M y friend Sam doesn’t waste a single bite of an apple. He crunches through the core, swallows the seeds and doesn’t leave anything behind, but the stalk. In this way, he couldn’t be more different from our mutual friend Megan, who refuses to eat apples unless they’ve been sliced.
Sam doesn’t own an umbrella. Megan changes her bedsheets every week. Neither Sam nor Megan particularly love striking up conversations with strangers.
When Sam was a child, he had to be taken home from his very first sleepover because he vomited Turkey Twizzlers on the carpet. These are the kinds of incongruous facts that people know about their loved ones in movies – as Harry famously said to Sally, “I love that you get cold when it’s 71 degrees out. I love that it takes you an hour and a half to order a sandwich.
” In real life, we pass the time talking with our friends about their children, co-workers, exes and eccentric family members, but we don’t always hear about the meaningless minutiae that makes up their daily lives. This is why I sincerely recommend that everyone starts doing one thing: ranking your friends. What an evil and totally objectionable suggestion! Let’s not get things distorted: I do not think that you should rank your friends based on how much you like them, or how cool or pretty they are, or how close you consider yourselves.
Instead, you should rank your friends in arbitrary, nonsensical and conversation-provoking ways. I know about Sam and Megan’s app.