Pogo.com. It’s an online game website that features some favorites like Monopoly and Scrabble as well as some other cute games. Almost every day my best friend and I log on to play at least a couple games of Scrabble. This is one of the ways that we nurture a friendship that is seasoned with wit and intelligence sprinkled on top of retard sauce on top of laughter noodles.
So we enter a monopoly slots game room online… and are subjected to what I suppose is a microcosmic example of the most empty and idiotic banter I’ve seen in ages, complete with emoticons thrown around with reckless abandon. Maybe it’s because I don’t speak squirrel-face or scream-face with people I know, but inside the chat window next to the far more amazing game of monopoly slots, I was lost. I witnessed both the obliteration of intelligence and the antithesis of friendship. My eyes have been opened to a community of thousands of examples of people who don’t commune on the basis of common ground other than wasting time together and reinforcing the unchallenging.
As for wasting time… sometimes you gotta do it. It’s even more fun with a buddy. Zoning out together without remorse is a skill friendships need to survive. But I’ve found that the best friendships spend the most time entertaining, exercising, and enriching the mind. To me, it’s about coming together to become critics of the world around you–to turn it upside down and inside out and not be alone in doing it. To consider things together. To detect the humorous. To create things together.
Friendship ought to be empowering. Not an excuse to become mindless and without opinion. Call me an idealist, and I am, but the possibilities of two or more intelligent people coming together on the plane of friendship are insane. Far better than squirrel-face squirrel face surprise-face oh-face mean-face omg!! Why compromise?