Once upon a time I had a really, really good friend that we’ll call Marvin. In retrospect, I thought more of my friendship with Marvin that he did.

I have lots of friends, so the friend part isn’t really the story.

Anyway, Marvin was a guy and I happen to be a girl. Marvin also happened to have a girlfriend. We’ll call her Betty. I met Betty on a few occasions, but Marvin insisted that Betty didn’t like me and she thought there was something going on with us. There wasn’t.

I find that it makes it incredibly awkward to hang out with your guy friends’ girlfriends when you know they don’t like you hanging out with their boyfriends AND suspect you have ulterior motives. I didn’t.

Let me interject that I’m the kind of person that brings in chicken biscuits from out of town because your favorite biscuit place closed down their local locations. Or maybe I’ll bring you coffee mug emblazoned with your favorite team and filled with M&Ms in their colors just because I had a layover there. I’ve even been known to ship Kroger brand tea to a friend who has moved to a land without Kroger because she’s convinced it’s better than anything else in her market (even though I suspect it’s just one of the few tangible ties she has to her childhood). I’m not saying this to brag, because it’s really a selfish act. It makes me happy to make my friends happy.

Because of said desire to do random things for people, it’s not really surprising that when Marvin and Betty broke up right before his birthday, I showed up at midnight to usher in said birthday with a cake, decorated to look like a vinyl record. A nod to his treasured collection. His cake was, of course, subsequently posted on Facebook, where Betty saw it. Betty wasn’t amused.

Betty, like me, enjoyed tweeting. One day, as I cyberstalked Betty to see if there were any good breakup posts, I noticed that the conversation between she and her friends seemed to be discussing me, my dinner and anything else I had offered up to the black hole that is the internet. They were convinced I had been sleeping with Marvin and blamed me, in part, for their break up. I even had my own hashtag, #recordcake.

I bumped into Betty a lot over the next few months. Apparently, we had a lot in common. After one incident wherein she stormed out of a bar and a few near misses with her friends drunkenly calling me out (which she apologized for), one night I decided to try and talk to her. Slowly, the way you might approach a wild bear if you were so inclined, I walked up to her in a crowded, dark bar.

I explained to Betty that nothing had been going on with me and Marvin and told her I hoped we could at least be civil, since her new regular hangout out appeared to be my “Cheers”. Betty agreed and we became Facebook friends.

We exchanged the occasional friendly post and she offered to cook me dinner and bring me books and trashy magazines after I had surgery. Soon we were making plans for concerts and celebrating birthdays. When my car was demolished by a tree in a storm, she was there to pick me up that night so I could watch a playoff hockey game and drink a much needed beer.

I think everybody on both sides is a little impressed at how close we’ve become. Everybody but Marvin, that is. As it turns out, Marvin was exacerbating any actual tension between the two of us and was probably the only one that thought we shouldn’t be friends. Our regular bartender might actually agree on that point just because we are a lot of t-r-o-u-b-l-e when we want to be.

Last night, I found out that Betty had reprimanded a guy in a bar last week when I wasn’t there and he’d said I’d be pretty if I lost weight. She knows I’m pretty amazing just the way I am. Betty is a pretty awesome friend like that.

Marvin, on the other hand, is now married, which I’m happy for. He also quit talking to me last January when he decided to get serious with the new lady, who I genuinely enjoyed hanging out with for a time.

I could look back on this and be mad that somebody was a crappy friend, or just sad that he and I aren’t friends anymore, but things happen for a reason. I got a cool friend out of the deal and I’ll never be sad that I made an effort to let him know that he was important to me at the time.

The point of this story, if there is one, is just that you shouldn’t hold stupid grudges against, and otherwise judge, cool people just because somebody else says you should; and you shouldn’t let people, even your friends, get away with hurting you, either. That, and I think it’s pretty cool that I had my own skanky girl, home wrecker hashtag.

The point of this blog is just to share the stories. I have a lot of them. They’re all my record cakes.