The inevitable finally happened this Friday. I was out and about , doing my normal rounds of my normal places, when I was confronted by a stranger on none other than Friday asking about New Friend Friday. Instantly I thought to myself that this felt dirty. My synapses were firing NFF ‘hell no’ neurons to my insatiable NFF desires. I could hardly concentrate on our conversation with all my mental flip flopping. Was it possible to make someone a NFF if they new the outcome of our conversation? Was it wrong to only want to memorialize unsuspecting individuals? Would the Gold Fronts slit my tires for worrying about such futile things?

Although my neurons were caring sharp words and demanding to keep some NFF street cred I decided to see exactly how it felt to make friends with this girl. The long brown-haired gals name is Melissa Vujasinovic. When I finally did come back to planet Pay-Attention I learned only one fact. This fact drove me wild for the rest of the night because it is one of the only things I have been able to think about lately. It is about nothing that will dramatically effect me. It won’t make me rich. It won’t make my bike any shinier. But it seems to keep coming up. And that megascule yet miniscule fact is that Melissa’s grandparents are Croatian. To complicate matters even worse, one is Serbian, that is to say a Slav member of the Orthodox Church, and the other is Croatian, which usually equates to a Slav member of the Roman Catholic Church. I had no idea until I was in the area and began reading about it’s history that I could understand how much of a difference that could make. Melissa seconded the idea with raised eyebrows on how exactly strange her grandparents relationship was. After this snippet of Melissa and her NFF questioning I had no other real content. I was too blind to see exactly how she sits, or spaces syllables while talking, or any excessive blinking, etc, etc.

But I did decide after several days of deliberating that writing about suspecting NFF does not feel as dirty as I imagined. So game on. Game on.

Love,
erikb