2am

let me set the scene:
you're sitting there having coffee with a friend and you start talking about say...
...feet. i know random, but let's just say this branch stemmed from a conversation about shoes. so you decide to pull a harmless friendly joke to pull your mate's leg a lil'. you lean over, peek under the table and pretend to smirk remarking: "sheesh...with Sun Ming Ming's* feet, i bet the guy's at foot locker panic everytime you walk in eh?"

then it's like pause...they raise an eyebrow...purse the lips..tuck their feet behind the chair legs...cross their arms..lean back...and:
"atleast they don't go running for oxygen masks everytime you show up..."

chhhyyyeaaahhhh...the conversation goes pretty much downhill from there as you both squeeze your minds to squirt out the tiniest faults and bloopers about each other that you can use as an attack (or defence). the ravenous ping pong game finally ends in a big stupid screaming contest about absolutely nothing as one of you storms off, often leaving the remaining person to foot the bill.

it's this irritating defensive attitude that really bugs me about some people. you just can't engage in a humourous light-hearted diss with them. like shit, man. take a chill pill, can't you take a joke? it's like they think the world's out to get them. sometimes they leave me feeling pretty stupid because they don't laugh. and when they don't laugh i automatically come up with two explanations:
a) the joke was just OTT, uncalled for, offensive, lame and not funny, or
b) it happened that they have something shoved so far up their arse that day that it interferes with the "humour/joke alert" function of their brain and so they mis-register it as declaration of war.

i've been told that people who are defensive are insecure, have big egos, or they just had a reallllly bad childhood. so i had a good bitch to a mate about one of these doomed-to-be-disastrous conversations i've just had. it went something like this:

lyn: yeah, then he brought up the thing about me backing up into a pole. like fuck, that was my first time driving! seriously, he is soooo immature.
storm: tell him to lay off the caffeine and loosen up a bit
storm: then make a joke about his manhood and go offline. he'll think about it all night. trust me ;)

haha. seriously? maybeh ;)

note*: Sung Ming Ming is China's tallest basketball player. or, for those of you who don't follow bball, he's the tall kungfu guy in Rush Hour 3 that kicked Chris Tucker's arse hehe.