Essay: Comparison/Contrast

Mer & Me
October 24, 2007

As we strolled through the silent aisles of the store, she screamed suddenly in a whispering, excited tone, “Ahhh!” pointing her finger frantically and hopping up and down, the words sped out of her mouth, “Look! Look! Look! Look at them! SHOES! Ahh! I want them!”
Glancing over at them and shrugging my shoulders, I said dryly, “Nyeh, they’re okay,” and returned to the rack of black band T-shirts I was skimming through.
“Okay? OK! How can you say that! They’re, like, the best shoes ever!” she screamed cheerfully and scampered away quickly to obtain her treasure.
Friends always have to have something in common with each other so they can get along…but some friends—even the closest of buddies—can be as opposite as a microwave and a refrigerator; and this, along with others, is one of the numerous differences between my friend Mer and me.
Scouting for shoes, her absolute favorite pastime, is one activity that Mer takes part in daily. Surprisingly, she doesn’t plan when and where she’s going to look for her shoes because she marks almost everything on a calendar before she steps foot out of the house. A perfectionist at heart, she’s incredibly particular in most of the activities she pursues…especially drawing. When Mer sketches a picture, the eraser is usually rubbed aggressively down to a small nub; and she can spend an hour redrawing the same line to make it perfect. But before one frowns on this, know that she can take almost any cartoon picture or drawing and sketch it to look like a near copy of the original.
As “perfect” as she is with everything else, Mer always seems to have some flaw with her body that she needs to go to the doctor for. From a nerve disorder that prevents her from competing in sports to nearly “bottoming out” from lack of sugar, there always seems to be some reason to take her in for a check up.
But Mer doesn’t let a little “medical problem” stop her from enjoying herself. Actually, she sees the need for sugar as an excuse to completely engorge her body with junk food as she plops down on the couch to watch one of the millions of movies she has in her collection. Even though her nerve disorder may cause “disorder” in her daily walking, she still loves to dance and keeps in rhythm with her favorite songs as she pops, locks, and drops what her mama gave her across the dance floor of a party.
I am completely opposite of this. The only dancing that really comes from my body is spontaneous spurts of flailing my arms everywhere and just going with the flow of the music, there’s really no structure to it—just like the planning I do, which is little to none and not really that big of a deal since most of my plans slip my mind anyways. Tending to ride by the seat of my over worn, ripped pants, I usually don’t plan too much for anything because my plans are subject to change at any given moment—mostly because of my involvement in sports.
Yes, my schedule tends to transform itself frequently because of the added physical activity, which alters my eating and sleeping habits. For example, I get home late from games, which gives me absolutely no time to sit down with a bowl of salty, sugar-filled sweets and watch a two-hour long movie. And as much as I absolutely love junk food and how it gets into enraged altercations with my stomach, I tend to stay away from the saccharine delicacies.
Receiving a small stomach ache from soda or over-buttered popcorn isn’t exactly a phone call to the doctor for me either. In my family, somebody either has to be bleeding or dying to waste money on seeing some guy in a white coat to give them a prescription for the problem. Most of the “diseases” that we come down with are toughened out and aren’t cured by relying strictly on a drug.
Another aspect of not being reliant on something is my drawing. I absolutely have no patience to sit at a desk and hunch over a sketch for ten hours trying to make it a twin to the image being drawn from. Preferring to scribble strange creations from my own demented mind, I usually only have the tolerance to speed-draw my picture instead of making it perfect…which can result in an extremely messy, eraser-stained sheet of gray paper.
Now, although we differ in countless ways—more than those just listed above—there are some common interests and personality quirks that we have that are close in comparison to each other. For instance, we are both incredibly unstable people. Swinging from being loud, obnoxious, and giggly to screaming and fuming with rage to sulking and whining depressively, our moods can be altered at the snap of a finger. With the attention span of a half-dead goat, the snap of a finger may be the only way to get our full concentration as well.
But our interest is fully alert when we both scream until our voices grow hoarse, head-bang until our necks go out, and jump until our knees lock up at rock concerts together. The feeling of waiting for the final pun in a Dane Cook joke seems to catch our ears too before we both fall over in our chairs and laugh until our lungs are numb.
Hair-tangling joyriding across the pastures on 4-wheelers and the quiet relaxing element that is found in writing seem to be two opposite activities that mix well with both of us. Like the opposite ends of two magnets, the opposites of our attitudes and our ways of life pull us towards each other and keep us glued, but the similarities between us give grounds to relate with each other on. Opposites are needed to create balance, and even though Mer and I are identical in a couple of our entertainment preferences, it’s the differing aspects about us that are crucial to keeping us close.