Friends You Love Blog Hop - Week 3

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This month is about building friendships and making our existing friendships stronger...We challenge you to dig into your "followers" list and find one follower you don't know well (not a loyal commenting person) and reach out to them and ask them to do a guest post on YOUR blog. Then, come back and link up with your guest post and have your new friend (guest poster) link up as well!

This week's featured post is from Mariah at Manic Mariah!

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Paprika

Paprika is a code word I have for many of my close friends. If I text Paprika to my friends they know I am having a shitty day and I need them to show up in my alley for a chin wag (gossip session) and a glass of wine.

I don’t know a thing about SEO, applications for mobile devices or plug-ins for Facebook, Outlook or any other old look. I admit that freely. I don’t even know how to check my email for viruses and only recently did I learn what spam was. I’m not very savvy when it comes to technology. I also admit that.

What I do know is how to be a friend.

According to Websters:

Friend:
–noun a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.

Let’s cut the crap shall we? We all know that a true friend will destroy our period panties when we die and they call us on our bullshit, a real friend teaches us constantly and sometimes the best of friends are total bitches.

I’m lucky; I have lived in the same neighborhood since I was five and still retain many of my friendships with women that I met in elementary school. Our bound is tight; our words are honest and if I smell or I need to get back into the gym they’re surely going to tell me. They’re also the women that I can complain to when I have masturbated 25 times and still can’t reach on orgasm because my hands are just too cold to make my vaginal walls contract in ecstasy. My friends come up with simple solutions: “Mariah, get in the shower and try.” Half an hour later and I am a changed woman… thanks to my friends. Of course I would do the same for them because my comfort zone and my unconditional love for them is tighter than my skinny jeans (which my teenage son wishes I didn’t wear).

Recently I have ventured into the wonder that is Internet Friendships. It baffles me, it intrigues me and it constantly keeps me on my toes. I have only met a handful of people from the Internet in real life, and while I wouldn’t necessarily tell them if they smelled, (which they didn’t by the way) I did feel our Internet connection spill out into real life. Those Internet Friendships can and DO turn into Real Life Friendships where you can and DO call each other on your bullshit, and you chat on the phone and when you finally meet in person you want to hug them for hours on end… and maybe you want to lick their ears out of love.

I think having the constant interaction on Twitter, Blogs, Email and Facebook sometimes gives people a false sense of friendship yet at the same time it creates a community and that community breaks down into cliques and in those cliques honest friendships evolve.

It’s fascinating.

In the end it doesn’t matter where you met your friends, it could have been at the grocery store, the gym, or (oh gasp!) the Internet. Or maybe your best friend is someone from your youth. The important part is that you have someone to talk you off the ledge of life; someone that will pick you up when you fall and wipe the drool from your chin. Most importantly your friends cheer you up when an orgasm seems unreachable and they pat you on the back when you achieve success. And that pat? It doesn’t matter if it’s a virtual pat from someone many states away or if it’s from your neighbor next door. The important part is that you pat them back.