Broken Phones, Name tags, and Irish Potatoes

I’m going to talk about a special person.  I won’t mention his name because of privacy concerns, but it starts with “M” and ends with “aher”.  I was told to talk about a person that makes me happy.  To be honest, I don’t really know if this guy makes me happy.  In fact, most of the time I just cry after he talks to me.  Just kidding; it’s quite the opposite actually.  He’s probably the reason I have a smile on every day.  If I were to describe him with one word, it would be "indescribable".  I’ve known him for about seven years, but he makes our relationship look like thirty years.  This friend is very special to me since he has made me laugh in times of deep sadness and anger.  Most people have never actually seen me sad or angry.  That kind of image of me is produced by this friend.  He shares joy through the stories he tells whether or not they’re true.  (He usually claims they’re all true)  He is the driving force behind all my endeavors and sets me back up when I'm about to fall apart.  In this post, I’ll share two especially special stories that made me laugh and regain happiness in the past.

I’ll start out with a more recent one.  Recently, I was starting to feel depressed, as a result of the academic pressure and toxicity of junior year.  In the midst of this pressure, my friend completely annihilated the front screen of his phone. It was completely smashed to pieces and unusable.  Now I assumed that he dropped it himself out of carelessness, but here’s the story he told me.  “Alright so I go outside to play, right?  I come back inside and my younger sister is just like waiting there for me.  She told me that I played too much or something.  Anyways, I laughed, and then she took my phone.  She slammed it on the ground, but it didn’t break the first time.  Before I could pick it up, she took it and threw it again on the ground harder to make sure it broke.”  Whether this story is true or not, I do not know.  (However, you can still see the cracks on his phone screen from “the incident”.)  I do not remember how hard I laughed at this story.  I’ll probably remember this till I die, as it is a story of its own kind.

About a year ago, my friend had told me another humorous situation that had occurred upon him.  He told this story when I was feeling down last year because of the loss of my friend.  If you know him well enough, you’ll probably recognize this story. In subbie year, we had a science unit where the FabLab people came in and allowed us to make name tags using lasers and pieces of balsa wood.  The average student would design it with their name and perhaps a picture or two.  My friend was not average.  He thought it would be a clever idea to put the words “fuck” and “shit” in wingdings (a font that nobody can read) on his name tag.  Unfortunately, by uploading it to box, the application did not recognize the font, and converted it to Times New Roman.  It was public; everyone could see, even the teachers.  After finding out 5 hours later, he ran around the school trying to find the fab lab people in order to apologize.  That story put a smile back on my face and helped me move along despite the devastating conditions at the time.  Every day, he knows just the story to help cheer me up, especially when the midday blues start hitting me.

As you can see, my friend’s life is incredibly unique, and he uses humorous elements from it to express jubilation. These two stories especially connected with me, since they were told during very desperate times. The feeling that I get from laughter is priceless in the stressful years of high school, and my friend especially is able to bring it out of me.  Whenever I’m feeling down, I return to him in hopes of another equally entertaining story.  I can most certainly call him my friend, knowing that he will always be there for me during dark times, waiting with comical stories.  Hey buddy, if you’re reading this blog, cheers to seven years of storytelling!

Side note: If you’re wondering, yes, I did receive permission to share these stories.  Not only these stories, but also some other pending ones because of their vulgarity.  If you want to hear more stories like these, you can just go up and ask my friend. If you're looking for something especially entertaining, ask him about turtles and mental therapy.  He’ll probably tell you.