Need a friend? Sure I’d like mine bubbly and happy please!

Friends. You love them, annoy them, fool around with them, and sometimes get irritated with them. They know you better than anyone else including sometimes your own family. You create the most blissful, exciting, painful and emotional memories with them. All in all to they are the people who you choose to live with and not those who you’re forced to.

And then comes social networking. It just brings us all even closer in a way. Now as soon as you come back from work/school/wherever you were, you instantly start talking to the same people who you just met a few minutes back. Of course now you’ve got BBM, MSN, Facetime, Facebook, Twitter, MySpace etc. all on your mobile.

What does that mean? It means that when you want to meet with your friends you give them a minute-by-minute replay of what’s going on.

>K just got off d metro

>K m walkin towards d lift

>K in the lift :]

>OMG I C U

>Hiiiiii!!!

After that it becomes vocal.

Right now, what matters more is how many friends you have on facebook. Even if it means you don’t talk to a third of them and the other third is a bunch of people who you don’t even know.

Sure, okay, I guess I can come to terms with that.

What I can’t comprehend though is why would people buy friends. Yes BUY. Like they were some product in a store with a bar code.

So I was reading the magazine today morning, as usual, and eating my bagel. Then I came across this article:

Should we put a bar code on friendship? http://gulfnews.com/life-style/people/should-we-put-a-bar-code-on-friendship-1.846648

And I was shocked. For those of you who couldn’t be bothered to go to the link or are not as shocked about it as I am, here’s a brief summary. The article is about the website www.rentafriend.com where you can request for a friend to accompany you for any activity that you prefer for a certain fee.

No man is an island. John Donne said that and quite honestly I agree 100%. I don’t think it’s even thinkable for a person to live without social contact. Clearly the founder of the website, Scott Rosenbaum, is using that to his advantage like any normal businessman. What I don’t get is the how is it possible that millions of people out there are lonely or unsatisfied with their friends, enough that they want to resort to buying one?

If a hawker on the street were to holler, “Friends for hire! Friends for hire!”, it would seem terribly out of place. In cyberspace though this kind of sale seems perfectly legit, starting with the strictly platonic friendship website www.rentafriend.com that has friends available for rent worldwide.

Yes if someone were to scream that I’m sure this is how my expression would be

Have we become so busy with our lives that we can’t even strike up an ordinary conversation with someone? Have we become so reclusive that the thought of opening up and sharing information about yourself bit-by-bit is like asking the average person to solve a rubiks cube in 60 seconds?

And even if you did hire a friend. What sort of conversation would you have with that person? Would it be possible to use the “Oh do you remember that time…” line? Would it be possible to have a fit of random giggles over something that only you and your bestie could possibly get the humour out of. Could you and your friend drown yourselves with bottles of coke, sprite and some random other edible stuff and spend some quality time cursing the unfairness of life or rant about that awful shit a certain someone did that day.

No I really don’t think it’s possible. I think that this is just another serious form of role-playing and although it’s not in my place to question the reasons for purchasing a friend, I think it’s quite a sad life if you can’t even spare some time to mingle with other people.

My friends and I go to the park, hire a huge bicycle that fits 6 people, and sing on the top of our lungs to whatever song we feel like singing at that moment while pedalling like mad-women to our warped rhythm.

Could you do that with your friend-for-the-day?

Yeah, I didn’t thinks so either.