The Flawed Friend

In high school, I used to have a friend whose name starts with the letter K. I'm pretty sure the only reason we kept him as a friend was because of how easy it was to make fun of him. And it was so easy. I almost feel bad about typing this up on the internet, but the sad thing is K wouldn't even be able to deny any of this or even be able to defend himself in anyway against the comments I'll make here.

K had extremely bad grammar. I think it was because he had a family in which three different languages were spoken. Frankly I think it would be cool to have that kind of exposure, but it seems that while he was in his formative years attempting to straighten out how to speak in any of the languages his family spoke he seems to have failed to learn how to speak very well in any of them. Friends of ours that tried to speak to him in languages other than English claimed that he was even harder to understand in the foreign languages than in English.

As you can imagine some really odd an humorous things came out of this boy's mouth and he had no idea that he'd said something absurd. One specific example I can think of off the top of my head is that he would call hoodies, hoedies.

K used to make this ridiculous over the top hand gestures almost every time he talked. He would point at you and wiggle his finger around in your face the whole time he was talking to you if he thought he was saying something important. He would also do that point and wink thing all the time.

K was also really gullible. You could convince him of almost anything if you tried hard enough. It didn't help that he really was fairly ignorant about a great many things. He also didn't like people to know that he didn't know much so he would lie about things to make it seem like he was smarter that he really was.

Another thing about him that was easily ridiculed was that he liked to draw Japanese anime style art pieces. But of course the only thing he would ever draw were female subjects. If you watched him draw he would spend about 90% of his time on the drawing working on the female's curves. It was really hard not to point this out to him, of course he would deny it a hundred times.

Perhaps the thing that takes the cake on his list of mock-able tendencies and habits was that he used to write fan-fiction. Which for the sake of this discussion is when you make up a story for something that you watch, play, or read usually at an extremely lower level of quality than the thing you are attempting to emulate. He wrote his about some mech fighter game and made himself the main character and basically proceeded to try to make himself seem really cool and sexy killing robots and hooking up with over the top gorgeous women.

I think the saddest thing about all this is that I went along with all the ridicule. Most of the things he did weren't his fault. He was a very trusting person who really was just content being himself even if he was what most of us would consider to be odd. He was a good guy and I hope I, nor my friends didn't cause him too much harm emotionally. Honestly though he knew that we made fun of him and I think in some ways he enjoyed being the joke that we told over and over again. He always got to be included in everything our group did and despite anything we said about him we had a lot more fun having him around than we would have without him.