Compliment Videos For All

Spending a Saturday night drinking and recording myself complimenting old friends made me love myself and my friends more. Now I’m encouraging you to do it too!

It all comes down to the words of the late, ornate, articulate Shakespeare: What is in a drunken compliment video? Shakespeare was truly dozens of thousands of years ahead of his time, or however many years its been since he was alive that Wikipedia would tell me if I had internet access right now[i], because does it matter what you say in said low-quality, photobooth-recorded videos? Is it less meaningful if you make a video for two people at once? Or whether your compliments include such profound items as “you are tall”? Or how many times you burp and show your beer can? Ultimately, does it really matter if you are telling your friend compliments that you have said a thousand times before (mostly behind their back) or a weird secret about how you voraciously viewed all of their standup sets on youtube before you were actually friends — adult friendship is hard enough as is, who needs a mild stalking situation to jeopardize it? Now just be flattered. Or is actually really touching thing that you went out of your way to make a dorky video to just say you were thinking of them? I agree with ole Willy Shakes, it is truly the latter that is what makes it simultaneously cringe-worthy and heart-touching.

I should start by retracing some steps that led to my recording twelve videos for old friends professing my secret admirations about them. It all started back when I was turning six and my sister hijacked my party for her own egotistical needs… oh, wait that’s too far back. And what? My electro-hypnotism treatments to block out all childhood memories must not have taken. No this starts in a regular way, I have been ble$$ed with good friends, very good friends, the bestestest of frands, throughout my life and then for various awful, horrendous, and worstly boring reasons we have been forced (completely willingly) to live in different parts of the world. And no matter how cute the adds for facetime and google hangout are, keeping up the day to day minutiae and jokery, otherwise known as the fertile horse manure that friendships blossoms from, is exhausting if you are not in the same zip code.[ii]

To recap the entire last paragraph, I think I am funny, and, perhaps as a result, I have friends ‘round-the-world, whom I neglect on the reg.[iii]

I have recently increased the number of out-of-zip-code friendships by moving from a city that I lived in for the last five years to a land of uncertainty about where I was going, who I was, what I was going to do. As you might imagine it is difficult to make friends in a new city when you 1) are embarrassed about living on your brother’s couch in his one-bedroom apartment and 2) tell everyone you meet that you might be staying one week or one year. And after accidentally getting a part time job and my first eviction notice[iv], I heard the universe telling me to say in St. Louis.

Only three short weeks of living away from my brothers and he asked me to housesit his new place for the weekend.[v] And without the isolation of a giant house, my journey into friend worshipping would never have begun.

I actually do have two friends in St. Louis, both from high school. One is my soul mate who I grew up with and other is a guy whose parents must have mistakenly moved to our tiny town when he was 16 leading to one overlapping semester of school together but our similar mixes of nerdiness and not-give-a-shittery formed us a quick bond.[vi] They were both busy on this particular Saturday night but sure-as-the-day the grocery store wasn’t! And they were so kind as to sell me a Shlafly six-pack and a watermelon.

A couple of beers in, and sufficient Beyonce kitchen dancing executed, I needed to facetime with my dear frand, Kadymac. But No! The internet!!! Why???? Why me?????? Pulling myself off the floor, I remembered that I have an imagination, a MacBook and a god-given need to git-shit-done, so I did the next best thing to live facetime, I recorded a video for her as if it were a voicemail.[vii] And it was the funnest.

I have this problem — I’m backdoor bragging right here, because this is something I love about myself — where I tend to layer on the compliments to my friends when they are down. Typically it manifests as 10 text messages sent in reply to one they send me that just says “I got dumped” and then I tell them how fucking fantastic, sexy, smart, funny, well-endowed and god-damn likeable they are, all in very specific terms that I really do believe about that friend (except dick size and vagina magicalness, I am just guessing about those things, I don’t have x-ray eyes or shower cams). This problem has recently been on my mind as my second abovementioned, shared-zip-code friend just experienced my unsolicited complimenting for the first time and took it as flirting. It is not flirting. Or maybe it is flirting. Yet I feel that describing compliments as flirting cheapens them. As if I’m only telling you how much I liked your poem to up my chances for a good blowie, and not because I enjoyed it and understand how difficult it is to put yo’ heart and yo’ art out there. So now I compliment him extra out of spite.[viii]

As my ethanol levels mixed with feeling the good feelings for making video jokes at Kadymac, I came up with the drunken-genius idea to make compliment videos. So I started filling lists of reasons I love friends I never see and recording a four to eight minute video to each of the twelve people on it. Because damnit, why shouldn’t everyone have a video of 5 reasons they are amazing and lovable read to them by a semi-drunk lady? Please take this video and watch it when you are sad or need a confidence boost, or a laugh, or want to remember what people looked like in 2014, because you will have it forever. Life isn’t easy and we never know who is having a hard time, as was so tragically illuminated in Robin Williams’ recent suicide. I tried to make each compliment as unique as the person who would receive it, which was probably the most difficult part.[ix] Then I put my drunk ass to bed.

I rewatched all these videos again the next morning, while laying as still as possible to avoid hangover-induced vertigo. And I felt great. I felt like a million bucks inside my heart because it was all out there, I was telling people I haven’t seen in a decade secrets about how much I admired them before we were friends. How their lives had positively affected mine. How I wished I could be more openly loving like them. How I thought everything they did was funny. How I know they had taken care of me in a quite literal sense in an awful time in my life and I could never repay them. How I found them stylish. And kind. And so understanding. And so many other things. So I fought off the feeling that what I had just done was kind of creepy and I put them up hidden on youtube and sent out the links with a weird email that looked a bit like robot-created spam.

After watching a cumulative 84 minutes of friendship gushing I understood a strange thing about who I love and why I love them. Something I could have never conjured up without having said it out loud, over and over again to different people in an alcohol-enhanced, word-filterless state. I was drawn to each of these people so much because of their unapologetic uniqueness, and that Brene Brown word of 2013, authenticity.

Before this essay grows to infinity, I will end by encouraging you to get a lil drunk, on booze, exercise or caffeine, and think of 5 things, or perhaps come up with 5 things on the fly, and record yourself saying these things to your friends. They won’t love you more, and they will tell you that you are weird and funny and thanks so much, but really these are videos for yourself. Because no amount of forcing can make someone feel how much you love them, but you can feel how much you love them and it feels fucking great! It is like being the Grinch and letting your heart grow three sizes.

So here are some extremely embarrassing examples for your reference. This one I don’t have any way to send to the recipient anymore so I might as well put it out to the world: http://youtu.be/CP_k8QR857k . And this one is for a friend I just left: http://youtu.be/KoAe89dOIgo . Please excuse my drunkenness, lack of editing, and ramblingness.