Ryan ChartrandRandy Newman once sang the lyrics,”You’ve got a friend in me. When the road looks rough ahead and you’re miles and miles from your nice warm bed, just remember what your old pal said – boy you’ve got a friend in me.”
Ah, what nice lyrics from such a nice song on the subject of the ever-so-important friendships that we all have in life. In another example, I’m sure that Paris Hilton many times has said, “I love my girlfriends” as she takes breaks between her snorts of blow in the bathroom stall of whatever night club she normally frequents1.
While the line said by Newman might be more poetic than the line Hilton normally likely says between her white lines, both have an underlying theme still of friendship. This brings me to this week’s “Guide to Life,” as you probably know that even the closest of friends can get on each other’s nerves. But with this column, I’ll break down some of the things that you might currently be doing that certainly should stop.
The first is to not be the Constantly Using Stupid Movie and TV Show Catch Phrases Jackass. This Jackass actually originated way back in the 1700s2 when Paul Revere yelled, “The British are coming!” People everywhere in their best Revere impersonation yelled that to each other, annoying the shit out of pretty much everyone around. Today, this still holds true as one of the most annoying things you can do is yell anything you see on TV ranging from Dave Chappelle’s “I’m Rick James, Bitch” to a Borat-accented “Nice” to Carlos Mencia’s “Der Der Der.”
While it might be funny to the person saying these things, in reality, it is one of the cheapest forms of comedy you can find by using the jokes from TV in your own horrible attempts at these impersonations. This is not to mention that using anything by Mencia won’t work because it wasn’t ever funny in the first place, so trying to quote Mencia as a good comedian is like trying to quote abortion as a good comedian3.
The next thing to make all your friendships better is to not be the Horrible Cell Phone Using Jackass. This might be one of the worst ones there is. Scenario: You’re taking an after class nap, when all of a sudden your cell phone rings4 promptly waking you up. Instead of answering, you decide to dismiss the call, and let it go to voice mail. Just as you get all comfortable back in bed and just about to fall back asleep, your voice mail rings then keeps you up.
So, you listen to the voice mail and it is your friend saying something like, “OH MY GOD DUDE CALL ME BACK JUST CALL ME BACK RIGHT NOW THIS IS SOME SERIOUS SHIT.” Of course, you then have to call back, pretty much immediately, but what happens? Yep, Mr. Important caller with such important news then doesn’t answer his phone.
As you try to go back to sleep, you then get interrupted the third time as he then calls back with the ever so important news being something like, “Hey so I thought that the girl I liked was mad at me because she didn’t respond to my MySpace comment, but then she did, so nevermind.” Moral of the story: Don’t demand someone to call you back unless it is important. Oh, and answer your damn phone when that person calls back5.
The third way to avoid being a Jackass to your friends is to not be the Money Mooching Jackass. This one might be more apparent to me than anyone else because many of my friends are fellow Jews, but hang with me for this one either way.
So, you decide to go out to eat with your friends, you get out of the car at whatever restaurant you’re at, and then the bomb explodes right in your face6, “Oh shit, dude, I forgot my wallet. Can you spot me?” Now, this wouldn’t be a problem if it just happened a few times, but after this continues to happen you start realizing that if you took all the money that your friend owed you and instead put it towards, say science, you’d probably single-handedly be able to fund the money needed to find a cure for AIDS. Or save Darfur or something. Hey, you get the picture.
So, that brings me to the end of another “Guide to Life.” Like always, I hope you learned something and will continue to foster great friendships with the help of this column. Love and peace and I’ll see you all next week.
1 But wasn’t her acting good in “House of Wax”?
2 Thank you Wikipedia for making me look knowledgeable.
3 Or Napoleon Dynamite as being a good comedy. It was OK, but not GOOD. Yes, I said it.
4 Seriously change your ringtone though. That song is lame. Yes, you.
5 Also, the moral is to not call me between the times of 2 p.m. to 6 p.m., because likely I am sleeping during that time.
6 No, that wasn’t another Paris Hilton reference. Get your mind out of the gutter.
Mike Heimowitz is a journalism senior and Mustang Daily humor columnist. See how he masters spell check at mikeheimowitz.com.