Guide to Flaking.

You can’t do everything everybody wants you to do. That’s just a fact of life. Other facts include: you can’t do everything you want to do, you can’t want to do everything, you can’t always avoid everything you don’t want to do, people will eventually stop inviting you to things if you never show up to anything, you have to clean your bathroom every once in a while. I’ll talk about that bathroom thing later, maybe, but for now let’s deal with the fine art of flaking.

There’s a force inside of everyone that makes them annoying by accident. Call it delusion. Call it optimism. Call it self-concern. Whatever it is, it makes pretty much everybody on the face of the planet annoying. It’s there for a reason. If you didn’t think you were worthy of friendship or at least some form of respect from other people, you’d have a hard time living. And since you have to operate under that assumption in order to not break down crying in the grocery store line while Shanice rings up your boil-in-bag rice, you’re probably going to be wrong sometimes about your worthiness. There are some people you like who don’t like you very much. Or maybe they don’t actively dislike you, they just don’t care that much. That’s fine. They have their own problems. You can still invite them to your birthday party.

Sometimes you’ll be on the receiving end of somebody inviting you to their birthday party, and you will say, “There is no way I am going to that dude’s birthday party,” or “Oh man, I like that dude and I want to go to his birthday party, but not enough to change my existing plans or deal with this weather or go to the neighborhood it’s in, and that’s fine because I wouldn’t be all that mad if he missed mine,” or, “It’s far away and I have a cold but I’m pretty sure that our friendship is tenuous enough that I have to go to this guy’s fucking birthday party even though it’s super inconvenient to get to, because he’s always gone out of his way to go to my shit and I kind of owe him one here, so I’ll go for like two drinks just so he knows all that friend effort he spends on me isn’t wasted, because he’s a good guy and I don’t want him to get discouraged. He’s prone to getting discouraged.” You might also say, “I don’t care about this dude, but this is a good excuse to go play Whirleyball. I’m in.”

(I’ll probably write a guide to birthday parties later, but you should include Whirleyball if at all possible.)

Guilt is not a great lifestyle choice. It’s not especially progressive. But then again, I guess there are benefits to having the same friends who you hang out with even when they piss you off for your entire life. I wouldn’t know. I do know that in general, if you don’t want to go to something, you shouldn’t feel like you have to go unless it’s one of those bigdeal things you have to go to. Things like girlfriend’s birthdays at her family’s house, or a wedding you’re standing for, or a birthday party for somebody who you’d be kind of pissed at if they didn’t show up to your birthday party. Everything else, though, is flakable. You’re not a piece of meat here. You can’t be all things to all people. And the success/failure of a party, or whatever it is, isn’t going to rest solely on your shoulders, no matter how much you’d like to think it does.

Actually, this is a good point. You should try to avoid being anybody’s only fun friend. That’s a burden. Sometimes you fall into it by accident, like if you’re getting over a breakup and you end up being sadbuddies with somebody and then you get unsad before they do and you end up secretly undepressed but still stuck doing sadbuddy things like getting shitfaced drunk at Dan’s Bar for no reason on a Wednesday, playing “Jailbreak” by Thin Lizzy in its entirety off of the jukebox, and hearing the same old story about Madeline again. And when your sadbuddy finally gets around to asking how you are, you’ll notice a flinch of disappointment on their face when you say, “Honestly, I’m doing pretty good these days.” That’s why sadbuddies drift apart. It’s natural. But in general, try to avoid being somebody’s only fun friend. It’ll only help them in the long run. They have their own journey to unsadness, and it’s not your job to hold their hand. It sounds harsh, but it’s not. You can’t make somebody be unsad. You just have to do what you do, and hope for the best. If that means occasionally getting shitfaced at Dan’s Bar whenever you’re in the mood to get shitfaced at Dan’s Bar, and then eventually “whenever you’re in the mood to get shitfaced at Dan’s Bar” becomes “never,” then that’s what you do. People will understand. Even if they don’t, they will.

One thing you can do to prepare people for the idea of you flaking is develop a flakey persona. You will do this by accident. Let’s say your roommate invites you out to their birthday party and you were planning on going but you haven’t slept much recently and you have no money so you got drunk and high at home before going and then realized you were too drunk and high to go out, so you thought you’d go ahead and watch a movie and sober up a bit and then go after the movie, but you fell asleep during the movie. Nobody is going to be mad at you for not coming to their birthday party if they come home and you’re passed out on the E-Z Boy with an empty bag of Doritos on your face while the DVD menu for “The Incredibles” loudly repeats. Like they might be kind of pissed at first, but then when they realize you were just going to be a sleepzombie at the party anyway, they’re like, “Oh, that guy.” And they laugh and make fun of you at other parties for that one time you were asleep on the E-Z Boy with an empty bag of Doritos on your face while the DVD menu for “The Incredibles” loudly repeated. That’s a medium funny story. It’s funny enough to tell people even when you’re not in the room, and I’ve always found that to be a flattering concept, even if it is the result of being an idiot.

You’re shooting for “Oh, that guy.” It’s not perfect, but it’ll work for now. There are several challenges associated with it. One is chemical dependence. It’s pretty easy to achieve “Oh, that guy” status if you’re always drunk. Drunk people do weird and funny things and get away with it more often than sober people. The problem with it, other than the health, financial, interpersonal, and barfingallthetimeological risks involved, is it starts to get very not cute around the second or third time somebody has to cart your mumbley idiot ass home. And it’s totally unacceptable once you turn 30. So you have to use it sparingly until that birthday arrives; let’s say a good rule is you can’t be the “Oh, that guy” drunkie with the same group of friends twice in a row without anybody else getting a turn until you’re 30, at which point you have to at least pretend to have grown up. The good news is by the time you’re 30, you won’t give as much of a shit about what other people think of you, and you just won’t go to their birthday party if you don’t feel like it, or if you do, you’ll drop by for like a half hour and have one good expensive microbrew beer, and to get there you’ll drive your car that you own now because you have money because you’re not drunk all the time. But in the meantime, you can pull an “Oh, that guy” due to excessive imbibement every once in a while. It’s kind of fun.

But “Oh, that guy” goes beyond mere drunkenness. It’ really a lifestyle. The idea is that you might not always show up, but when you do, it’s fun. You might not want to go to every little event people have, but you do want to at least know about them. Otherwise you’ll have the thing where it’s Friday night and feel like tearing it up and you don’t have any plans for once and you have no clue what’s going on, and when you text everybody you get like four lukewarm responses about semifun things they’re doing that you’re kind of not invited to. So there’s some performance pressure there with an “Oh, that guy.” You don’t have to start up colander on the head impromptu pots-and-pans call-and-response drums songwriting (in a fun funny way—always seek to avoid the obnoxious version of colander on the head impromptu pot-and-pan call-and-response drums songwriting where nobody wants to participate and nobody is laughing, and it’s pretty much just you screaming in the kitchen) whenever there’s a thing at somebody’s house, but if you do once (you can only do it once), you’ll be invited to fun things for a while. And nobody will be mad if you don’t show up, because you’re the pots-and-pans guy. They can have almost just as much fun talking about that pots-and-pans time without having to relive it. Not every party needs that much chaos. Most parties can’t even handle it. Parties have a limited elasticity that way.

So you’ve got to balance your routine by also being a good guy to talk to. Regular conversation is an important skill to have. It’s maybe even more important that knowing when it’s great to bust out the pots and pans. Otherwise you’ll never be invited to regular conversation parties because nobody wants you to ruin everything. Regular conversation parties might be boring, but usually they have better food. So there’s a payoff.

Another good idea for your “Oh, that guy” flakey persona is to occasionally show up to things that nobody expects you to be at. It’s a karmic retribution. Every once in a while, you’ll get an invitation for an event so inane you can’t believe somebody took the time to drag your name over to that column of Facebook. If you go, you’ll be rolling with a really weird crew where you scan the room and you’re like “This is a really weird crew. This is probably the first and only time this specific group of people will ever be in the same room.” It’s good to go to one of those every once in a while because they’re like a Christmas sausage and cheese sampler but for awkwardness, and sometimes you’ll discover a new flavor (of dude) you like. Or, say, it’s 3:30am and somebody heard about a party at that one weird college kid’s house and you show up and bring booze and do the pots-and-pans thing because you don’t give a shit. And everybody there is like, “Who’s this guy?” Except a couple of them are like, “Whoa, that dude’s here? That’s the guy who lit his crotch on fire the other night at Madeline’s party. I’m gonna go dare him to eat the rest of the dip.” Congratulations, weirdly unplanned thing show-er upper, you’re an “Oh, that guy.”

Do you see how this is childish? It’s childish. But so is feeling obligated to go to people’s parties and events just because you feel like it’d hurt their feelings if you didn’t. I mean, sometimes that’s a fine and dandy reason to do something, because there are events out there that carry enough significance to make you feel like shit if a certain person doesn’t show up, but you’ve got to pick your battles. If your whole life is ruined by the fact that Minor Acquaintance X, especially a.k.a. “Oh, that guy,” doesn’t show up to your 80’s themed dinner party, you should probably rethink your life a little bit. Maybe it’s worth ruining.

Oh, and there’s this: I know it seems awful, but it’s ok to skip a going away party. You’d only get like 15 minutes to really talk to the person, and if they’re really a good friend you can and should hang out with them at least once one-on-one before they leave anyway. Plus, what are they going to do, not forgive you? No, they’d be happy to see you whenever you visit them in L.A. Going away parties are skippable. But I don’t always recommend it, especially if you’re in the market for “might as well hook up” opportunities or goodtimes with a buddy you’ll miss. Just realize, if you’re going to have trouble making it, that, “Oh yeah, going away parties are skippable.”

Probably the most important aspect of successful flaking is to not get too worked up when people, even people you care about a lot, don’t show up to stuff that you’re doing. Remember: you’re annoying. You think people like you when they don’t really like you. Of course some people don’t like you as much as you’d think. They were trying to have a conversation about Nietzsche with this cute girl they just met when your crazy attention-starved ass started banging on pots and pans and shouting a bunch of nonsense about Christopher Reeves. And this is after you totally ignored their story about Madeline’s parents’ divorce and what it means. Of course they’re not showing up to your birthday party. It’s in Edgewater. You can’t blame them for flaking. Not when you’ve spent your entire 20’s being “Oh, that guy.” They can’t do everything you want them to. And if you have to deal with a super weird crew on your own birthday, that’s fine. You’ll enjoy that, too.