Advanced Essay #1, Felix Schafroth Doty - Dank Friendship

Dank Friendship

My goals with this paper were to explore friendship for myself, and how I feel during this complicated time in my life. I was trying to figure out my priorities, and by just writing and writing and kept thinking, and so I was able to figure some things out. I think that I did a good job in reflecting on the paper, as well as the topic, and that my descriptive scenes were very well written. I would like to improve my description outside of the scenes, and how I interact with an audience that isn’t myself.

There’s something about being with friends that makes every scene bearable. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sweaty, hot afternoon, with tiny gnats pecking at my eyes, or if it’s a restaurant with awful fries. When you are with friends everything seems one step up. If you’re watching a subpar movie, you can heckle it to no end and poke holes in it until it looks like a piece of swiss cheese. If you’re playing a terrible game you can laugh at it instead of getting frustrated and feeling the need to shatter your screen.

As I sit among friends in a restaurant with dank fries and a slight breeze rustling the trees outside, I take it, not for granted, but as a gift. I remember a time when I wouldn’t spend my afternoons in town laughing for two hours straight, but instead wasting away the waning light inside, rewatching stale episodes of old shows by myself. There’s something about wasting time with friends that makes it feel way more productive, and maybe even healthy.

I can definitely feel long times away from a social life taking their toll on me. If I spend too much time by myself or with family, I feel cramped and much worse about myself. When I spend time with friends, even if it’s a couple of minutes talking about nothing important, I can feel the stress washing off of me. Most of the time it’s a physical feeling; I laugh and feel the tension releasing from my muscles, like some kind of emotional stretch. I can feel relaxed after a day with friends, even if I have something pressing as hell coming up tomorrow, and I know that everything is ok in this way I can never feel in another situation, like a zen or a bliss is coming over me.

I remember one day I was working with some expensive equipment; a camera worth more than me and a glossy lens that I’m sure was fresh out of the box, taken from a pristine white factory with models for workers. I was trying to charge the batteries, but all of a sudden it wouldn’t turn on. I frantically tried flipping the dial from On to Off, trying to get a pulse from this dead machine. It even seemed to have lost its crisp click as I tried to switch it back and forth. I could hear the noise of a flatlined heartbeat in the background as I pounded away at it, trying to get it to breathe. I was fearing for my life. How could I afford to repair this equipment without chopping off my arm and selling it to the highest bidder? Freaking out, I called my friends trying to see if they knew how to fix it. They obviously did not, but just hearing them speak with me seemed to make it more manageable. Having someone to share the burden with made it all ok. Although it got fixed before anyone got in trouble, it was still a taught situation that seemed to be eased by the company of others. I would not have handled it with such finesse had I not had the help of my friends.

Recently I was trying to fix a serious issue. In one of my projects I had lost all of the audio, which was the essential element. I was wondering what to do, drawing a blank when I tried to problem solve. As I keyed my friends into this fact, they immediately hopped to, troubleshooting and brainstorming. I could see lightning above their heads. We managed to salvage the wreckage of the project and get a few chuckles from the audience, but if it wasn’t for my friends I would have crumpled into a ball and cried until it came time to get graded. There’s no one better than a friend to have your best interests at heart.