My friend Jimmy pushes buttons. He tells people their haircuts are bad or that their ethnic cuisine is smelly or that they should go kill themselves.

Underneath this veneer of infantilism he is really funny and smart. In fact, when I’m down there are only a handful of people who can make me smile and he is one of them. Despite our steady friendship every once in a while he’ll try to make me upset. He’ll say something like Croats stink or something equally absurd and ineffectual. This amuses me greatly and I’ve often wondered if he’ll ever figure out how to actually upset me. I also wondered about what he could possibly do to upset me. Well, he finally did something that made me feel like crap.

The best part about is that he didn’t do anything out of character or anything much worse than what he’s said or done a million times before. In fact, he did something frivolous and of very short-term consequence. It is just that he finally found my button. You can tell a lot about people from their buttons.

Go Jimmy! It took you seven years to make me flinch. Here’s to another seven years of you guessing wrong!