Body Language

My friend Luis always assumes that I am a great judge of character because I used to want to be a behavioral profiler.

I often wonder about that.

If you are an excellent judge of character, or are trained to be an excellent judge of character...what are your friends like?

It's like that cliche that psychologists/psych majors always get: can you tell me what i'm thinking?

No rats ass, I can't. But I can tell you right now what the fuck i'm thinking...

Anyway, it brough back the old memories of "the best friend". I haven't thought of her in a long while, enough that I can't remember her phone number and my mom now forgets her name ("that...whatchamaccalit, whatserface...ah, blah!")

Truth be told, it was going to happen sometime soon. As soon as we graduated college and she turned into this overborn catholic, something inside me knew that things were going to go down.

That was, I think, one of my biggest disappointments. And not just because I lost a friend, but because I thought i'd made an awful error in judgement.

I never really counted for change, and let's face it, I slipped.

The signs were there. Even my own mother pointed out that she would gladly cart out my soul to the highest bidder just to save her parents.

One point: we're not ingrates. We respect our parents, we love our parents, we just don't sell our friends reputations to our parents.

They're our friends. And at some point in your life, your life and your parents life take parallel roles, where you live them side by side but no longer in the same line. I think the pop magazines call it "the teenage years".

I never once said a bad word about my friend to my parents. And this isn't because I don't love my parents or I'm not as close to them as she is, but i'm just loyal to my friends.

In the same way that my other friends have complained about minor offenses i've done, but have never said anything bad about me to their parents. Or for that point, something bad about her.

Maybe it's some unwritten code that she just wouldn't sign...

I think, after that, we were left dumbfounded by what we just learned.

Why the hell would her parents think that about us when we hardly knew them, WTF was she saying to them...is this how she saw us?

Being close to someone distorts our perceptions, as being close to some things ruins our vision in real life.

Now it's not even sadness for the loss of a friendship, but more of...annoyance on how you can be so stupid. How could you have missed your mark. And damn, weren't you just dumb for that one decision in your life.