This past week, I was trying to fill out empty picture frames, and I said to my husband that we don’t take enough pictures with our friends.
The last time we got a group photo that wasn’t a wedding picture was five years ago at my husband’s college graduation. We don’t really have a good excuse, since we see each other every weekend, but it just never occurs to anyone to take a picture of us all together.
Later that same day, our friends came over for the holiday and we grilled and played games, and our friends drank various drinks. Somewhere between the games and the drinks, two of our friends decided it was a fun idea to slap each other in the face as hard as they could.
Now, we are all adults. A group of 27-year-olds with career level jobs and houses and responsibilities, but no one was going to stop them from doing something stupid.
Also it was funny. My husband got it on video, and in the background you can hear me and our other friend laughing. I don’t condone violence, but they’re adults, they can decide for themselves and it wasn’t done out of maliciousness.
It was out of curiosity.
We’re all best friends, and this is absolutely not the stupidest thing they’ve done. Though afterwards they did agree to never do that again as one of them had a small cut and the other one nursed a headache the rest of the night.
I advocate for making smart choices, but we’ve all had our moments of bad decisions. They could have had major impacts on your life, or they might have just been a bad decision that you realize after you probably shouldn’t have done.
I’m sure all of you can think of something incredibly ridiculous or stupid you did with your friends. I think that’s the sign of good friends, when you can do something dumb and not be embarrassed or worry that you’ll be judged. Friends that know when to laugh now and when to laugh later.
There isn’t a memory together that we look back on and don’t laugh at. Eventually, with enough time and luck, even the things that were scary in the moment can make you laugh.
And maybe it isn’t like that for everyone, but I’m glad it is for us.
So we don’t have a ton of photos together as a group. But we do have videos of us laughing at each other. And we have photos of us being ourselves, which don’t always make for frame-able pictures.
I guess I don’t need more photos of our friends, I remember all of the good times anyway. And I hope you have time when you look back and say ‘man, that was a stupid thing to do’ and you laugh about it.