However, I’ve noticed something strange about the senioritis disease. It affects us not only at school but in our friendships as well. I’ll call it…’social senioritis.’

     As we grow increasingly irritated with homework and waking up early, it seems like we’re growing more and more irritated with each other. The stress is piling on and it’s easy for us to take it out on our friends; but why is it so easy?

     Hmm. I don’t think there’s any scientific reasoning behind it, but I have a few ideas. Maybe it’s because friends are often the most honest people in our lives, and honesty isn’t always easy to handle during stressful times. It could be because it’s simpler to be angry with people we trust; we know that in the end they will always be around, even if we wronged them a few times.

     Or, maybe we (especially seniors) are realizing that a lot of us don’t have much time left together and feel like it would just be easier to slowly pull apart than have to wait for a more dramatic goodbye.

     But the truth is, we ARE going to have to say goodbye, and it’s going to be difficult no matter what. Why not spend this time strengthening our friendships? I mean, we’re going to be here during the summer and over holidays…wouldn’t it be nice to have extraordinary friends to come back to instead of just decent ones?

     In order for that to happen, social senioritis needs to die! When a friendship is “new,” it’s easy to find the truly admirable characteristics in each other. It tastes good, like hot and cheesy nachos.

     However, you know when you leave the nachos out on the counter for too long, and they start to taste a little funky? The cheese becomes crusty and you begin to think the chicken tastes wrong.

     That is exactly what happens when friendships start to grow old. They get crusty. Instead of noticing the wonderful personality traits in each other we start to notice the not-so-good ones, and for some reason, they seem to annoy us a whole lot more than they should. Soon enough, our best friends become the people we tend to avoid the most.

     It’s time to start reminiscing. We need to recall the important reasons why we became friends in the first place and bring them back, like…glasses. Glasses were cool when they were invented because the practically-blind people could suddenly see. Then, people thought they were lame for a little while and made fun of people for wearing them. Well, all of a sudden glasses have become all sexy chic or something, and people are even buying fake ones.

     So, we need to rediscover our awesome-ness, just like we did with glasses. There’s a reason why we are friends with the people we’re friends with, just like there’s a reason that people who can’t see very well wear glasses: it just makes sense.