I had an interesting evening last night...

Oh, you just KNOW it's going to be good when I throw out the word *interesting*.

A dear, dear friend of mine came over to cook supper with me. She's a terrific cook, specializing in her native Guamanian dishes. She also makes a mean potato salad.

So anyway, she's teaching me how to shred the chicken just right for kelaguen, showing me how to use the tortilla press and how to flip the handmade corn tortillas in the skillet using only my fingers (without burning my hands off),helping me to grate the ginger for the bulgoki marinade (without putting shredded knuckle in it), etc. Like I said, she's a terrific cook.

Later we stuffed ourselves with the wonderful things we had made together. It was a wonderful evening. So far.

After the table was cleared we went into the living room to sit and have coffee. We started catching up on each other's lives. It had been a few month since we had talked, so I was unprepared for what happened next. I was telling her the story of how I got screwed over by the furniture store when buying the couch she and I were sitting on ("damaged shipment", ten weeks of waiting for a new couch, ruined visit with in-laws because we had no living room furniture for them to sit on, many terse conversations with store manager, impassioned letters to company CEO and the Better Business Bureau, etc.). All of a sudden she whips a "magazine" out of a tote bag and says, "Did I tell you about my wonderful new business I started two months ago?"

Gentle readers, for the next 20 minutes, she attempted to "network market" us. Her new business opportunity is something called Pre-Paid Legal. I got a ten-minute spiel on how if I had purchaed a PPL plan, (for only $29.95 per month) I could have had a very high-powered law firm call up the furniture store and the store owners would have been quivering in their boots. "Nothing makes people freak out faster than hearing that you have an attorney. You can make people do whatever you want if you say those magic words, 'I'll have my attorney get in touch with you.'"

We had been network marketed before, about ten years ago. Some of our closest frends had gotten into a business, (the parent company of which rhymes with "Scam Day") and had used us to practice their sales pitch, knowing full well that we would rather have our eyeballs poked with sharp sticks that join "Scam Day." It, too, was a looooong evening.

I've seen these same friends go into tremendous debt just trying to keep up with the rallies, conventions, and "free enterprise meetings" they were pressured to attend. I've walked through their house and looked at the inspirational slogans they have tacked up on every surface in their home. I've stood over their "dream table" (consumerism altar) with its floor plan of the 11,000 sq.ft. house they are going to build when they "Make Diamond", the beaches they are going to stroll after they are able to quit their jobs ("In Just 2-5 Years!"), the Ivy League Universities they are going to write out tuition checks to for their younger children. ("Like Pocket Change!")

I love these friends dearly, but to put it mildly, this enterprise of theirs changed the friendship. Their focus became the business--necessary I suppose, if your dream is to become billionaires.

So when this happened last night, I was able to look my friend in the eye and say, "Not for us." I was able to give her all the reasons that we would fail miserably at network marketing--reasons I am rather proud of.

The one thing I wish I could have said to her without insulting her is this: "Our friendship is not for sale at any price."