how to win friends
by Avital Gad-Cykman


Truths like 'everybody needs friends' are indisputable. Interested parties have been asking about the nature of friendship, its side effects and death rates. Gladly, making friends is both fun and a highly recommended activity of body and mind.

You may pick up friends spontaneously, sporadically, or systematically, one by one as they appear on your path. While joining a collection of people who do you good, (read as: friends) you strengthen your bases. The method only matters if it fails and has to be discarded. You are not in it to lose. Concentrate before attack. Once you have a new friend, you are settled, popular, enriched. You dance the dancing and feel the feeling.

A friend hides behind every closed door, at every restaurant table, around every corner. They are all there, free and full of potential, personifying your future. Your only role is winning. Smile, talk, offer help and advice or ask for help and advice. Use everything within your reach. Your body too.

***

Several members of How to Win Friends Inc. hit the headlines. Let us learn from their example.

The POLITE THIEF:

On April twentieth, 1996, Mark Bellingham adopted Batman’s climbing system. He threw a long rope, hooked it over the roof, and broke into the twenty-second floor of Middlehood Tower, Sherwood, Britain. The young woman standing in her living room and looking at him cried: “Thief! Thief! Help! Help!”

He commented on the nice, windy weather, shook her hand, stripped her fingers of her three gold rings, and planted a kiss on her cheek before leaving through the window.

On April twenty-first, Mark Bellingham repeated the operation and entered the twenty-first floor of Middlehood Tower. As he saw a couple at the kitchen table, he mentioned the nice little irony concerning number twenty-one and also commented that the temperature was probably twenty-one degrees Celsius.

Sadly, Mark Bellingham’s activity was interrupted by the police on the twenty-second of April. Rumors say that he has been writing to the young woman from the twenty-second floor every week ever since.

The lesson learnt: If caught, remember that the jail is full with mates after your body and soul.

The CHARISMATIC KIDNAPPER:

Have you heard about Patricia Hearst?

What was her kidnapper’s name?

The lesson learnt: Victims have a good shot at gaining eternity.


The LIVE SEX DOLL:

When sex idol, actor Muller-Swarzfeld from Berlin was asked for an autograph, he asked for one in exchange. His ex bodyguard still remembers him leafing through his dog-eared phonebook and sighing at each and every name. Following his breathing exercise, Muller-Swarzfeld lay on the sofa upon which he asked to be well packed. The package was soon sent in a taxi-delivery to the fan’s doorstep. It is true that several times he was used and thrown away, but at other times, he made long lasting friendships. His fee charging, however, brought income tax inspectors to investigate the case and stop his activity.

He has lately launched a memoir and won a literary prize.

The lesson learnt: Literature favors us.

The EMPATHETIC TAXI DRIVER:

I hope you have been enjoying our little conversation. May I shoulder your baggage now?

The lesson learnt: Take a ride.



painting by Tom Giesler
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