Today I overslept, and since I didn’t come up with an idea yesterday, I’m scrambling for one at the same time I’m feeling that confused panic of having missed my intended wake-up time.
As a jog to my creative juices, I did my obscure holiday check, and today is Don’t Cry Over Spilled Milk Day, Make a New Friend Day and White Shirt Day, which apparently honors employees who helped the UAW become the sole bargaining agent with General Motors after a sit-down strike which ended on this day in 1937.
I think I’m just going to go with the barest sliver of an idea that I got, and try not be too disappointed that it isn’t brilliant or the funniest.thing.ever. Instead, I’ll be glad I got something original sent out, before I had to go to work, and without resorting to other tactics.
Today’s Word:
inimical
As in:
Preston Taylor was feeling the pressure. His calendar was telling him that today was Make New Friend Day, and he had never been particularly good at that. He wondered if whoever came up with the bright idea for this reason to sell cards even thought about the fact that making a friend was a process, it was not typically something that could be done in a single day.
He told himself “It’s just a calendar.” He was under no obligation to make friends or wear shirts or talk to some cat. He could just forget the tiny notation on the bottom of Thursday’s page, and go on with his life.
But, the page bothered him. Why was he resisting making friends? He might try just walking down the street at lunch, where it would have sidewalks filled with pedestrians. He could see himself, holding out his hand, and saying “Hi, I’m Preston. I’d like to be your friend.”
He grimaced. Right, that isn’t remotely awkward. He’d be lucky if no one called the cops and had him committed.
Preston wondered briefly why that was. He wondered what he would think if someone came up to him and offered him friendship on the street. “Because it was weird,” his brain offered. No one trusts weird things, and if you can’t trust someone, well, it’s hard to be their friend.
He then thought about situations which would make someone a true friend in the span of a day. Reasonably, two people could be united in a common crisis, like being trapped in an elevator, or trapped in a speeding bus that could explode if it slowed down to under 50 MPH. And this was friendship, not a romantic one. Because, he thought with a chuckle “relationships that start under intense circumstances, they never last.”
He supposed if he were serious about this making a friend thing, he could simply cause a crisis, and be trapped with some other person, and then they’d become friends… Until the other person found out that he’d caused the crisis, and never spoke to him again, because everyone knows the other person *would* find out. That’s like storytelling 101.
No. thought Preston. He would just mostly be himself, offer a friendly gesture, like bringing an apple, unexpectedly, for a co-worker, and let nature take its course. Hopefully he didn’t randomly pick the one person who hated apples and would be inimical towards such an offering. If they ended up friends, so be it. So long as they didn’t end up enemies, and there was a touch more friendship in the world, well, he figured that was worth an attempt. Maybe not even just on Feb. 11.
******************
Well, it was worth a shot. I’m running late for work. Type to you tomorrow.
inimical / in – EM – eh – cal / hostile, unfriendly.