The email below was forwared to me by a good friend of mine who went to Yale where he met no shortage of whackos, oddballs and misfits masquerading as America's finest young intellectuals and scholars.
I can't decide whether this email is sad or frightening. Whatever it is, it's seriously funny.
There's definately a padded room somewhere on the eastern seaboard reserved for this guy.
Boy, I LOVE Excel. Now that won't come as a surprise to any of you, I'm sure...
Back when I first started keeping a journal in Februray 1986, I would sometimes basically list who my friends were. It wasn't formally done, but I would write, "At school the kids I hang out with are [so-and-so, this kid, that kid...]"
Then, in '91, after my coma scrambled up my brains into mush, I started to REALLY keep a list, not names mentioned in a journal, but a list for list's sake. At first I would just list my friends at Yale, my friends at high school, and my friends from elsewhere in whatever order they came into my head. Eventually, in the fall of '91, when I was back in New Haven and working at the public library (but not yet back in school), I started RANKING my friends. (God, that was fun when I first did that, it really was...)
I didn't have a universal ranking system, because that would have been too difficult, but three (Yale, Sleepy Hollow, Other) separate ones, with however many people I wanted to put on each. I think I had about 35 Yalies on the Yale list... that was more of a wish list than a reality, including at least a few cool people who I certainly knew and got along with well when we saw each other, but didn't really ever hang out with one on one. The Sleepy Hollow list and the Other list were shorter; I was able to make the Yalie list so long because at Yale, which was not small but not big either, one had the opportunity to know tons of people (I'm sure I knew hundreds at least slightly), but the campus was small enough that you would inevitably run into quite a few of them on a regular basis, unlike how it is at Ann Arbor (I assume). I remember one time when CS and JR from SHHS visited me, they were just marveling at how popular I w as, because every two seconds we would see someone that I knew. Actually, I wasn't popular at all, as it isn't in my nature to be popular, and I've always been tolerated at best by most people, in every single environment I've found myself in, starting with day care. No, that was just how Yale worked, almost everyone had tons of acquaintances.
Anyway, my Sleepy Hollow list and my Other list only included people I was still in touch with, sensibly enough (to beat a dead horse, I was "in touch" with all of the Yalies by the simple fact of seeing them regularly on campus at the very least, and some I actively socialized with).
Eventually, I decided to stop ranking people. Especially when we're talking about the folks near the top, it just doesn't make sense to try to say that X person ranks above Y person.
So, for a spell, I reverted to random lists of friends (although still in 3 categories). Maybe I even stopped making the lists for a while. (Sometimes preferring to focus on lists of hundreds of actors, or novelists, or hot famous women, or what have you... lists that I would write on pieces of scrap paper and then immediately throw out. Yes, there was NO purpose to this...))
But eventually, after I moved to Manhattan my Friend Lists started to move toward their glorious present state. The first major influence was the New York State Lottery.
Not too long after I started playing the Lottery, it became quite clear that a massive windfall was imminently in the offing for me. As a man of great generosity, I knew that I would share my good fortune with friends and family. However, it didn't make sense to me to give the same amounts to everyone... sure, I would give SOMETHING to my cousins in Jersey, Uncle Rollie's boys, but would I give them as much as I would give my parents? After all, I never see those guys anymore, and they're only my step-cousins anyway, as they're not Rollie's biological children but the kids of his second wife, Aunt Loida. So no, of course I wouldn't give them as much. (Actually, NO ONE would get as much as my parents, but I think that's standard practice for (single, childless) people, except in truly dysfunctional families.)
So I did the same kind of process for my friends... my closest friends would get X amount, and I went down from there in steps until I got to those people who were more than acquaintances but not yet close friends, or maybe would never be close friends.
Yeah. Everyone would get at least .1% of my net haul from a Lotto win. Now, if I won a $3,000,000 jackpot and 3 other people also won, that might be a little awkward, because by taking the reduced lump sum payment, and after taxes, as one of 4 winners I would only have $225,000 or so. Telling someone, "I won the Lotto, so I wanted to give you 225 bucks," that might feel a little awkward. I hoped that I was the sole winner of a jackpot of a hundred mil, let's say, because then I would be handing out at least 30 thou to everyone. (Although the gift-tax law would only allow me to give ten thou a year to individuals without Uncle Sam taking a bite. I can't remember, but GWB got that law modified, or removed entirely, didn't he? To help his rich pals out?)
So I had five groups of people, with 5 different percentages of my Lotto win headed their way.
Okay. Now here's the second major influence on the Friends List: NBC's "Friends."
This program (which has touched ALL of our lives in so MANY ways) stars 6 appealing young (or at least pre-AARP) white New Yorkers, and details their many adventures in the midst of the gorgeous mosaic that is New York, mainly focusing on Ross and his DeNiroesque love of the sistas, from Aisha Tyler to Gabrielle Union. (For me, the show jumped the shark back in '99, when Ross started juggling his romances with those twins from his class, the child-prodigy dinosaur mavens who were played by Mary-Kate and Ashley. It wasn't merely that it seemed far-fetched that Ross would date a fellow white person, as it had been clear from the first episode of the first season that Ross and his pals preferred to romance people of color over "sticking to their own," as it were, but also I'll admit I was bothered by the whole statutory-rape aspect of it; in fact I signed all of the many petitions that circulated protesting the plotline, and agreed with th e decision of the producers to keep the M-K&A episodes out of syndication (along with the removal of all references, no matter how indirect, to the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and Wahabbi Islam).
Yes, so my point is that Friends stars SIX people. This has now become the standard unit of groups of friends for most Americans, or at least the # that people should strive for. Some might argue that Seinfeld established FOUR as the model (following up on the tradition of I Love Lucy & The Honeymooners), but I would disagree, because Elaine and Kramer were never really all THAT close, they just weren't. On Friends, ALL of them are incredibly close with each other... sure, there are varying degrees of closeness, but none of the six would hesitate to call any of the others for almost any kind of social activity. And on Seinfeld there were many signs that the four had social lives outside of one another, that they had other friends. (Although George, he didn't have as many outside friends as the others, die he?)
On Friends, while of course they all have active dating lives (as stated above, almost exclusively involving people of color), they wisely shun outside friends, except as occasional plot devices ("Waiting for Gandalf" leaps to mind). In fact, they largely shun their FAMILIES... for example, they apparently find the tradition of Thanksgiving as a family holiday to be rather misguided, and usually choose to spend this day with one another, knowing that wacky hijinks will inevitably ensue.
Sure, Friends isn't the first "Six Show." Perhaps the best model of a Six Show is The Brady Bunch (which of course veered from the appealing Seven Show format of a previous Sherwood Schwartz classic, Gilligan's Island), but that had a sibling feel to it, so it doesn't count in the same way. Nonetheless, it certainly prepared us for Friends.
Oh, but I digress JUST SLIGHTLY... Friends got me to think of six as being the proper friend-unit, so eventually, I made my 5 Lotto groups of 6 friends each (the familial Lotto groups were more loosely structured).
Now, there have always been periods when I haven't played the Lotto, sometimes lengthy periods. I last played the Lotto in July of '02, and I probably won't ever play again, because I suspect that it's not as solid an investment as Berkshire Hathaway, let's say, or as the average slot machine. But once I had my 5 groups of friends of 6 people each, even without the Lotto, and even though I now usually watch reality shows instead of Friends, the 5-tiered structure was quite appealing, and I've kept it ever since.
The 3rd major influence on the Friends List is Microsoft Excel. I have all kinds of Excel lists, only some of which I've shared with the world, but shockingly, it didn't occur to me to put my Friends List in Excel until this past May. So I wrote down the names of all of the people that could be in my Friends List (I hadn't made such a list in a number of months), and decided on the 30 people who would be put in the list's 5 different grades... A, B, C, D, and F. Now, some people might take offense to the idea of someone grading their friends this way, but it's really not offensive at all. All it means is that people on the A List are people I'm much closer to than the people on the F list, for example. It means that they're more integral to my life than the F people, that I care about them more, that it would upset me more if we were no longer friends, that I enjoy their company more, etc . That's all it means, so no one should take offense, really.
I'm sharing this with you because if you don't already have your own Friends List, well you should certainly make one immediately, because it will add to your life in so many ways!
No more random lists on scrap paper that are just thrown in the garbage for me, no sir. Now that I have my Friends List in Excel, each May I'll be able to create a new one, and see how it changes in the years ahead. Man, I just wish that I had kept a formal Friends List all my life, or at least starting when I knew 30 people. I probably knew 30 kids when I was in first grade at P.S. 190, I guess, if you count kids that I knew in school (although I probably just knew kids in my own class in first grade, although I don't remember many details of that time... the only kids I can only remember are Mitchell, Herman, Ziv, and Vanessa, my first love), and kids from my building, and kids from elsewhere. I DEFINITELY knew at least 30 kids when I went to Horace Mann in 3rd grade.
See, and that's what matters... what's important is not that you're actually CLOSE to 30 people, not at all, what's important is who are the 30 people you would most call your friends if someone put a gun to your head and forced you to name that many. Take Tom Hanks in Castaway... clearly Wilson was his only REAL friend, but I'm sure he KNEW other people, different rocks and trees and so on, and felt closer to some of them than to others, so he could have still made a list of his Top 30. Hell, 3 of the people on my F List I've never socialized with one-on-one in my life, but you work with what you've got, so they're on the List.
(By the way, all relatives are automatically excluded from the Friends List, because one's relatives are not one's friends. I know some people say, "My mother is my best friend," or "My brother is my best friend," or "My newborn baby is my best friend," and other such nonsense, but we'll have none of that here. One can be extremely close to relatives, often more so than with any friend, but a different dynamic is involved with relatives than with friends. That's why they're called relatives, not "friends-with-whom-you-have-biological-ties-far-greater-than-you-do-with-the-average-person-on-the-street." (Although I think the German word for "relatives" translates to that in English.) I don't even think spouses or significant others belong on a Friends List, no matter how much you may love them.)
It would be incredible if I had these lists going back to my early childhood... think about how much stronger my MEMORIES would be of these people if I had these lists! Just tons of folks who vanished from my life long ago would have forever lived on in my memory as I was reminded of them any time I glanced at the list. Damn. That would have been nice.
It's theoretically possible that some day there will be scores and scores of people who could be fairly called my friend, or THOUSANDS, as is the case with Bill Clinton and Vernon Jordan and Charlie Rose and other such people persons. However, this isn't very likely; as I've already explained, most folks don't care for my company very much.
If this DOES happen, however, I hope that I'll have the willpower not to expand the # of members in each grade from 6 to 7 (using the Gilligan's Island excuse), or to 9 (using The Fellowship of the Ring excuse), or even to 12 (using The Dirty Dozen excuse), because that would soil the purity of the present system, and disallow proper comparisons of all of the years to one another.
I'm not going to share the actual names on the List with any of you (and I've bcc:ed everyone I've sent this e-mail to, just because), or any details about the grades, as that would be revealing personal things about myself, something I never ever do. Plus, if my Friends List with its names attached somehow got forwarded around, and it got into the hands of Jimmy Raines or Danny Zinman or James Gosnell or Carrie Cox (to name just a few examples), who would then see that they're not included in its ranks, well, I'm sure they would be very shocked and offended by their omission, so we'd better keep the names secret.
Here's a demographic breakdown:
black males: 9
black females: 8
white females: 4
white males: 4
Latino males: 2 (Latinos may be of any race, as the asterisk teaches us, but my policy is to only put non-black Latinos in the Latino category, because black is black)
Asian females: 1
Asian males: 1
Latinas: 1
I assure you that I don't have a quota system; when I made the list, diversity wasn't a goal, merely a by-product of the reality of my life. If one of the Big Eight drops out of the List entirely in the future, that's just how it will have to be.
And there are all kinds of fun ways to look at the 30 people on my Friends List. Slightly less than half, 14, of the people on it, have ever been married. What does that say about me, that at my advanced age so many of the people I call friends have never tied the knot?
Or I could take a different angle... none of the 30 people have (to the best of my knowledge) ever been convicted of arson. This shows that I'm discriminating about the sorts of people I associate with.
I could go on... but I think I've more than made clear that you should create your own Friend Lists (5 grades with 6 people each; this is the ONLY acceptable structure) ASAP, if you haven't done so already.
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