Flaws Are What Makes Us Human

It’s eleven at night and I’m chain-smoking, and blasting Nine Inch Nails while I write this. Today has been a very eventful day. And come to think of it, all of my days have been eventful lately.

I woke up to a text from a friend we’ll call, John: “You like curry? I’m going to a Thai restaurant in Laughlin, and they got the best curry I’ve ever had. Do you wanna join?” Considering that I had no plans for the day, I said yes. So i got ready and waited thirty-minutes for him to pick me up. I had only been awake less than an hour, when he pulled up in his Dodge Charger and I got in. We talked about life and all of it’s problems for the entire forty-five minute drive. He was tired of working in a kitchen, so he decided he was going to move to L.A. and start his own business. And what would this business be? Well, he was planning on buying phone cases from China, and selling them on Amazon. This worked because phone-cases in China are extremely cheap. He could sell the cases for twenty-dollars and make over five-times the cost. I did feel a little down that he was leaving, though. But I wished him well, and decided to enjoy our last hang-out together.

We got to the restaurant and sat down. John immediately started hitting on the waitress while I watched from afar and giggled. The food turned out to be very good. The sausage, the curry, the rice, everything tasted great. When we finished our meals, the waitress brought out the checks and John called her cute. The plan was to split the cost, and it seemed that it was gonna work. That was, until, the waitress told me that my card wasn’t going to work as it didn’t have a chip-reader on it. As John paid the cost, I decided that I would withdraw twenty-bucks from an ATM the next day, and bring it to him.

Along the way I found myself thinking that hitting on the waitress was… kind of cringe. But wait! I had also done the same thing just a few weeks ago. I realized that the only reason I found it cringe was the fact that I was also cringing at myself. I used this opportunity to tell John something.

“You know, man.” I started. “If you really love yourself, you can’t do any harm, or judge people. Everything that you dislike about another person, is what you harbor in yourself. Crazy shit, man.”

John nodded and agreed with me.

Along the high-way to home, there was this rock on a mountain that looked just like a hand sticking out it’s middle-finger. I sat up in my seat, and like a little child, pointed to it and said, “Hey look, God’s flipping us off, bro.”

John exploded into a fit of giggles. “Jesus…” He muttered under his breath.

John dropped me off at home, and I decided that I needed some rest. The Nevada and Arizonan heat had bled me dry. I got close to falling asleep, until my grand-mother began crying out my step-mother’s name. I got up and found myself very irritated that I was woken up. But who the fuck was I to get angry like that? My grandma was literally in hospice care and had terrible anxiety. And the worst part, is that she couldn’t get her anxiety meds. So, I rolled a cigarette and went outside, telling myself that I was better than getting angry like that. When I went back inside, my step-mother was talking to her and holding her hand.

I was just about to lay down again when I got a text from an old friend we’ll name, “Jeremy.” Now, Jeremy and I had had a terrible falling out over something that I couldn’t change. This led to a whole series of events, that, well, would be better off as their own blog post. Anyway, for the past couple days I had been texting him, and asking him about his side of things. Today, I asked if he wanted to call and talk, and he said, “Sure, why not?”

I called him, and it rang for a second. He picked up and said hello. We began talking about all the bad things we had done to each other, simply due to immature anger. At one point, I had posted his phone number on a porn site and told people to call him if they were looking for a good time. And meanwhile, Jeremy had changed his license plate to, “IH8KNNY,” and spread lies about me around town. So, there we sat, on the phone, discussing our actions. But, in the end, we both apologized, and I told him that if he wants to hang out again, he’s free to call me.

Now, there was something I had said to Jeremy that really struck a chord with me. And that was, “If all of us were perfect, then life wouldn’t be so exciting, would it?” And, personally, I think that’s very true. Every one of us has done shitty things, and every one of us had judged people.

It’s what makes us human.