One friend is good, but a group of friends is better

Through the years, people have come up with names for a group of people who hang out together. Such names include "posse," "gang" and "crew" in pro wrestling they have been known as "factions." I prefer the term "clique."

Just to be clear, I am a realist and do realize that cliques can be negative, especially in adolescence.

I think the most blatant example of this in pop culture was the 2004 film "Mean Girls," how the stupidity of "clique rules" could ruin people's perceptions of others they hardly know. Even movies like "High School Musical" show how idiotic and pointless cliques can be by stating certain people in certain cliques cannot do activities outside their ordinary routine. In the case of "High School Musical," a basketball player cannot be a musical theater performer and neither can "the smart girl." Most cliques come together without having the intention of doing so.

I have seen a lot of different kinds of people on this campus. The one thing I have seen a lot of is people walking and talking in groups. I used to be irritated by people not walking by themselves like, "Why can't these people be strong and stand alone?" Soon after this, I thought about myself and people in their 20s and just hypothesizing what life is going to be like after graduation. Then I realized and remembered a cold hard fact about this world. Life stinks when you don't have people you can trust and it also stinks when you're out of university and you don't know where to go.

This was the same thought of Marta Kauffman and David Crane when they created a little sit-com in 1994 called "Friends." That show is one of the greatest sit-coms of all time and one of the greatest sit-com of the 1990s.

This television series, along with others like "That 70's Show," "How I Met Your Mother," and "Will & Grace" shows the value of having a clique when you are at an age where you have so many questions about your life, such as, "When or should I get married?" "Should I have kids?" "What if I never find my career or a job that I enjoy doing?" Most, if not all, of these questions are pretty scary and for a long time unanswerable because of this: It is nice to know that no matter what's going on in your life you have six people (more or less) who will be there for you at your favorite restaurant, bar, one of your friend's apartments or your favorite coffee place, waiting to tell you how awful their day was to make you feel better about yours.

There is a reason why ensemble sit-coms like "Friends"are still funny to a countless audiences. What's funnier than hanging out with your friends?

Throughout my life, I have been called many things, some of which are not appropriate to put on paper. The one thing that has always come back to me is the comment that I'm either the creator of cliques or the backbone of a clique. I don't know why this is; on the other hand I can understand why I get this title because I never knew much of my extended family by blood, thus I have never had a lot of close ties with most of my family. This is the sole reason for which I think cliques form, either you really don't like your family and do not want to get to know them better or you meet people with similar interests and you just so happen to connect on different subjects as well. For these reasons, I think the bonds of friendship formed in a clique are sometimes stronger than a familial bond. This goes back to the old saying, "You can choose your friends, not your family." I just had dinner at The Roost with four of my closest friends. I hadn't seen all four of them together in one place for more than a week and all of us just ordered dinner, relaxed and talked about various subjects. We spent hours and hours socializing and making jokes. At the end of the night I remember thinking, "This is the best night I have had in weeks." Now I'm planning to get my clique together to do this once a week.

Cliques can be destructive and petty groups of people, but they can also be some of the best friendships you can form in your life and some of my fondest memories are my clique memories, so the next time someone asks you to join a clique, don't turn them down right away because you could miss out on a lot of good times.