Our Friends

Trip Start Feb 10, 2006

Trip End May 31, 2006

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Flag of Argentina Buenos Aires, Argentina
Sunday, February 12, 2006

They say quality is more important than quantity. I don't believe this to be true about everything, but it is true about friendship. For some reason I have always been more inclined to keeping a limited amount of good friends than having to deal with many well-known people. This was not true in my teenage and young adult years as I had friends and acquaintances everywhere. As I matured and grew older I started to feel the emptiness that being surrounded by people who didn't really know you. And so it was that, as harsh as it may sound, I started getting rid of the excess baggage. I discarded the people that were good for going out and partying and talking about trivial stuff, and tried to deepen my relationship with those who showed some intent in knowing me, and vice versa.
But it is only occasionally in one's life, that the planets align and you meet a set of people that change your view of friendship. Aristotle had beautiful ideas about friendship and said that "a friend is a single soul dwelling in two bodies". This is what comes to mind when I think about the group of friends I have now.
It's amazing how we can all share the same eccentric, morbid, sarcastic, acid, apocalyptic sense of humor and all laugh in the same level, while other people look at us as if saying "it wasn't that funny". It's those liberating bursts of laughter that makes me feel so close to them sometimes. The strange way in which we talk and share our views as if we were talking to Larry King, exhibiting our deepest thoughts, always making them sound dramatically humorous is a favorite pastime.

Drunk at the Pool

Deliberating over something totally insignificant as if addressing the Nation is also one of the traits we enjoy having. But the most characteristic feature we have, is making a spectacle of ourselves in public. For some reason we love the shouting, the screaming, the laughing out loud, the acting, the dressing up, the posing, the grotesque topics. Not because we like attention or because we like others to notice us, but because we make an art of ridiculing ourselves. And that has been a good exercise to a valuable lesson: being able to laugh at yourself, and make fun of yourself without caring what the person in the other table thinks. This is how we have fun with ourselves and each other, exploring our limits, taking each other to the edge. Sometimes I feel my face will be permanently deformed by all the hard-core laughing sessions I have with these people.
It's such a deep understanding that sometimes there isn't the need to explain certain things or situations because with one look or expression you already know. I think we've all grown so much from knowing each other and feeding off each other. We've learned to take our flaws and convert them into virtues together. We help each other and feel protected all the time, and never alone. We're never alone. Even when we're apart there's always some link to a memory or something said during the day or an image that comes to mind about how important the people are to you. It's people like these that make you completely and purely uninterested in your own well-being at times.
We jokingly refer to ourselves as a family. When we go out for fun that's what we usually behave as. We stick together and take care of each other as if we were exactly that: members of some insane hippie family clan.
One of my favorite moments is when after a party, we've been dancing for 8 hours non stop, it's 7am and we step out of the dark like vampires into the morning sunshine, the sudden silence and comfortable nothing of just walking hand in hand like cripples down the street secretly wishing the night had never come to an end. Saying our good byes and then the next day getting together and talking about the crazy crap we pulled, with our usually energetic sense of humor.
The plus to all this is that we all work together. We work for different departments but all for the same company. So we see each other everyday. If our employers knew how much time we actually spend mucking around with each other during office hours while we could be productive in our jobs, we'd all be on welfare right now.

Something like this does not end. And it won't. You know who you all are..............