even though I was 3000 miles away. And since then we’ve done a lot of shared remembrances of things we were obsessed with when we were little. It’s nice to at least be in some kind of contact with someone who’s known you for that long.
If you manage to toast the broad, please send me a screenshot
Best. Typo. Ever.
Please don’t edit it. Please.
Toast this broad!
Cheers to this broad!
I could watch hot dudes drink while smirking basically all day, is what I’m saying.
I friend broke up with a couple of dudes from an old college friend group because I realized I didn’t have to deal with their misogynistic bullshit just because everyone else we knew thought it was cute and harmless. (One of them liked to talk a lot about how he wished he could travel back to the 19th century and be like, a robber baron, and also about how he wanted a docile wife who would do whatever he said.) Never looked back. Faded out with others of the group as a result…few regrets.
he wished he could travel back to the 19th century and be like, a robber baron
D:
D: D: D:
Of course, usually those guys don’t grasp that if they could go back in time, they would not *be* a robber baron–they would be the clerk that worked 14 hour days six days a week and lose all their savings in whatever bank panic happened during their working life. And the ‘docile’ wife may or may not be so docile. Woman have not changed that much–she may not have been able to get a job, so she may have held her tongue because she had no choice but to stay with a jerk, but they had ways of ‘getting back’ at husbands. (I’ve heard stories about wives in my family at the turn of the century–no docile maidens there, that’s for sure.)
I want a “women in our family a hundred years ago” thread. Doesn’t that sound fun?
Oh friend break ups are hard. I quite regularly have very vivid dreams about my best friend that I met in the first year of university – we drifted apart in terms of interests and mutual friends but it became a proper ‘break up’ because we were also living together so it all came to a head in the weeks before our final exams.
It wasn’t so very very heart breaking as I knew it was coming (though neither of us handled it in a very adult way), but she’s the one person that isn’t currently in my life at all that I think about a lot, and the dreams are so happy-sad. We shared so much, and it makes looking back at uni photos bittersweet as she’s in almost every single one and we had so much fun together for a couple of years.
EDIT: Was going to come back to delete some of the many ‘so’s that crept into this, but idk they’re all heartfelt!
So…what do you do if you get sort-of dumped by a friend because she has a new boyfriend? I know we’ve all been talking about high school-era friend-breakups, but this is happening now – and we’re in our 30s.
She hasn’t had much relationship experience and he seems like a nice guy (although recently he expressed a mild misogyny that threw me for a loop) but she’s just…disappeared on me. I almost never see her and we only communicate through text now and I’m surprisingly deeply hurt by this. Talking to her about it, regardless of how gently, is nearly out of the question – she’s enormously sensitive and would absolutely interpret it as either being critical of the relationship she’s wanted for so long or me purposely guilt-tripping her.
I just want my friend back. The irony of it is, she keeps saying, “I just don’t want to be the kind of girl who dumps her friends for a guy.” and I’m all YOU ARE, THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE.
Thoughts? Is this a wait-and-see kind of thing or a give-up-the-ghost kind of thing?
“I just don’t want to be the kind of girl who dumps her friends for a guy.” and I’m all YOU ARE, THIS IS WHAT YOU ARE.
Well…um, if that’s what she is, is that someone you wanna be friends with?
An excellent point and believe me, it’s something I consider seriously, but aside from this she’s been an amazing, loyal friend for many years – it’s tough, you know?
“I feel like we haven’t had a chance to hang out much lately, and I miss you! Can we schedule [dinner/coffee/drinks/pedicures]?” And then actually schedule it. My college roommate lives in the same town as me, and we have monthly dinners because we are both so busy that if we don’t schedule it, we won’t see each other.
I have been attempting this with limited success – there’s usually an excuse involved along the lines of “I have no money” or “Spending time with his children is really important so I only have about an hour to hang out…sorry!” She also uses her natural introversion as a crutch to avoid going anywhere or spending time with more than one person (and that person ends up being Boyfriend; surprise!)
How long have they been together? As Ethylbenzene says below, it may wear off as the relationship progresses and they either break up or move out of the honeymoon phase.
Is she flaking out on things that are already scheduled, or is she putting up roadblocks to even scheduling them in the first place?
She’s doing a little of both, actually. I’ll say “let’s do [this] this weekend!” and she’ll say “Maybe…” and then cancel for good the day before or when I push for a solid answer. It’s very hard not to take it personally. Logic tells me it’s not anything I’ve done, it’s her preference for spending time with him instead, but it still stings. Especially since I’ve laid on the floor with her numerous times because of some terrible breakup, and now that she’s with someone good it’s all “Bye!”
Thank you for your help, by the way. I have no frame of reference for this kind of thing.
I would say it’s not necessarily an either-or. This will almost certainly wear off as the relationship progresses. In the meantime, though, I would honestly say something. Yes, she’s sensitive but that doesn’t make her behavior ok, and it doesn’t make her feelings more important than yours. I’d check back through the Captain Awkward archives for some scripts and go from there. It may not be comfortable or fun, but you aren’t comfortable or fun right now what with getting your feelings constantly hurt, so.
I’m really hoping this does wear off. And you’re right, Ethylbenzene, I should just get it together and have a talk with her. And your comment that her feelings aren’t more important that hers really struck me. I feel like I’ve been allowing myself to be hurt by her because she’s so sensitive and I don’t want to hurt HER feelings in the process. Thank you so much!
With luck and persistence, she will resurface.
You can certainly say you’re missing her, and texts are not enough.
New relationships are horrifyingly hard to see out of.
Friend breakup: had a friend from 4th grade on who I basically worshipped, because she was pretty and nice and smart and popular, whereas I…well, I got good grades. We went to camp together too. She moved away in 7th grade but we continued being friends. Cut to freshman year of college, and she cut off all contact with me and our camp friends. Just stopped. Screened our calls, wouldn’t respond to emails, etc etc etc.
When we were finally able to speak with her a few years later, she had no defense. I tried reconnecting with her but she just proved to be not a great person (and sometimes I would tell her that in drunk texts. Ooops. I deleted her # from my phone, finally). Now we’re living in the same city, and I see her occasionally, and it’s awkward.
Mass friend breakup at the end of highschool for me. All my friends got super heavy into binge drinking at age 17/18, and I wasn’t interested. It would be one thing if it was drinks while we were doing stuff we already did, but because it was so shiny and new, the plans were always literally “LET’S GET DRUNK!” and nothing else. Because I wasn’t interested in just that and only that, I was no longer needed.
I’ll tell you one thing, though – losing all your friends in the 6 months before leaving for college makes for a much less difficult time moving away from home. I was SO READY to get out of there.
Also, the looks on the faces of those kids when I’m back in town and have a drink are hilarious. It’s as if it’s impossible to believe someone who wasn’t ready to start binge drinking all the time at age 17 could be capable of having a whiskey/coke 10 years later. How odd.
“Muslim women bathed her in warm goat’s milk” hoooooly Orientalism, Batman. Given that the vast majority of Turks are Muslim and the religious affiliation of the bath attendants was probably not that relevant, might we have said “Turkish women”? Or even just “local women”?
I’m guessing this is a hamam thing. In which case it’s something anyone can do, by walking into a hamam and plunking down some money. You don’t even have to be a bullshit “adventurer.”
MALLORY
IT’S JANE AUSTEN DAY
WHAT ARE YOU DOING ABOUT IT
(WO)MAN THE BARRICADES
The only best friend I ever broke up with happened to be a guy who wanted to go romantic, so fortunately that followed the regular pop culture break up narrative.
But straight up friendship breakups? There really does need to be more support out there. My husband was unceremoniously dropped by his best friend of a decade and he was completely at a loss. Not only did he have to deal with the whole I’m-male-I-shouldn’t-show-emotions problems most guys have, but there’s none of the normal rituals to smooth the way like listening to break up songs or rebound dating. Poor guy was shocked that it made him feel like crap for a really long time too – people expect to feel shaken up after their girlfriend dumps them, but don’t realize how long the pain can linger from a friendship ending.
I kept telling him, “You know how they say it takes a week to feel better for every month you were dating someone you broke up with? Well, this was a real relationship too, even if it wasn’t dating. It was ten years, you’re not going to just “get over it” that quickly!”
Kind of hilarious friend breakup in hindsight: I was in a band with all of my best friends in 8th grade-freshman year of high school (we were terrible) and they kicked me out freshman year because I was angsty and depressed and probably bossy, I can’t really remember. But one of the dudes who was my best friend called me and told me and I heard the others laughing in the background and thought they were laughing at me (they weren’t) but it still really hurt and I didn’t have very many friends that year. Eventually I got over it and I’m still good friends with one of those people and she knitted me a hat for my birthday.
I’m having a friend breakup right now where I suspect she’s secretly hated me for the last several months. We’re already essentially not speaking anymore, and I wish she would just get it over with and unfriend me on social media already to make it official (I reached out to her offering to talk it out if she’d like to and got no response, so it seems pretty over). Unfortunately since I’ve been friends with her for quite a while I know that her m.o. is to just shit-talk her family/friends to a third party and silently be bitter about it forever instead of actually doing something about those relationships. Which I guess is why I am not especially bothered that we are friend breaking up, since I’m quite familiar with the kind of spectacularly petty complaints she has about people, and her issue with me could probably be easily worked through if she was willing to deal with it. But she’s not, and I don’t really have time for that in my life!
Ugh, that sucks. It sounds like you could probably just walk away and either unfriend or ignore her on social media forever and not be missing out on much from her end.
I don’t have the energy at the moment to actually type out the story, but let’s just say I literally do not believe in having A Best Friend, it contravenes my philosophy of life, and there is a REASON FOR THAT.
ETA: Also, that I have lived this long without knowing about Vinegar Pie is frankly inhumane.
I got friend dumped by my middle school BFF in front of every one of our mutual friends at lunch – because her dirtbag boyfriend pulled a “her or me!” cause I loathed him openly. And she picked him. It was traumatic at the time. I got dumped for a guy who put TOOTHPASTE IN HIS HAIR so it was matted up and dirty like his hero Kurt Cobain. Are you fucking kidding me?
Anyway they got married, he ended up continuing to be an abusive controlling dick (which is one reason I hated him in the first place). They split up, we reconnected, she kind of apologized and was like well I was 14 and hormones and he was my first love, etc. I said it was totally cool because it was, I was also 14 at the time and had hormones and liked a guy solely because his hair looked like Billy Idol. Even though he huffed Freon. These things happen.
The hair-related poor decisions really make this. Ahh, teenagers.
In high school my best friend and I sent some pretty intense emails back and forth at each other and we friend broke up for a while. It was hard because she was in a pretty bad place for a while and I was pretty much constantly trying to take care of her, which wasn’t good for either of us in retrospect. So I’m glad we broke up and I got some perspective on that friendship, but of course it was VERY INTENSE at the time.
Aside from that I am like the master of awkward!friendbreakups. There were a fair few times in college when I was very friendly/close with someone up until anything romantic was suggested (either by them or by someone else) and I just awkwarded my way out of those relationships.
I am in an uncomfortable pre-break-up with a friend who just had a baby and it feels real shitty even though I think it might be more or less mutual and her holiday card looks like the kind of stock family photo people mock on Tumblr. 🙁 We live in different cities but we’ve been close friends for more than a decade. Her life has turned out very successfully in ways mine hasn’t (marriage vs. divorce, property vs. debt, etc.) and I feel like she wants me to be more jealous/sad than I am? But then maybe that’s actually me projecting my jealousy and subconscious feelings of failure? I don’t know.
I would appreciate hearing any advice or experiences from people whose friendships were complicated by parenthood, if anyone has any. Thank you in advance, my internet loves.
Unfortunately I can’t speak to the parenthood aspect of it, but you have my best wishes that the friendship will either work out or end well for both parties.
This kind of thing is weird and hard! Some of that is going on in my life too.
A friend of mine, after being one of the last single ladies of our acquaintanceship, got pregnant and subsequently tied the knot and now is so happy about catching up that I think she wants to explain the ineffable specialness of pregnancy and feel the jealousy of others as a way of assuaging how she felt for so long. I sort of understand and can have patience, but I also sort of can’t be in the room when she is explicitly competing with another pregnant lady (who could care less) over the size of their respective “bumps” because she feels hers isn’t big enough. So you are not alone! Webs of projections.
My tack is to just take a little time out from the crazy and trust that the person will probably regain their head again once they get used to what is after all a major life transition. Possibly with saying something directly but jokingly and with love to them if they project too much onto me and I want them to realize what they’re doing. But people do go into a weird phase and come out of it again — I feel like part of friendship sometimes is waiting those phases out, since surely there is also a good reason that before this you liked and cared about the person. Does that help?
It also helps to see friend in person, and play with the baby and help them see how they don’t have to be crazy and isolated but can actually be chill with their baby and trust other people with it and so on. If the person is suffering from middle-class-American-baby-safety-germ-danger-phobia. Sometimes people never interacted with babies until they had their own, so they sort of assume that’s the case for everyone else and that they can’t hang out with friends who aren’t parents, but it can be a big relief and they can snap out of it if you just wordlessly show them it is not so by being good at playing with their baby. And then you can have a nice auntie-relationship with the baby and the friend may chill out. In short, no guarantees but there is hope!
So my best friend in 7th grade hung out with me all year and all summer between 7th and 8th grade. Then on the first day of 8th grade, I found out that she had transferred to a different junior high…from a teacher. She never told me she was leaving, and she never spoke to me again, and I have no idea why. It was a rip-roaring way to start the year.
She went on to be salutatorian of her high school class, went to an Ivy League school, and has a husband, family and a very successful career. Needless to say, I still think she’s a total bitch and a garbage human being.
In 5th grade I knew my family was leaving to move to a new city and didn’t tell my friends deliberately so I wouldn’t have to say goodbye. As an adult who’s done some emotional maturing I would never do that these days, but at the time, it just felt terrifying to deal with the prospect of dealing with my/their feelings and figuring out what to say and whether to keep in touch or even find out for sure if they WANTED to stay in touch. It might have been because she was young and had no idea how to do it better. Anyway, I’m sorry that happened to you.
Friend breakups are terrible, and I’m glad we’re talking about them, because when my really bad friend breakup happened, I found the lack of cultural context for my painful experience a really hard part of it.
Ugh you guys Joyce Carol Oates is on Twitter twittering some terrible tweets about trigger warnings in classrooms, and I actually tweeted back, which is like tweeting into the void, a sign of hopelessness and despair.
But seriously, why do people with such large media platforms continually get the trigger warning issue so terribly wrong?
Ugggh.
I saw a piece on Inside Higher Ed recently about classroom trigger warnings, and I was really struck by some of the inane arguments it made. Like, one of the “problems” the writer raised was, “But spoilers!” Ma’am, you are a professor of literature; if you can’t figure out how to write a sentence that warns students that the book they’re about to read contains a graphically depicted suicide without telling them which character kills themselves and how, we have bigger problems than “oversensitive” students.
Uggggh what? The argument FOR trigger warnings is that students who have been traumatized by violence can prepare themselves for discussion and students who have less emotional stake in the topic understand that it is serious. The argument AGAINST trigger warnings is. . . spoilers? (And that we are overprotecting students, but that’s just dumb, they are not called “trigger shields” and they are not meant to cover up violence.)
Well, even if we’re willing to treat “but spoilers” seriously as an objection: it’s a solved problem! I write and read fanfic; that is definitely a community where people are a) concerned about warning appropriately for content and b) concerned about avoiding spoilers, and sometimes those two desires do come into conflict. So the way you handle it is, you put the potentially-spoilery but also potentially-crucial warning information on a different page or way at the bottom or in white text on a white background, and you say “Here’s a vague version of the content warnings, here’s how to see the detailed version, but bear in mind that doing that may also spoil some plot developments for you,” and you let your readers decide whether they care more about being adequately warned or about going in unspoiled. It seems like that should be pretty easy to translate to a classroom setting.
I feel like I accidentally friend dump people a lot because I’m socially awkward and always think that people won’t want to hear from me. If I see someone all the time, we’re great because I can see on their face that they enjoy talking to me. Unfortunately, a lot of my friends live in different states, and I find the long phone calls we get into emotionally exhausting… so they only happen probably once every 3 months. Just yesterday, I ducked out of a call with my HS best friend because I didn’t feel up to talking. I still need to call her back. Why am I so bad at this??? I don’t mean to hurt people’s feelings but it’s like I can only handle so much. Not even sure what that means.
I did have to for real friend break up with someone who I’d known since middle school because he was very needy. He’s been in a bad place for a few years and I was too. We extra bonded during that time but now I’m doing better and he’s still… not. I tried for a long time to keep supporting him, but eventually his casual misogyny and dismissal of my progress was enough. I still feel a lot of guilt about cutting him off but I know it was the best thing for me emotionally and mentally.
It’s definitely not just you. Long phone calls are incredibly draining for me as well. Even more so than in-person conversations, and I’m the kind of introvert who gets tired just from one-on-one time with close friends, which we’re *supposed* to be good at… I found that frequent quick texts, FB messages, funny emails, and the occasional IM session really help to alleviate my friends’ feelings that we’re not staying in touch when we don’t talk on the phone every week, and the short messages I send that rotate through various forms of social media so they never get too long or require too much time all at once really help me stay active and involved in maintaining ongoing contact.
i feel the same way about accidental friend breakups.
I’m not great with people either; I find a good way to maintain connections is to send them articles I think they might enjoy. Then they know I’m thinking of them, and we have a thing to talk about should they want to talk, but if they want us to just be passing social, they can register amusement and move on.
The Toast has been a critical source of “Hi I miss you and you like tea, read this article, isn’t it amazing, I know they say not to read the comments, but READ THE COMMENTS.”
I feel you. And then comes this wondering – did I fade out on you or did you fade out on me? Are we not talking now because that’s what you want or because I dropped the ball? – could I pick back up the ball?
Yes.
I had a friend breakup! Fun times.
Back in junior year of high school my best friend of many years announced “I’m divorcing you.” That was it, no explanation, no nothing. Best I can tell, she chose to do that because I stopped driving her to school. She was pretty much a horrible person. This came after several smaller scenarios where she cut me off for awhile before taking me back. More than ten years later I’m happy that it’s over.
“Her senses sharpened to the point that she could smell shampoo on a tourist’s hair from a mile away”
….da fuq?
My best friend in freshman year of high school was this super-cool punk rock girl. We went to see movies about the Sex Pistols together and ended up calling each other “cunt” for months because we both wanted to be Johnny Rotten. Then she dropped me for someone I guess she thought was cooler? I’m not sure. It hurt at the time but I got over it. Anyway years later she found me on Facebook and she has 3 kids and likes to talk about how bad chemicals are, so, well, bullet dodged I guess.
Friend break-ups are THE WORST. I was about 14 when I broke up with my best friend of about 9-10 years. There was about a year of her being mean to me, ignoring me, telling me to my face that she didn’t care what I had to say (she was the first person to ever tell me to “fuck off”).
I decided to try slowing fading out of her life but the first time I sat with other people at lunch she acted like I’d written “I HATE YOU” IN 10ft letters on the wall. I’m sure she wasn’t the only one at fault, I probably did some shitty things that I don’t remember/block out, but my memories of that time are really painful.
She’s good friends with my sister now and we chat if we see each other but it feels weird.
Between freshman and sophomore years of high school one of the guys in our friend group just vanished. Like, completely stopped talking to any of us or responding to friendly overtures or sitting with us at lunch. We’d see him around school with completely different people and he wouldn’t even make eye contact. It was weird because our friend group had been a huge amalgam of three different smaller groups that fused together due to shared club affiliation in middle school: my friend group, another group I didn’t know so well, and his friend group, and we were all hanging out because of him.
So after he vanished, it didn’t take too long for our big group to fall apart, but in an unexpected way where both smaller groups swapped some members, the two other guys he had essentially abandoned from his own middle school days became part of my friend group for a year or so, and we all stayed really good acquaintances afterward and wrote nice things in each other’s yearbooks.
I’ve had I Am Bread on my steam wishlist for WEEKS and I’m wondering whether this website is a good enough excuse to break my “no buying stuff for yourself in December” rule. It’s not like anyone’s going to think to buy me a video game about bread for Christmas, is it?
– a gaming ex-baker
My best friend in high school stopped talking to me with no explanation. I went to pieces. Looking back with the wisdom of age, I think she might have been trying to do a Slow Fade and I refused to notice, but at the time, it was the most horrible thing that had ever happened to me. My latent depression attacked with a vengeance, I was horribly emo and miserable all over the school, and two years of high school are still a bit of a blur.
…I handle rejection much better now, just in case anybody was wondering.
FRIEND BREAKUP: in seventh grade I was sharing a locker with two girls in my class (it was a tall, person sized locker. They once locked me in at my request it so we could all laugh about how we locked someone in our locker, LOL!). One of them was in my girl scout troop and was a frequent guest at my house for sleepovers. One day she stopped talking to me. If I came up to the locker at the same time as her she would walk away. And my school was TINY, we had like ALL of our classes together, and she would straight up ignore me from 8 AM to 3 PM. I never found out why. Whenever I remember it now, it bugs the CRAP out of me. Though at least with age and distance it only bugs me in the same way that it bugs me when I read internet articles called “5 Completely Unsolved Mysteries that No One Will Ever Know the Answer To” and then I immediately demand answers to all of them.
Friend breakup: I tend to be a serial-monogafriend, so I had a best friend all through primary school and high school who drifted away one we went on to study different things, and I met New Best Friend through Music and Emo and Passion and Fangirling. We were kind of inseparable, we went to shows together and she stayed at my house all the time when she came up to the city from her little-country-town home. We had so many in-jokes and particular passions for curiously specific things, and all in all it was a perfect late-teens-early-twenties friendship.
And then I met the love of my life, in line for a Brand New show in which she had been holding a place for me. At first, it was all friends together, but I know I became the obnoxious I-don’t-want-to-lose-you friend who gets a boyfriend while really spending all my time with him. And she said she knew, and we wouldn’t stop, but we drifted apart and ended up Not Speaking and it felt like a breakup that I cannot phrase in any terms currently in the lexicon. It was not a lesbian relationship. It was not a traditionally romantic relationship. It was a friendship that was made by two young women learning what they were actually like in their adult lives, which I think is far more important than old schoolfriends. It was wonderful and weird and I guess would have changed over time as we grew older, but it never got the chance.
It really hurt. I haven’t really had any other close friends since. I’m still with the love of my life, and he is my best friend, but sometimes another friend is something I miss. (Sometimes I couldn’t care less, though…)
She sent me a message on MySpace months later, saying sorry. I never replied.
This made me wish there was a way to "Favorite" posts.
Kaiser! (anyone from SK?)
One friend I had when I was 12 – I was awful and moody and needy and she wanted to be cool (which I wasn’t). After multiple hig break ups that ended with me sobbing and grovelling, we faded and I felt upset for a bit and got over it.
At sixteen, a friend who was mean to everyone (my most common statememt to her was ‘thank God we’re friends, because I couldn’t handle being your enemy’) told the whole school that I called her a bitch and a slut because I’d asked her to be nicer to a mutual friend. She said something unforgivable on MSN Messenger, I believe, and I don’t remember what it was, but I never got over it.
Recently a friend dropped me while I was going through severe depression, and after a while of seeing her do fun things with our mutual friends on Facebook, I deleted her. Then she asked a mutual friend why, and triggered a friendship post-mortem. I awkwardly offered to re-add her on facebook and now everything is the same except we both have one extra person on our friends list…
But of those only the middle one was definitely not at all my fault. The others… Eh.