Flakes Of The World: Please Get It Together
By Thoughtis
We all have that one friend (or maybe several, let’s be honest) who is about as reliable as an alarm clock you can easily throw across the room. You invite them somewhere, plans are made, you prepare, you wait, and lo and behold — forty five minutes before you are supposed to meet them — they cancel. Car broke down, not feeling well, smoked too much weed, didn’t smoke enough weed, can’t deal with the sun, just ate an entire box of Cheez-Its and are not ready emotionally, the reasons are manyfold. What’s important is that they are not going to show up, and you will, once again, be stuck wondering why you have such an enormous flake for a friend.
What’s sad about these people is that they’re often so cool. When they do show up (when the royal “we” deigns you worthy of its presence), it’s amazing and incredibly fun. They can often be the life of the party, extremely fascinating, or just generally capable of holding a conversation that doesn’t center around last night’s episode of Whitney. So, like the glutton for punishment that you are deep down, you continue to make plans that you know are likely never going to see fruition. You continue to invite them to events on Facebook, knowing full well that even if they manage to click “maybe,” they’re likely going to show up three hours late at best. They are already clicking “maybe” on the Facebook event of life, actually inviting them to something on social media seems a bit redundant.
And these people are often the same ones who seem to operate on the most impossible of schedules. A lunch date is just far too much pressure, but they will happily text you at 1 a.m. on a Tuesday with an extremely vague question, like “what are you up to?” (Honestly, what do they expect us to say? “Oh, you know, just tending to my prize Alpaca flock — it’s shearing season soon and I want to get a good price for their coats at market.” Um, we’re sleeping, you enormous creeps.) There is absolutely no concept of time or society with these people — we’re all just formless blobs, drifting through our existence, waiting to get a phone call and go to a concert with 15 minutes’ notice.
But the truth is, flakes of the world, life does not work that way. It’s really cool when you make plans with someone and are relatively sure that they’re actually going to show up. It’s nice to be able to plan for the future — the near future, let’s not get carried away. How awesome would it be if we could just expect you to come to our parties on time, and maybe even bring a bottle of something decent? Extremely awesome. It’s not that you’re not awesome — it’s just that no one is worth all the absurdity you make us put up with.