If friendship is calculable some might say that by adding an abundance of acquaintances, multiplying a few merry memories, and subtracting some silly squabbles the result would equate to a perfect relationship. I, however, believe that friendship can be measured in ice cream and tissues.

Once upon a time, not too long ago, I found myself in a car with a boy I liked and I felt the need to explicate my feelings in a typical, melodramatic, teenage fashion. I told him that my love was exponential and that I could only hope that our love would be asymptotic and reach a common value. I told him that as our time together approaches infinity the limit of my love would not exist. But he turned to me before he got out of the car and stated that if his love for me was graphed, according to extreme value theorem, the maximum it could ever reach was friendship. And then he asked, “all we had for homework was calc, right?”

As I drove away tears started filling my eyes at a rate I couldn’t calculate making it impossible to derive the related rate of my disappointment. So I put to practice the first step towards a solution, calling my best friend. And so we sat outside a pastel-colored ice cream parlor as we had done many times before and I blubbered my feelings out whilst shoving a cookies-and-cream-flavored antidote down my throat. Tissues were destroyed at a constant slope but I felt lucky to have such a friend. I have found that I believe that evaluating a true friend is systematic in that if ice cream and tissues equal feet and inches, a true friend will have enough to form the length of a lifeline and then be that. For if friendship is in fact calculable one must be present not only for smiling and dancing but also for ice cream and tissues.