Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Can I substitute Yelp for friends?

True story: I was on the phone with my boyfriend tonight having our usual run-down of our days discussion and jokingly, I posed the question in this entry's subject line.

Once I said it out loud I knew that I half-meant it, then wondered what it'd be like to slowly replace my friends with restaurant and business reviews. No, I'm not serious. Okay, crazy - yes and perhaps fed up and obviously this is not a likely or desired solution or scenario, but hey...Yelp won't ever let me down.

Yelp won't disappoint me, hurt my feelings, judge me, blow me off or change into a whole 'nother website before my eyes. Stupid comparison.

Okay back to the real matter at hand. I'm not going to lie, I've been a little distant with some people - not to avoid them per se, but I guess just to gather my thoughts and re-evaluate these friendships in the long run.

What is it with some people? Everyday I'm more and more aware that I'm constantly annoyed with a pretty decent amount of people in my life. Is it my fault for keeping them around or am I at fault for not saying anything to begin with? I bite my tongue because I feel like some of my issues with them are petty and I'm positive they'll overreact and be too defensive to understand my point of view, so my qualms feel even more unwarranted than ever. Unfortunately, the maturity gap between them and myself is ever-growing. And this is no one's fault by any means, but it is a fact of life.

Change is good, I wholly embrace it. But when change happens to the people closest to you, you can't help but want to ignore it. Or rationalize that it's just a phase. And then question the hell out of it. In watching them change before you, does this then, in turn, change you (for the worse)? Or are you the one with the problem, are you the static character in a novel of a dozen dynamic characters?

At the end of the day my issues with said annoying friend(s) comes down to either 1 of 2 (or both) things, and it's not a shocker though as both points bring out the worst in everyone:
1) materialism
2) popularity contests

I'm 24. I'm at the point where I just want to scream, "Shut up, no one cares!" at the top of my lungs. No, I don't want to hear about your non-problem problems and/or Facebook dilemmas. I don't want to hear why you're forced to do A because you never deemed B, C, D or E an option. No one is controlling you, there are no strings, no marionettes on a stage, don't act like you need to blame every other person in the world for your mistakes and shortcomings.

So again, I ask, can I substitute Yelp for friends?

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