Star “Do Not Ever Call Me Starlita” Friend died recently after tripping over a laptop cord that had been plugged into the wall by a student who claimed he needed to charge the laptop, but really just wanted to move so he could sit next to his friend and watch TikTok.

It was on the same day that she had planned to have her class read speculative fiction on thepretentiouspedant.com, but the website was blocked by filtering software installed by the school district.

Star made a few friends and many enemies throughout her working years, which began in a nursing home when she was 14. Once, she was called stupid by an elderly schizophrenic because she didn’t know how to make coffee.

But what she lacked in talent, she made up for with hard work. Star eventually learned to make coffee, type obituaries, and take medicine in capsule form. Sadly, she was never able to connect a television to a VCR or DVD player, and as a result, her students missed many opportunities to enrich their understanding of literature through film. 

She married Daniel Friend in 2002, as much for his technical skills as for the fact that he knew how to say “the horse is dead” in French. Because of his expertise, they were able to keep a Frigidaire Compact 30 oven working for 40-some years. Although she had been known to threaten, “either this oven goes, or I do,” the oven did indeed survive her.

In her years as a newspaper writer, Star wrote about food, but she was never a foodie. After offering to pay her children to eat vegetables, only to be disappointed when one almost gagged on a tomato, she declared herself the queen of processed food. Though her friends ate organic salad from glass bowls at lunch, she mostly survived on Nutella Uncrustables and Cheetos.  

Pastries were her passion. She believed the flourless chocolate torte was the greatest invention of all time. 

One of her many enemies was a student who became enraged when she refused to publish a humor piece he wrote titled “Minnie’s Chocolate Pie,” in a class anthology because it contained offensive language. Even though she never used the story, she kept it, and years later prepared the pie herself at home, omitting shit from the recipe. The pie was a success. At least, she didn’t have to pay anyone to eat it.