Friendships' Unlimited Nights and Weekends

In kindergarten I let my friends pick me. At that point in life I was faster than most my peers and found extreme pleasure in running away from them, but my mom told me that to make friends I needed to ask a nice looking girl to if she wanted to play. I did and Liz and I became great friends until the third grade when she became boy crazy and I still found extreme pleasure in running away. Fast forward 15 years and I've discovered my new method of choosing friends—wireless provider.

What does this mean? My best friends are part of my IN Calling Network. My acquaintances make their apologies for poor planning. And the hot guy from the party who could have been the father of my children was networkly undesirable. Sorry mom I tried. But in the current financial scare (plus the last six years of my fiscal uncertainty) I'm keeping expenses down. Cell minutes included. And my shining personality fades in one-line txt conversations. It becomes a get-to-know-you blunder, sometimes even a shoot-your-best-friend-in-the-head catastrophe.

There are benefits of Verizon choosing my closest friends for me. I feel guiltless calling Stacey in Vegas multiple times a day and chatting to her while states apart we both wander through aisles at the grocery store dissecting our food cravings. I even sit in a comfortable I-miss-you-silence with some of my favorite conversationalists. The technological way to sit side-by-side while reading alone.

The downers come hard and heavy. Besides passing on Mr. Perfect, whoever he was, I've let a relationship with my sister dwindle to birthday calls. She declined on the family agreement to stay on one network and moved into a different time zone. Double negative. The friendship we once shared, I her part-time nanny and she my life planner, gone; a shimmer of a memory of a better time.

I think I was supposed to stop running away from my friends (sister). I should pick up the phone, she's only ten digits away. Maybe tomorrow after nine, or if I'm not busy this weekend...