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The Frenemy

If you've never heard of the word "frenemy" before, it's a combination of the words "friend" and "enemy." The basic idea is that the person in question elicits both positive and negative emotions. This has always seemed like one of those things that I would see on TV, but would never actually witness in person. Turns out I was wrong. I have now witnessed this phenomenon in person.

I was visiting my sister a while back, and I was browsing through Facebook at the time. I came across a picture of a friend of mine who was wearing a shirt that my sister happened to own, so I pointed it out. My sister's initial reaction was something along the lines of, "cool, she's got good taste." However, the friend had modified the original shirt a bit; she'd cut it up to fit her style a little more. I thought it looked fine, but my sister was not amused. Quickly, her reaction turned to, "wait, what?" In hindsight, I should've noticed that this was classic frenemy signs.

A day later, I happened to be exchanging text messages with said friend. Now, I use Google Voice, so I can, and do, send text messages from a web interface. Basically, I don't need to use my phone in order to send text messages. On this particular occasion, I was using a tablet to send these text messages. What I didn't account for, though, was that incoming text messages would result in a small notification sound. My sister heard this sound, and she asked what the heck was making that sound.

I explained the source of the sound. As soon as my sister realized it was the same shirt-wearing friend as the one in the picture, her fate was sealed. She was officially a frenemy. I laughed pretty hard at this, since it was amusing as all heck to see someone actually described that way. That made it even worse, since that turned it into a running gag. Over the course of my stay with my sister, she would occasionally ask about her frenemy, and I couldn't help but laugh each time. Mind you, I also turned off that notification sound pretty darn quickly.

All in all, though, I witnessed a sitcom scenario come to life, all thanks to a shirt and some text messages. I'm going to call that a win in my book.

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