Things I used to forget before I had a place to write them down...etc.

From Et cetera

Sometimes, your lifestyle will change very suddenly and very dramatically. Now, when I say "sudden" I don't mean like...waking up one morning and getting out of bed only to realize that it's not a bed at all but the stomach of a recently-thawed prehistoric mammoth and you're stuck alone in this abandoned research laboratory on Baffin Island wearing nothing but a set of snorkelling equipment and a shiny pearl necklace with "Yours Forever" engraved on each jewel. No, not like that, more gradual than that, but definitely a quick change relatively speaking. A better example: All throughout elementary school, you hang out with Friend X. Friend X is a cool guy, he likes tobogganing in the winter and badminton on summer days when the wind is calm. Friend X's mom always packs him a lunch even though the two of you always eat it at recess and then have real lunch at your house across the street when the bell rings. You forgive him for his follies like the time he spit milk through his nose in laughter and ruined your nice clean jogging pants and congratulate him on his achievements, like the Perfect Attendance certificate he received that had a signature written in gold on it.

So, you and Friend X conclude elementary school on good terms and spend the better part of July hanging out, firing cap guns at one another while zooming around the neighbourhood on bikes with cardboard in the spokes to make it sound like a real motor and everything's good. August comes along and your families both decide to go camping at two entirely different locations. No big deal, it's happened in summers past, nothing to worry about. When you arrive back from your two-week adventure in the hinterlands, you find that Friend X has not yet returned home, but he did send a Batman postcard. Right on.

Now, Friend X returns home, but you don't see him at first because his family is moving into a new house. Now, they're not moving far away, in fact they're not even leaving the neighbourhood. In fact, the new house is even closer to yours than Friend X's old pad. September rolls around, Friend X's family is settled in their new house and you head to junior high school. You end up in a different home room than Friend X, although you do share some classes, and your locker winds up beside Enemy Z on one side and on the other, the person who will ultimately become Friend Y.

Suddenly, you don't own a cap gun anymore because it broke and you never saved up for that fancy copper one at the dollar store. Instead, you spent your allowance money on winning a green gumball that entitled you to a free rental at the local video store. You save the gumball and ask Friend X, who you haven't really spent much time with since junior high began, if he wants to come pick out something from the video store and watch it on the weekend. He agrees.

So, you and Friend X go to the store and choose some random action movie and go to your house and watch it.

It is enjoyable.

But then at Monday's dentist appointment (one that got you out of first period Science with Mrs. Ugly might I add), you learn that you have to get braces, which, decidedly, sucks. Despite the pleas to your parents that you don't need them and you'll do just fine without braces, nothing you say can sway them from booking you in with the orthodontist. So you miss a few more days of school to get your braces done up and when you return, you discover for the first time that you haven't been eating lunch with Friend X in the school gymnasium for the whole year. Instead, you've been reading the sequel to Hatchet by Gary Paulsen, alone in the corner. With this startling revelation exposed, you resolve to spend that very day at lunch with Friend X. But when you get to the gym, expecting him to be huddled in a corner somewhere as wll, you learn that he's sitting with a group of five people from his home room. Five people you don't know!.

Now, at this point, you can't just sit down and make yourself at home with these strangers. Maybe if you had more charisma. Maybe if you were popular. Maybe if you didn't have braces. But now? No, not a chance. You run away and cower, opening to chapter four of The River and drifting off like a log into the boundless solitary realms of your imagination, Sodalicious fruit snacks in hand.

Now, this incoherent and incomplete tale of Friend X is not a story about losing friends because I'm pretty sure everyone (or at least anyone who reads this page) remembers how the social hierarchy of high school indiscriminately boots people out of their respective cliques at random it seems. No, if you recall, this is supposed to be a story about changing lifestyles, which I admit, can quite often be related to who your friends are. At this point in our story, your life is going to change because Friend X has suddenly become Acquaintance X and you're sure to never fire another cap gun in his direction again. How did that happen? Well, no good reason really, but nevertheless, here we are.

Acquaintance X now spends his weekends playing Playstation with some of his other friends and occasionally hitting up a McDonalds or a movie theatre. You do a lot of reading (including the third exciting novel in the Hatchet series, "Brian's Winter") and listen to CDs lamenting about how you wish you could dance as well as MC Hammer. Now, if you're normal, within the first few months of junior high school, you should be realizing how miserable your life is and how horribly depressed you are in Grade 7. You'll be searching for things to blame this shocking twist of events. Was it the gumball at the video store? The move into a new house? The braces? And then as you finally settle on a scapegoat, you absentmindedly find yourself punching your own jaw in an attempt to cause damage to the orthodontist's fine work and carving things like "Death to Dentistry" in your drywall when realistically, no one is to blame. Not even yourself.

Enter Acquaintance Y. In addition to sharing locker proximity, Acquaintance Y will occasionally lend you some looseleaf in class when you've run out far sooner than you should have by drawing horrible depraved images of dead orthodontists and their crying families. He is also quick to lend you a pen when you've run out for precisely the same reason. Seeing this portents a possible friendship and so you decide to actively pursue it by following him home from school one day. And I don't mean all stalker-like. I mean, you start a conversation with Acquaintance Y on the way out the door and rather than heading home, you just walk with him to continue your conversation. He doesn't question it, but if he did, you'd tell him that this is always how you get home. After all, he's just an acquaintance and doesn't know where you live, saving a strange embarrassment.

Carrying on this behaviour for several days, hoping the slight detour en route home will pay off, eventually he invites you into his home. There, you meet his parents and play a rousing round of air hockey. Instantly, he becomes Friend Y and just like that, your lifestyle has changed. Now you're going to spend more time playing air hockey and less time plotting the murder of all the world's dentistry staff. Depression, especially at that age, is highly exhausting and I'm surprised as many junior high students carry on with it as long as they do.

Now, Friend Y does not singlehandedly change your lifestyle. As the years go by, you become friends with Friend Y's friends and sometimes even with Friend Y's friend's friends and/or family. The tree can actually get quite complicated, but you just don't notice because it happens over a longer period of time than most people pay attention to. And what of Acquaintance X? Well, he still exists. The two of you are not enemies by any stretch of the imagination, but any talk of the past (or indeed, any talk at all) seems to have been suspended.

So, you and Friend Y conclude high school on good terms then he goes to college and you go to bed. He makes all kinds of friends in college and you don't spend as much time with him as you did just out of convenience. But get this, in his second year of college, Friend Y actually makes friends with Friend X, who unbeknownst to you, also went to college. One day, Friend Y invites you over to his swanky on-campus residence for a party with Friends H through W. As well as Friend X. You and Friend X are naturally happy to spend time with one another simply because it's been so long. So everyone has a good time drinking retarded amounts of liquor and abusing god knows how many contraband substances in the process.

Before you know it, your social life has transformed into spending time with all these people who met at this party. You all have similar tastes in music, video games and drinks and just like that, you live a new life. At this point, you don't realize how much your social life has changed of course because you haven't been monitoring it step-by-step like I have in this article. But when you consider that several years prior you were shooting cap guns at Friend X long before Friend Y was even a part of the picture, yeah I'd say things have changed.

More idle musings to confuse the masses. I find that once again, I have no point.