Want a friend? Be a friend.

What do I want to say in this blog? Everything. I don't even know where to start with all this, but I'll give it a shot.

This one's been weighing on my mind a lot lately. Weighing might not even be an accurate description - festering is more to the core of the matter. I've been wondering, what is the cost of friendship? Is it a matter of dollars? A matter of loyalty? Both? Well, I don't have a definitive answer for that other than it seems to be a matter of worth one way or the other. Worth the time, worth the phone call just because, worth the late night bottle of wine when you and your boyfriend break up, worth the present in the mail just 'cause...basically when it comes down to it, its just plain and simple worth the effort. I can pretty easily categorize the real friends from the friends of "convenience" based aloen on the theory of who takes the time and effort to contact me without any pretext.

Funny, you can be a great friend for a long time and during the course of that friendship, you can slough off all the little things that seem to bother you, but when they start to mount and you can't get them off your chest, those little things become the big things and the big things are the friendship deal breakers. One person always having to make the call or send the email is a little-big thing.

I've always said that honesty is the best policy and with such a policy, I've lost a lot of "friends". By "friends" I mean people who blow smoke up my ass and want to be uber-friendly only when they need something from me. Or even greater is the people who say that they love my friendship and my cut-to-the-chase approach with life, until, it applies to them. Yes, yes...when that happens, I know, I know, I'm the bad guy and the "you were supposed to be my friend!" friend. Well...when you're acting like an ass and I apply the same thing that you admire about me to YOU, how does that make me the bad guy? Because I didn't kiss yours ass blindly in the name of being best buds? Guess what? I realize I'm not God or anyone's judge, but I do have a high expectation of my friends to be decent people and act accordingly. How great of a friend am I to sit idly by and let you make an ass out of yourself and a fool out of me?

Don't get me wrong. There are a small handful of friends who are on the same honest page with me and those are the ones who I have known through thick and thin. As for the rest, they say the best rise to the top, but I'm going to choose to see that as the fattiest rise to the top and they are the ones who ultimatley just stick on you and weigh you down until you you run them off!!!

Uuuugggghhh!!!! Ok, well it felt a little bit better to get that one off my chest.