Friday, 30 April 2021

Points in Case

Points in Case

Sometimes I Think About My Childhood Best Friend and Wonder “Whatever Happened to That Guy?”

Posted: 29 Apr 2021 10:00 AM PDT

I guess no matter how old you get, you never forget your childhood best friend. I certainly didn't.

I had a lot of friends as a kid. There was Timmy, and Tommy, and Jimmy, and Jommy. But none were as close to me as Elliott was. Elliott became my best friend when we were in the third grade. I was the only one who would laugh at all the rude things he would say about our teacher, and our teacher was the only one who would laugh at all the rude things he would say about me. We were two peas in a pod, a regular pair of pals, two elephants in a diaper.

Elliott had a hard time fitting in at our school. He was "the new kid," since he had been born so recently, and he moved to our town when he was eight. The other kids would make fun of him for his weird out of town haircut and weird out of town glasses. He said in the town he grew up in, everyone had haircuts like that, but no one believed him.

But I could tell that beneath that ugly haircut and ugly glasses, there was a nice kid who wore some ugly t-shirts. I let him sit at my table during lunch, even though he always ate some weird out of town food called a "sandwich" and drank "milk." Where some other kids might have made fun of him, I was accepting, eating half of his sandwich to prove to the other kids that it wasn't "gross" or "weird."

One day, during recess a bully was picking on him, and I said that if he wanted to fight Elliott, he'd have to fight me too. During the weeks we spent recovering in the hospital, Elliott and I really bonded, and from that day forward, we were inseparable. That bond carried us all the way through elementary school and into middle school.

Every afternoon, we would play video games at his house after school, and every night, we'd call each on the phone while we played video games at our respective houses. Eventually, other kids began to see how cool Elliott actually was. He wasn't just "The New Kid" or "Wally's Loser Friend" anymore. He was "The Old Kid" and "Wally's Cool Friend."

Elliott always had an ear when I wanted to share my theories about our teachers. Like in the fourth grade, when I thought our teacher, Ms. Dork, slept in a coffin at the back of the classroom after school, but that wasn't true. She slept in her car. Then there was our sixth grade teacher, Mr. McGrew, who I thought was a vampire, but it turned out he just always had blood around his mouth.

During the summer in between sixth and seventh grade, Elliott and I didn't get a chance to see each other at all, because he was away at science camp. So when I went over his house for our weekly "Friday afternoon hangs," I would have to hang out with his parents instead. They were nice, but they never wanted to play Nintendo or see if we could buy tickets to an R-rated movie.

When he returned in September, however, Elliott had changed. He said he had met some new friends at camp. Everything about him was different. He walked differently, with more confidence and without doing our patented "Best Friends Skip." He dressed differently, too. Gone were his old ugly t-shirts and in their place were new ugly t-shirts. He even talked differently, using strange new expressions and slang like, "What's up?" and "How are you?" I barely recognized Elliott anymore. In fact, he stopped going by "Elliott" and started calling himself "Greg."

Soon "Greg" had no more time for me. He spent all his free time hanging out with his new friends and his new parents. I saw him one time in high school, wearing his cool guy sunglasses and doing some cool guy homework. I tried to remind him that we were best friends once, but he pretended not to notice me, no matter how loudly I sang our "Best Friends Theme Song."

As years went by, Greg and I drifted apart. We went to different colleges, got different jobs, and married different women. I often wondered what happened to him.

One night, I decided to look him up on social media. I was shocked by what I found. It turns out the reason that Elliott and Greg seemed like two totally different people is because they actually were two different people. Greg was just another kid that went to science camp. He wasn't Elliott at all.

That's why he acted and talked and looked so differently. And why he would say things like, "I'm not Elliott" and "Who's Elliott?" and "I think that Elliott guy is over there." I thought he was just speaking metaphorically.

I couldn't believe my luck. It turned out that Elliott wasn't a jerk after all.

After all these years, he and I reconnected and have decided to start over right where we left off: playing videos games in his parents' attic every Friday afternoon, sharing "sandwiches," and worrying about Y2K.

List: 18 Reasons Why My Electric Toothbrush Is Having a Better Existence Than I Am

Posted: 29 Apr 2021 07:00 AM PDT

  1. It does not owe the government $72,328 in student loans.
  2. It has seen someone naked within the past year.
  3. It does not have an ingrown hair on its nipple.
  4. It did not go to Skate Way in 6th grade and ask Derek McTollander if it liked him only to have him say, "Ew no" to its face and skate away.
  5. It has never handed out welcome flyers at a hippie music festival with a huge booger clearly visible in its right nostril.
  6. It has not been banned from the nearest Pizza Hut.
  7. It did not let out a surprise squeak-fart in front of Geoff Rizoli when trying to drunkenly get up from a lawn chair at a party after Homecoming.
  8. It has not had to discover that pubes also turn grey.
  9. It has not lost countless hours of its life fantasizing about being in the middle of a Falcon and Winter Soldier sandwich.
  10. It does not feel like it missed out on buying Bitcoin at a decent price.
  11. It is not an elementary teacher failing miserably at trying to get nine in-person and 17 virtual third graders to create models of equivalent fractions.
  12. Its bristles do not get frizzy without the precise ratio of leave-in conditioner to gel.
  13. It isn't worried about its credit score after forgetting to pay its Ann Taylor Loft credit card for three months.
  14. It did not tell Joey Stauffer that "his smile lights up brighter than the full moon" only to have him say, "I gotta get gas," jump in his truck, and haul ass.
  15. It is not bitter and sad and scared and lonely because it's over forty and never got married.
  16. It has no understanding of climate change and is not trying to figure out where its unmarried single self can live so that it is far enough inland not to be near the flooding coasts but not too far inland that it's surrounded by drought and tornadoes, while also being far enough north not to be fried by 100+ degree weather, but also far enough south not to be frozen by a new ice age, all while near a plentiful fresh water source and a population large enough to offer potential partners who would marry a woman over forty.
  17. It is not absolutely positive it's going to die alone in an underfunded retirement home run by apathetic idiots who are only idiots because some elementary teacher didn't do a good enough job teaching fractions.
  18. It's minty.

8 Reboots That Literally Ruined Your Childhood and Also, Your Half of the Rent Is Due

Posted: 29 Apr 2021 05:00 AM PDT

The Magic School Bus (2017)

This was a slap in the face to 90's kids everywhere. Can you believe what they did to Ms. Frizzle? She's unrecognizable! The show's creators definitely felt the backlash when millennials took to the internet to voice their concern. They can't touch our childhood! Oh, and also your half of the rent is due, like today.

The Powerpuff Girls (2016)

Different voice actors? Stiff animation? A fourth sister!? None of it worked. Childhood = Ruined! Kind of like our trust with our landlord if we don't get that rent in on time. Seriously.

Lizzie McGuire (Cancelled)

Ok, so maybe they stopped production on this one, and good thing too! Could you imagine them touching an icon like Lizzie McGuire? That'd be like you touching some of our bills there buddy.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (2018)

Oh this one is just so wrong! I mean Sabrina as a dark thriller? Where's the talking cat? Where's the comedy? Where's your credit card, because if you have this much time to complain about these reboots on Twitter, you have time to pay this rent.

Fuller House (2016)

Yeah, yeah, it's different so it sucks, I get it.

Hey man, speaking of houses I'm thinking of moving back into my parents'. You've been shirking a lot of your responsibilities lately. You just spend all day watching re-runs of Pete & Pete saying, "No one can touch you, you're safe." It's getting weird.

The Conners (2018)

Wait… I remember you getting really upset when Roseanne left. It happened around the same time you and Jen broke up. Is this what this is all about? Look, I know you two had been together since high school, but it's time to move on. You can't keep focusing on the past dude, it's not healthy for you.

She-Ra (2018)

Hey man, you got this in the mail. It's a cease and desist from Nickelodeon Studios. They said you've been sending death threats to their creative team? Saying if they reboot another show you'll do something drastic? Look, this is getting to be too much. I'm gonna spend a few nights at my friends place, to just kind of give you some space. Maybe think about what you're doing.

Don't worry about the rent, I got it covered. Take care of yourself, okay? Promise me that.

Be Cool, Scooby-Doo (2015)

Ok, I've had enough of– Oh wait… no actually, you're totally right on this one. That show def sucked ass.
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