Well, what more can I add that a thousand other people and critics haven't already said or written. Not much, I suppose.
I can tell you what attracted me to Friends in the first place. I can tell you how it "touched my life" in ways I never thought possible. I can tell you all sorts of things. But, I'm really not going to do that. Not really. I'm just going to tell you how I was able to put my knowledge of all things Friends to good use.
I liked them so much that my senior English project was about them. I made a Friends hell. The assignment was to design your own hell, like Dante's Inferno (because we were reading it at that time.)
That was our project. I got the theme song from a mix tape one of my friends made me, and we (my classmates/fellow friends) created a Friends (scrap) book to illustrate our hell.
In our hell, modeled after Dante's own, there were 6 levels, I think. Each level was named after each Friend. We had to come up with punishments as well. My memory is a little fuzzy. It's been a couple of years. I think each level was full of those who committed against the friend that the level was created for. So, for example, in Joeyland (where the welcoming sign read, "How you doin'"), people who committed sins against Joey inhabited that level of hell, and paid for their sins by way of punishments, which pretty much mirrored what their crime was (as far as I can remember).
It was a fun, nifty, little project that earned us an A. But the enjoyment value meant so much more than the grade. (Ok, who am I kidding. I'm glad we got an A.) I totally enjoyed it.
We went through several ideas before settling on the Friends idea. One was the Simpsons. Now, that would also have been a great project. But Friends was more appealling, and we got our ideas together better than our attempt at the Simpsons hell.
The class’s reaction was positive. I think our class enjoyed it. We made them laugh as well as the teachers.
Some groups went for the serious. Others made a candyland hell base on relationships. Others made a video. That's pretty much all I remember.
We, at least me, felt pretty good about that.
When I thought about doing that project, and in the process of creating it, I never thought I would be here, in this moment, facing the fact that there will be no more Friends. I made my Friends project with my two other friends, and while I already said goodbye to some friends, I'm going to be saying good to another friend, soon. Wow. How weird.
It makes me think back to high school and the people that I knew then. Most of them, I'm not in contact with anymore, which makes me really sad. I'd love to still be in touch with them, but I guess that's not how it works here.
With my friends that I made overseas, I still try to keep in contact with them. (Some more successfully than others. I'm trying, though.) At least, I have most of their email addresses, and if I don't then at least I know someone who would know. I guess, in the US, things don't work out like that. I'm not surprise, really. My high school was really big, so maybe it's impossible to know everyone. It's sad...how everyone goes their own way, and you never really know if you're going to see them again.
You just have to hope that you'll continue to remember them, and they will remember you too, in some small way. (I've now turned it into a really sappy post, which was not my intention, but oh well.)
P.S. We tried hard to incorporate all the tiny little quirks Friends had into our project, like mentioning Gunther, Janice, and Ugly Naked Guy. Our hell map was in the shape of the Central Perk coffee mug (and we may or may not have named the area Central Perk Hell. Alls I know is that Central Perk was mentioned, somehow). Gosh, I wish I had the project with me right now. There were tons of things we refered to that happen to each of them. Like Ross and Rachel's "We were on a break." Ross got put into Rachel hell for that. And his punishment was to have Rachel look-a-likes run around telling him that "We were not on a break!"
All the details is starting to come back to me. I wish could remember it all. I wish I had room in this post to write down all the things we put into our hell.
P.S.S. I'm telling ya, it was the best damn hell I've ever had the chance to be a part of.
