Of Family and Friends by Tom M

Sometimes you just want some alone time. ( The reasons for this alone time vary... Use your imagination ). And inevitably one of your friends is going to call and want you to do something, neigh, force you to do something. At this point you will have to make up an excuse. Now your friends aren't stupid. Well, alright, maybe they are. Okay, most likely they are. But they've known you for a while, and they've heard all of your excuses before. Even the really lame ones that a month old chimpanzee would be able to see through. But for some reason your friends believe them. These include: "I'd like to, but I have to mow my grandmother's grass" even though your grandmother lives in a second-story apartment. Or, "I can't, I have to babysit my baby brother," even though you don't have a baby brother, or any brother for that matter. But these are your friends and they are expected to believe such half-assed attempts at excuses. But they only fall for the same ones about thirty times, at which point you have to start getting some new material. You have to be creative. Put some heart into it. Try things that they have no way of checking out to make sure whether or not you are indeed telling the truth. Such as, "Gee, I'd really like to go with you to the 10th Annual Butter Churning Showdown, but I have to have my heart replaced with one from a baboon, and today's the only day I could do it. I'm really sorry. Maybe tomorrow." Now this is a damned good excuse. Not only is it so far-fetched that your friends will have to believe it (because you couldn't possibly make up something so stupid), they also probably won't check your story out, as it is far too much trouble to call the nearest baboon-to-human heart transplant facility to verify your story.

Then, there's your family. Honor thy father and mother. La-di-freakin-doo-da. Throughout your life, your parents are, in order: your best friends, your worst enemies, your best friends again. When you are a child, your parents are your heroes. Hey, who else is going to get you that box of Count Chocula on the top shelf? Without them, you would starve. They drive you places you want to go, buy you things you don't need. It's great. Sure they do some things you don't like, such as making you bathe and attend school, but overall they're pretty darn cool. Then, right around the time you pop your first zit, your parents begin to drastically change. You're a teenager now, and your parents are still treating you like a kid. They are still making you bathe, and still making you attend school. What gives them the right to do this? Just because they created you, and raised you for twelve years? Yeah, like that was real hard! You now feel compelled to rebel against your parents if for no other reason than that because it's just plain fun. So sure, go ahead and get your eye pierced. All the kids are doing it, and parents just loathe it! Start dating people you know specifically that your parents will hate:

"Gee, Sarah, I know you want to start dating, but Joshua's a little old for you.
"Mom, you're such a hypocrite. You married Daddy and you were two years younger than him!!"
"Yes, honey, buy you're only fourteen and Joshua is fifty-seven."
"Mom, I hate you!!!"

But then, when you get to be around twenty-three or so, your parents become your best friends again. You're out of college, you have no job, no money, no clothes, no friends, no place to stay. Suddenly, ol' Ma and Pa are looking pretty good about now. It's time to come crawling back to them. "Hey, Mom and Dad! Remember the last ten years that I've hated you? I was only kidding! Pretty good one, huh? I bet I really had you going all those years!!"

Such is the way that life goes between parents and a child. You struggle through the bad times, and enjoy the good times. Bad times such as when they tried to tell you the facts of life:

--Mom: "Johnny, honey, sit down. Your father and I have something important to discuss with you."

--Johnny: "Make it quick. I'm trying to watch Melrose Place."

--Dad: "Johnny, turn off the TV, son. This is very important."

--Johnny: "Well it damn well better be. Amanda was just about ready to kill Jake for sleeping with Samantha."

--Dad: "Johnny, you're ten now, and your body is going to start going through some changes."

--Johnny: "Yeah, like getting bigger. It's called growing, Dad. It's not a new concept."

--Mom: "No, your father's not talking about your body growing, well, uh..."

--Dad: "See Johnny, men have something that women don't and ... "

--Johnny: "You mean a penis?"

--Mom: "Where did you learn that awful word?"

--Johnny: "Off TV."

--Dad: "...And women have something that men don't."

--Johnny: "A penis."

--Mom: "No Johnny. Women don't have a p-p-pen... that. They have something called a v-v...something else."

--Johnny: So what you're saying is that boys have ****s and girls have ******s."

--Mom and Dad: "Johnny!!!! Where did you learn those terms?"

--Johnny: "On Sesame Street. It's part of their special sexual awareness month."

--Mom: "Well, no more TV in this house, young man!"

--Johnny: "Gee willikers, ma!"

--Dad: "Anyway, Johnny, you may have feelings and feel like you need to release these... emotions. It is a part of discovery that every young person must face..."

--Johnny: "You mean masturbation?"

--Mom: "Good god, Johnny! Where in the hell...?"

--Johnny: "School, Mom. They taught us that in the second grade!!"

--Dad: "That's it! You're coming out of the public education system! Home schooling from now on, Johnny!!"

--Johnny: "Gosh dang-gumbit!"

--Mom: "Well Johnny, I...guess..."

--Dad: "Uh, son... Um, you just go back to your Melrose Place..."

--Johnny: "It's too late. Amanda's already had an abortion, but it wasn't Grant's baby. She had been sleeping around with Tony, who was in a homosexual relationship with Jake...."

Now moments like these were pretty painful, but they are all part of growing up, and it is fun to look back on those times and laugh. But there was also good times, like when your parents took you to exotic places on vacation.

--Johnny: "Are we there yet?"

--Dad: "Not yet, Johnny. We just got in the car. We haven't even left our driveway, for Christ's sake!"

--Johnny: "Oh."

--Mom: "Just sit tight, Johnny."

--Johnny: "Let's sing a song. 99 Bottles of Beer!"

--Dad: "The hell you say!! Try 99 Bottles of Non-Alcoholic Beer."

--Johnny: "Yeah!! Okay. Ninety-nine bottles of non-alcoholic beer on the wall... ninety nine bottles of non-alcoholic beer..."

--Mom and Dad: "...You take one down, you pass it aro..."

--Johnny: "I'm tired of singing this song. Let's play something else."

--Dad: "Dammit, Johnny! You started the damned song, boy, and you're gonna finish it!"

--Johnny: "But I gotta go to the bathroom. My batter is going to burst."

--Mom: "That's 'bladder', honey."

--Johnny: "Yeah, that's gonna burst, too."

--Dad: "Son of a bitch! You just went to the bathroom five minutes ago. Now you're just gonna have to hold it!"

--Johnny: "Now are we there?"

--Dad: "Don't test me, boy. I'll turn this freakin' car around so fast, you won't know what happened."

--Mom: "We'll be there in awhile, Johnny."

--Johnny: "Oh."

--Dad: "What the...?? Oh, for Pete's sake... Johnny, for the love of God! Get your ass off the back window!"

--Mom: "It's not polite to moon people. Especially a car full of nuns."

--Dad: "That's it. Trip's over! We're goin' home."

--Johnny: "No! I was just playin'! I'll be good.

--Dad: "Alright, but one more stunt like that, and you're going home... With belt marks on your ass!!"

--Johnny: "Hey Mom and Dad! Look at the old guy we just passed. It looked like he was drooling! He looked funny!"

--Mom: "Johnny, that was your grandfather. We don't make fun of older people."

--Dad: "Alright!! Enough! I'll teach you to respect your elders, boy. I'm coming back there!"

--Mom: "Don't take your hands off of the wheel, you'll get us all killed!"

--Dad: "Well, your son has it coming!"

--Mom: "My son? So now he's my son?!"

--Dad: "@#$%*!!!"

--Johnny: "@#$%*!!!"

--Mom: "Johnny!"

--Dad: "What in the hell?! Boy, where did you learn that word? You can guarantee that I'm gonna unlearn it outta ya, in a minute!"

--Johnny: "Are we there now?"

--Dad: "So help me God, boy! I'm gonna swerve this car into oncoming traffic if you don't shut your damn yapper!!!"

**Later**

--Johnny: "Wow, we're finally here! It's beautiful! It's way better than I ever imagined it! Thanks, Mom and Dad! I love you both!"

--Mom: "Johnny, this is just a gas station. We only left home five minutes ago."

Of course you never got to your destination, but it was driving there that was all the fun. It's quality family moments like these that make us all realize just how glorious life is.

Your parents and friends are great, but there are no greater friends than your own brother and sister. You've lived with these people all your life. You've taken baths together and seen each other naked when you were infants. (This could possibly explain the high rate of sibling marriages in the south. ) You are stuck with these people, and vice versa. You can call your sibling a stupid, crack-smoking, ugly, doodie head and they can't do one thing about it. You can beat the hell out of your siblings and, still, they have to like you because you are their sibling. Whereas if you happen to call your friend a "jerk", you're not talking to each other for months. Such is the glory of having a brother or sister. Unless you are the youngest. It is one of the additions to the Ten Commandments, I think the seldom-remembered number thirteen or fourteen, that states: if thou has a younger sibling, then thou must beat-eth the living shit out of him. I know, because I'm the youngest in my family. When I was younger, my older brother used to walk by me and I'd say "Hi!", and a second later I'm lying on the ground with a bloody nose and my underwear over my head. Older brothers and sisters are evil. Their meanness is cold, uncalculated, and pretty much random. And there is only one defense that younger siblings have for this. It's the old "Fall-to-the-ground-and-roll-into-a-fetus-like-position" defense. It doesn't help much, but at least it keeps the damage to a minimum. I soon learned that when my brother would walk by, I would say "Hi!", then quickly drop to the ground in this defensive position. It just saved us both the hassle of him having to chase me around for ten minutes before he kicked my ass. This tactic eventually gets embedded in your brain, and every now and then I'll have a Vietnam-like flashback when I say hi to someone and immediately hit the floor. It's rather embarrassing. And being youngest has other drawbacks as well. Our family scrap book has all these pictures of my older brother and sister when they were babies, and my page has only one picture. And that's a stick figure I drew of myself when I was three. I asked my parents about the lack of photos from my childhood and they just said, "Well, by the time we got to you, it was sort of, 'yeah, been there, done that'." And the youngest always gets things ruined by the older siblings. Like when I got my learner's permit to drive, and I was really eager to learn, but my parents said, "Well, your brother and sister both wrecked the car when they were learning how to drive, so we're not going to let you do the same thing..." And school is the worst. On the first day of classes, the teacher always looks down at you over her spectacles, squints at you, and says, "Ohhhh. Your Jim's little brother, eh? Why don't you just take a seat right beside my desk." But being the youngest did have some advantages. Like... Wait, I'm still thinking. Oh, okay. Yeah. Wait, nope. No advantages whatsoever. You're pretty much screwed.

But throughout life, your family and friends are there. So take care of them, because they're pretty much all that you have. When life gets you down and you think that it can't get any worse, you can always count on your family and friends to point out that indeed it can.