Grenades

Recently I’ve been recalling a lot of random memories from my youth, and I have to say, I was a very misguided person in my younger years.

I remembered one instance in particular where my friend had a crush on a girl at school, and after he finally mustered up enough courage to speak with her, she rejected him.

Ah, how crazed puppy love can make you.

You see, after he got rejected, he got pissed. This was to my knowledge, the first time he had ever tried to pick up a girl, and he was obsessive on a scary level. He would actually write her name hundreds of times in his notebook, filling up entire pages with her name spelled in different fonts, sizes and colors. Side note: I’m pretty sure the only reason he did that was because tv shows at the time depicted the same thing thus turning it into an ensuing stereotype, but it was weird nonetheless.

Anyhow, after the rejection heard ‘round the world, you’ll never guess what lover boy did. Okay so maybe you will guess, I don’t know.

My friend ended up coming to me, angry, thirsty for retribution. He went from being completely infatuated with this girl, to obsessively hating her. We wasn’t asking me to do anything in particular for him, but he wanted something. So what did I, the level headed, unaffiliated friend do? I obliged him.

What? I still can’t believe I did this. There are red flags all over this situation, covered in caution tape, profusely telling me to stay uninvolved, and yet I decided to be the loyal friend and help my fellow man out. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ll help out my friends any chance I get, but if the help they’re looking for is outrageously out of line, then they need to realize that. What I should have done to help my friend out was explain to him how vengeance isn’t appropriate and that this was not the end of the world. That would have been the best thing a friend could have done, but it was overshadowed by my desire to be seen as the loyal friend.

So anyways, what I did wasn’t all that extravagant or outrageous, but it is still off-putting to me. I ended up writing a letter to the girl which I planned to put in her locker. I don’t remember what I wrote, but even though it was much more level headed than what my friend had in mind, it still would have come off offensively to her, as I was pretty much calling her a bitch.

My mom ended up discovering the letter it in my room and confronted me about it. After the discovery, my better judgment finally took hold of the situation, and I never delivered the letter. The truth of the matter is this: The girl did nothing to deserve any of this. She was not interested in dating my friend, and my friend and I should have respected that decision. You can’t force someone to like you, and you definitely shouldn’t feel vengeful toward them if they don’t.

I’m disappointed in how I acted back then. All I was doing by agreeing to help my friend was asking for trouble, and I can only imagine what would have gone down should the letter have been delivered. Part of me says that I was still just a kid and didn’t know what I was doing, but another part of me says that I should have known better at that age. I guess in the end I’m just grateful that I was intelligent enough to learn from my mistake.

So today’s Q isn’t really a question:

Tell me about a childhood story of yours that taught you a lesson

Stay frosty