I benefitted greatly from the “team” aspect of hanging out. I don’t know any other way to live, nor would I want to.

There are too many people now that hang out with people they don’t care about at all. You can call it PTSD, but I’m always on the lookout for someone doing the wrong thing. All you need is one incident to throw your entire evening off.

The funny/unfunny part of it is that the chick that got displaced was very used to being treated like that. She looked at him, didn’t say jack and moved over, because there happened to be some space to move over. Never mind that now she’s not sitting perpendicular to her own part of the table, but off on an angle. Never mind that this dude that’s NOT at our table is now taking up part of our space. She’s very used to “eating” that. So, even though I would have been mentally & subconsciously penalized for letting her get pushed around, she wouldn’t actually have noticed it. Life was regular to her. This is what happens. People run into her and she moves.

She was probably actually uncomfortable with the fact that I brought the situation up to the dude. After all, she hadn’t been there when he first arrived and I informed her that he needed to watch out for the personal space of the person that was going to be sitting there. As far as she was concerned, we had never spoken to each other. The fact of the matter was that I had expressed myself already and he had heard me. He should never have run into her at all, because he should have been paying attention to what I had said… Not because I’m a cop or a bouncer, but because HIS OPPORTUNITY to disrespect what I was saying was right when I told it to him. If he wasn’t going to respect what I said, the problem should have occurred when I informed him where his space ended and mine (by extension, through my homegirl) began.

Again, the situation was an error. It wasn’t the guy being a jerk. The fact remains that his blunder was going to affect me in my “relationship” to both gals, going forward. The fact is that I took the proper steps to avoid what eventually happened by letting him know what time it was when he got there.

In the future, he would have been some nobody that inconvenienced her. Meanwhile, I would have been her so-called friend that let some dude press up on her position without doing/saying anything about it = I lose.

Too many dudes want to shirk their responsibilities and still expect to collect respect. It doesn’t work like that. Whether she tells you or not and whether she notices or not, it’s going on your personal record & resume. If you send that chick off to walk 10 blocks home on her own in the middle of the night in Manhattan, that goes on your record.

Put her in a cab or if you have to, walk her to her house and keep trying the door to her apartment until you’re sure her drunk ass locked herself in properly. THEN you get to go home.

Carry The Flag.