Top Ten Odd and Curious Thoughts (about Texting)

March 17, 2014 By

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(1) I love to text.  My thumbs fly so fast you would not believe.  There’s nothing more gratifying than the three little dots that says “they’re writing something at this very moment! In a few short moments, unless they get a phone call, have to take something hot off the stove, have an urge to do something different, or feel like totally ignoring me, I’ll know what they are thinking!” Yay!

(2) Come to think of it, phone calls are actually more efficient. As a bonus you get to hear awkward pauses, which is a delightful hobby. Why did we start texting, anyway?

(3) Oh yes, I remember.  Because you don’t have to speak to anyone.  And you sound more intelligent when you write rather than dumbly asking your man how his day was.  It was fine? Super.  You ate grilled chicken for dinner? Awesome. And your day? Oh I already asked that.

(4) Conversely, you can’t save them like love letters.  Printed screen shots just aren’t the same. It’s perhaps a bit weird and creepy to print out volumes of screen shot text messages. I imagine strange giggling and Saturday nights spent scrapbooking.

(5) My mom started to text. Which means at 10 am when I’m sitting in a meeting I get reminded to buy a crock pot and that next summer we’re getting together for July 4 and random thoughts like “I watched five minutes of Honey Boo Boo and who watches this stuff because this show is awful and your father is cooking eggs” and your boss keeps glaring at you for your buzzing phone.  Little does he know its just mom, stream-of-conscious asking if you turned off your coffee maker.

(6) The standard test for if a friend will make it past the introductory text phase is whether they can handle humor via text or whether all snarky throw downs will end with an LOL and a smiley face for the loss.  That being said there are times that I’m just tired and a good solid LOL is all I can muster.  It’s a marathon, not a sprint.

(7) I am the worst at not being able to get in touch with a coworker so I just naturally assume that I can text them like “hey buddy, so sorry to bug you but can you just stop everything you’re doing and pay attention to me because I have this work issue that’s super important (to me only) and I need you to be interrupted during your chipotle burrito to explain this complex financial arrangement to me real quick-like? THANKS!!” or the like.

(8) I’ve found that including the standard smiley-faced emoticon conveys a decent amount of normalcy or perhaps diffuses a humorous statement. Yet more intricate pictures seem to scream “I’m a nerd and found out there’s a Spanish dancer twirly-skirt lady in my picture file so I’ll choose to use it” and you don’t want to be that guy

(9) I love it when someone texts an obvious mistake like “I’ll be there at eight because I’m running a little lame” and then later you get the follow-up text that says “late” like you couldn’t possibly figure out what they meant by using standard context and you would just naturally just assume they were talking smack about themselves and they needed to clear up the rumors

(10)               Most of my best friends answer about half of my texts because they have a life and could possibly fail to care for their children or not have time to eat or shave their legs if they answered them all but then the next day I’ll get a picture of Chunk, Missouri with a statement like “who the heck names a town Chunk” and then all is forgiven for not commenting on my cute kid pictures because I am a lover of random texts.

There are times, however, that I miss the days of talking for hours.  I yearn for the flavor and tenor of a human voice.  I miss the nervous talking over each other and twirling the cord in your hand and the amount of openness it takes to talk without the shield and power of words and time to prepare them.  And most importantly, you have to form a coherent verbal response instead of just saying HAHA! LOL! Rolling on the floor laughing! Seriously? I’ve never seen anyone roll on the floor unless it part of a fire drill, and they are usually cursing under their breath.

So as many reasons as there are to love texting – for it’s convenience and it’s ability to hide behind words – it’s good to pick up the phone sometimes, just to go through the exercise of speaking to another human being.  To find out that we are human, and raw, and awkward.  To lift your head up and look around you. Maybe at the core, we are all just scared we’ll look stupid and hide behind machines to be safe.

Be different. Brave.  Put your thumbs down.  Talk to one other.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor Tagged With: , , , , ,

Luck of the Irish

February 10, 2014 By

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This girl can’t pass up a good groupon, so when an Irish restaurant in town offered a four-course menu for four for $99, I ran toward the computer with my credit card in tow and snapped it up like last call.  Not that ye Irish are really known for their food, and I’ll be honest about a vague stereotype I had trapped in my mind of a bunch of burly men in pubs eating Guinness rabbit stew, but still.  So when said groupon was about to expire, I gathered up three besties and we wore our St. Patrick’s best. Come on, it’ll be fun. They’ll be potatoes.

So off we go toward this random restaurant set high on a hill like a movie set and as we pull into the parking lot and leave the vehicle I have a sense that we’ve grown ten feet tall and what’s in front of us is really a hobbit’s house or maybe a hovel for gremlins.  But we approach what appears to be Hansel and Gretel’s cottage and open the creaky door, it opens to a front-porch-like haven of horrors with little dolls and St. Paddy’s paraphernalia. My nostrils are hit with the smell of old-people’s homes but with someone baking soda bread in a far-off forest. It’s a confusing combination.

I start to back my way out, because perhaps we’re in a dream and this place has swallowed up my children and there’s no hostess stand or normalcy and why for the love are there so many dolls.  For a fearful moment I thought we stepped into Frodo’s neighbor Marge’s living room, who has been alive since well before Eisenhower. But alas – another door in front of us creaked open and my other girlfriends were in fact inside, perched at a table covered in lace.  They looked frightened, or maybe hungry for rabbit: hard to tell.  But there were normal-looking people inside, everyone just sitting around as if they were eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday. My friends waved and I sighed because if we are going down an Alice-in-wonderland tunnel at least I wouldn’t be alone.

So there we sat in the hobbit house, trying to not hit our heads on the ceiling, just a simple table covered in lace.  My friend Jess kept wiping her eyes because the prices were all wrong and there was a bottle of wine on the menu for thirty-five thousand dollars and she thought maybe they laced the air with hallucinogenic drugs.  But alas the waitress came along, just a wee girl of fifty wearing a prairie dress with spitfire hair and told us that bottle of wine wasn’t actually for sale. “It’ll kill ya perhaps, young lassies, with all the air bubbles and such trapped inside.  But it’s a family heirloom, yeh.” So we decided to live and order the house red and the lady’s voice said “Aye, a good choice,” and the cadence of her voice rose and fell as if she descended from the streets of Dublin and I WAS TERRIFIED AND ENTHRALLED ALL AT THE SAME TIME.

So the courses began, and us girls all sat around giggling as the potato soup was served and we attempted small talk as if we are not all in a hobbit house sitting around a table covered in lace.  After a while my friend needed to use the restroom so she transcended into the bowels of the earth somewhere to the left and came back to the table as if she were having a life-threatening brain spasm. But in reality it was just the facilities, which included a green bathtub and a faucet connected together by strands of electrical tape and a cherub that looked out the window at nothing that overcame her. So my other friend Becca braved the dark and I offered to tie a string to her so she’d never get lost but she went in like a hero and took iphone pictures of the statute of a woman staring at your private places holding towels.

So between the salad and the beef they brought out a palate cleanser, but not the real kind, just lemon sherbet from Wal-mart, and we were just so giddy about all the absurdities we looked around and realized no one else was laughing and we must in fact be caught in a dream. But our best friends are all there so it was actually quite delightful and I drank red wine that in hobbit-money probably costs thousands.  I had a hunch the other patrons were in fact staged and it was all some big gag and a muskrat dressed in a three-piece suit would very soon appear with signs that said “Happy 40th, Josephine!” and we’ll all say “no, no, you’ve got the wrong girls.” But no one jumped out from the kitchen so we sat eating carrots cooked in maple syrup, but not the real kind, just Aunt Jemima’s from Wal-mart, and we toasted our future travels to Ireland where we could start a gang because we were all a good six-inches taller than all these other red-headed hotbloods and we could take this place down.

So we finally got the bill and although I had a groupon they said the actual cost of the meal would have run us about $469 so the suggested tip was around a hundred bucks and we’re like “but we live in the real world, thankyouverymuch” so we paid for our wine and we took our iphone pictures and we ran out of the hobbit house as fast as our legs would carry us.

I haven’t laughed so long and so hard in months and when I think of that green bathtub and my friend having a brain spasm and that waitress in the prairie dress and the hobbit house as we sat around a table covered in lace I am exceedingly glad we went, because it was all just so brilliant and colorful and strange. And it’s times like this that memories are seared and if we were all just sitting around eating a blooming onion at Outback on a Tuesday night we’d have no great stories to tell.

Because life, my dear friends, is a huge book that can’t close because it’s so jammed with stories. I’m so blessed and delighted to live inside of it, with friends who laugh and a heart that’s open and a life that sings, so when we run out of little houses after sitting around tables covered in lace we can say we had a life well lived, and friends that are well worn, forged in the tunnels of green cherubs staring into nothing.

It’s just luck of the Irish, I suppose.

 

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photo:

Bag End

Filed Under: Creativity, Friendships, Humor, Love Tagged With: , , , , ,

The Zoo

June 3, 2012 By

I apologize in advance for such a long post, but on this one I was a horrid self-editor and just couldn’t bring myself to cut out any details.   Please forgive me!

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It all started out so simple.  My husband had a board meeting in Dallas on a Saturday.  We figured it made good sense to drive up together, meet a girlfriend and her children, and we’d all hit the zoo while my husband was trapped in a long, boring meeting. A well-crafted plan!  So we packed our sunscreen and juice boxes and hit the road in high spirits.  In no time flat we’d be feeding the giraffes.  We’d be looking with awe as elephants fanned themselves with muddy water and giggling at those darn flamingos standing precariously on their tall, spindly legs.

I should have seen it coming when we stopped for lunch and a bag of food fell over, tumbling French fries this way and that in random places between my seats.  But this was a fun day with friends and cheetahs.  What could possibly go wrong?

My husband’s meeting was deep in the barrio somewhere, which meant I was weaving about unfamiliar territory amidst unfamiliar people.  My children were singing Wheels on the Bus as I gripped our own steering wheel, my blond hair tied back in a bun and my eyes squinting to find the right turn.  Finally, after delivering my husband safely, I took off for the zoo, which is literally two exits north. This is when things started to go south.  And west.  And east again.  Despite the zoo being a stone’s throw away, I still managed to miss the exit and I went on a fun-filled ride through pawn-shop, bail-bond, check-cashing and cheap-auto-insurance heaven.  I turned around and weaved over and tried to look at the map on my phone while not hurling my children into the taillights of the car in front of us.  We finally made it an hour late, but who cares?  We have all afternoon! And how long does it take to see gorillas anyway?

I drove up to the parking attendant to pay and she informed me that today of all days was their annual special event that required them to close early.  In three hours, specifically.  They’d shut the doors and shoo all the zoo-goers to their SUVs promptly at 4 pm and “we aren’t kidding,” the man says.  What were the odds?

So we all pile out of the car, get the stroller in zoo-read shape, and head inside to meet my dear girlfriend and her family.  To the giraffes we go!  Time’s a wastin! So we all schlep it over to pay $5 for a few lettuce leaves so that the overfed animals can get their daily intake of salad.  My two-year-old is frightened by the whole concept and just pitches the leaves over the fence.  They float to the ground like parachutes.

Next up is the monorail.  The kids are ecstatic about the train ride, so we all sit in a pressure cooker of sweat and trapped air for a good half hour, desperately pouring water down our children’s throats to prevent heatstroke and pointing out various animals down below.  “Deer!” my son says at every single animal. I start to correct him, but what’s the point?  We’ll never see that particular antelope again in real life.  “Yes! Deer!” I say in return.

After the train, we all head to splashdown so the kids could cool off in a manufactured river that’s only a few inches deep and smells very strongly of urine.  I watched my daughter and her friend lay their entire bodies in it, waving their hands around and pretending they’re mermaids.  I’m slightly horrified that there’s a kid in front of me with a sagging poopy diaper laughing and dancing around in the water my son just traipsed through. But it looked quite fun and maybe I need to back off on the germ focus.  After all, what are immune systems for?  What’s a few diluted pints of pee amongst friends?

So we dry off the children, change their clothes, and head to see the monkeys.  But before we get there, we are stopped by a zoo employee and told that the north end of the zoo is actually closed. Only for today, you see, because of the special event going on. So no monkeys.  But back by the entrance, there’s a bird show going on.  “See how things have a way of working out?” I tell my friend as we laugh and do a stroller u-turn in the walkway.  I grab the hands of my daughter and her dear friend, walk down three flights of stairs by the little zoo theatre, sit on the front row right in front of the tuxedo-outfitted penguins, and wait.  But people are leaving.  The penguins are walking off the stage, their little feet waddling out of sight.

“So sorry,” the penguin handler tells me.  “But the show ended about five minutes ago.”  Just our luck.  Yes, yes.  That figures.

We finally just hauled the kids to the carousal and let them ride the pretend horses around and around.  They were thrilled.  My two-year-old clutched his horse as if he might get bucked off and giggled with glee.  It was just in time for the zoo to close, whereby we were being asked to leave through the front gates. “Come again!” the zoo worker said.

The incredible mother that I am, I managed to pack seventeen juice boxes but no real bottles of water, and neglected to bring any hand sanitizer. So my children were covered with animal and train-rail and carousal germs of all sorts as we finally headed back to the car.  We hugged our dear friends, changed my kids’ clothes in the parking lot so they could pass out with sheer exhaustion in something clean on the way home, did my best to wipe them down with generic-brand wet wipes, and called the day a success.  Despite the fact that we were only at the zoo for a short time and had a four-hour drive back home.  And despite the fact that we would all likely die of a strange, urine-transported disease and didn’t see one single monkey.

The kids and I headed back to the barrio to get my husband, who was wrapping up the board meeting that very moment.  On the way, I hear my daughter say something disturbing in the back seat. Something like “what’s that all over you?”  She was speaking to her brother.  I was filled with terror.

I pulled over in a dollar store parking lot, taking up several spaces, and forced myself to turn around.  I had given my son a squeezable fruit, which is great for travel and presumably less messy for young children. Unless it happened to be a blend of apples and spinach, and is the color of grass cuttings.  In this case my son believed it appropriate to simply squirt the crap all over his body and then mash it into the car seat and his clothing like finger paint.

I’m trying not to curse as some man walks up to me to either ask for money or mug me, but I give him dirty looks and shake my head because I have better things to do, like strip my kid down to his diaper and wipe the green goo off every crevice of his body.  It’s crammed into the straps of his car seat like glue.  Great.

“Did we stop for a Frosty?” my daughter says as she notices there’s a Wendy’s nearby.  I look over at her, my hands covered in green mashed ick, after just shooing away a homeless person and glancing around to make sure no one’s going to car-jack us, cursing under my breath when I realize I don’t have any extra clean clothes and wiping my son’s body down with wet wipes while in a parking lot in a rough part of town.  Yes, my love.  We stopped for ice cream. The homeless dude that was asking for money just walked off, like Nu-uh. I don’t want any part of that craziness. 

My kids never did sleep on the way home. They decided to sing seventeen renditions of Happy Birthday and slung barbeque sandwich all over the backseat.  My son had not one, but two large poops that he so happily declared to us as my husband gripped the wheel and just hoped to the dear heavens that there was justice in the world and we’d get home already.  The kids got louder and louder on the way, possibly fueled by a mid-trip ice cream, and it at the end it was like a grand finale at a firework display.  My son wanted a cup of ice in the front seat and kept screaming “LEMME HAVE IT!” at the top of his lungs.  My daughter applied some of my lip gloss, which she said did NOT smell like cocoa or butter and kept saying “It reeks in here!  Open the window!  I can’t take this smell!”  Finally my husband and I just started laughing at how ridiculous it all was.

At nine o’clock when we arrived home, I threw my son in a warm bath and covered him with soapy bubbles.  In deference to the day we had, he stood up in the bath and peed for a long, solid minute. Somehow, I wasn’t at all surprised.

All in all, it was glorious. Any chance to see one of my best friends is worth it, and now we have even more stories to add to our long, thick book of friendship. The fact is that I’d do it all over again in a second.  One day, when the kids are grown and gone, my car will be clean and things will work out the way they’re planned.  But I’ll burn with longing for the loud, messy, insane world that I now wallowing in, green goo and all. These glorious little people make me laugh and smile despite having to get my car detailed on a regular basis. They might fill my car with stale French fries, but they fill my soul with happiness as I pick up their tired, sticky bodies, their mouths covered with the sweet residue of ice cream and their hair matted together with dried sweat.

They fell asleep so happy, and the next morning all we heard about was the carousal and the zebras.  The “geewaffs” and the choo-choo and all those deer.  And that makes it all worth it, monkeys or no monkeys, bacteria and all.

Filed Under: Embarrassing Moments, Humor, Love, Motherhood, My life Tagged With: , , , , ,

peace for the wandering soul

March 28, 2012 By

I have always been surrounded by wanderers.  I swim amidst thinkers and singers.  Artists and tinkerers of all kinds.  Whether they have spouses or partners, dogs or made-up friends, these are my people. I’ve always been drawn to those who challenged life.  Pushed back the limitations. Created things.  I look at kids nowadays, forced and squeezed into certain stereotypes.  What a shame to be so pigeonholed.  What a waste to not absorb it all.

What’s come of the wonderful patchwork of friends I’ve gathered along the roadside is a realization that I’m a bit of a loner.  That my faith defines me in a different light.  The fact is that I’m surrounded by non-believers, whom I love dearly.  I’d gladly sit for hours through nights and storms with these dear friends, despite our differences, holding their hands and crying into their pad Thai noodles.

I want to tell them what I have learned through so many hard lessons.  That peace is possible.  That God simply loves.  Yet I’m forced to cut down so many negative stereotypes of faith, like hacking through a rainforest, that the message is lost.  I won’t send sappy emotional poetry about how Jesus Saves.  I won’t drag someone to church and make them sing Rock of Ages.  I won’t tell someone in the grocery store I’m praying for them, because I know that won’t make any difference for them to hear.  In fact, it will have the opposite effect.

And yet I pray for them all the same.

I think the problem with religion is there are too many people that think right-wing crazies and Rush-Limbaugh-for-president folks (and the bigots and the bible-thumpers too, if you’re counting) are all lumped together in one ball of dough.  They all bake up into one hot and crazy loon that is not to be trusted.  I don’t feel like a crazy loon.  I don’t take the written word literally and like to question established truths.  I thought Origin of the Species was brilliant and totally understand people scratching their heads at the thought of Noah building a large ark whereby eight people and a billion animals be-bopped into it two-by-two and floated along the entire earth for a few days.  Yet I still think God is real.  I still believe he guides and directs my life.

You don’t have to consider yourself a member of the crazy tribe to have faith.  You can believe in metaphors, or think that our ancestors didn’t look like us, or that there is a plausible life form outside our solar system.  You can believe Jesus was a great teacher. Or, like his father, a great healer, without surrendering your soul to stupidity.  People who are blessed with great big thinking brains – the ones who analyze and process and deconstruct problems like science experiments – have a difficult time with faith.  It is outright inferior to accept something because we are told to.  Because it’s the right thing to do. Because everyone’s doing it.

We are more than this. 

But sometimes, in your lowest hour, faith comes upon you like a whisper.  A small breath of truth that tells you that you cannot survive the winter alone.  That you must be able to let go of your demons and fall effortlessly into the arms of God.  One who can keep you safe in those cold, bitter nights.  One who accepts you right where you are, and forgives all that went before that one moment.

It’s hard to explain to my fellow intellectuals, who say they feel silly praying to a popcorn-covered plaster ceiling.  To sit alone in one’s thoughts and think there is a God above, somewhere in some celestial heaven, watching nations get torn apart or seeing people drown a slow death, lost at sea. 

To these people I just say – have patience.  Don’t give up at least considering that this man people have revered for so many hundreds upon thousands of years wasn’t just some random bloke with a beard and dirty sandals, but that there was meaning to his words. That forgiveness really is possible.  That peace happens.

Because deep down, that’s what’s holding us all back. Fear that we’ll be found out.  That our insecurity will surface like a helium balloon and we’ll be the ones left with our pants down.  But God cares not of this.   We all start out from different places, with different gifts, and with different hearts.  Some that profess to believe, and hate Darwin to wit, might not actually believe in much after all.  All those pot luck casseroles and church committees for nothing. For regardless of where we are in life, or how silly we feel entering this new world, naked and starving, he simply forgives. 

I believe that God is real.  That he loved us enough to deliver a son to this earth to die for our behalf.  This I believe despite having one of those big ‘ol thinking brains.  I like to drink a cold beer and laugh at good, hearty jokes.  I cut other people off in traffic.  I might not take all written words – even some in the bible – literally, but I think God’s okay with the fact that we can question and explore and investigate.   That we can still buy groceries and walk the dog and live in this crazy, silly world of heartbroken people, and still make a difference.

Yes, I’ve heard that still, quiet breath.  When my life was screaming for mercy and chains wrapped around the walls of my heart, closing in faster than I expected.  When I stared death in the face and told it I wasn’t ready. It was in that moment I poured out tears of guilt and shame.  And that, my friend, is what grace is all about.

Pray for peace, my wonderful beatnik friends.  If you can’t manage that, try to keep a sliver of your heart open, so someday, you might find the room to believe.  And then, peace can start to happen.

Filed Under: Religion Tagged With: , , , ,

best friends forever

July 27, 2011 By

I have great friends.  In fact, my peeps are the most fabulous people I’ve ever known.  That’s why I begged and bribed and cajoled them to associate with me.   I have good taste, after all.  My circle of girls is unique and funny and brilliant.  They give great presents and remember my kids’ birthdays.  They write and sew and travel.  They take kick-ass pictures and whip up chocolate pound cakes and can banter with boys.   If you really think about it, I got the better deal.  I never remember their birthdays.  I can’t even remember their addresses.  I’m always at the post office balancing a care package in my arms, texting things like “do you still live on Cresent Avenue?” or “do you still hyphenate your name?”  I usually get some response like “uh, no.  I lived there in college eighteen years ago” or “I got divorced, remember?”

 

Maintaining friendships is difficult, especially when you have a husband and a chatty mother and evening routines that involve baths and reading and kids with ear infections.  I believe this is what prompted Hollywood to produce trashy television.  And cell phones.  And silly, fruity drinks.  Without girlfriends, who has a use for such things?  Texting has been a real boon to friendships, because you can text someone you haven’t seen in a year to let them know that you are currently seeing more under-eye wrinkles and perhaps you should try botox.  No one texts back and says “oh my gosh how’ve you been?” or “so how are those kiddos?” or “still got hemorrhoids?”   They simply text you back with the best eye cream on the market and tell you to hold off injecting your face with toxins.  See?  That’s maintenance.  One friend just sends random photos with no explanation, like a mountain or a picture of her kid wearing a cape or a slice of cherry pie.

 

I need to do better at showing my friends how much they mean to me.  Husbands are great – they are fun to have around and are interesting to talk to during dinner.   They do things like “support the family” and provide “love, loyalty, and wisdom” and all that jazz.   But when you really want to know who Justin Timberlake is hooking up with or what Jennifer Aniston’s house looks like and you forgot to buy this month’s People magazine, men are completely useless.  Also, they don’t like to talk at length about hairstyles or the sugar content in yogurt or other really important things that a modern woman needs to know.  And when it comes to being sad – heartbroken and dejected and can’t eat or cry or sleep type of sad – you just need to hear the voice of your BFF, saying you’re not a bad mother and you are so totally skinny and let’s go eat nachos.

 

You know when you’ve met a friend that will stick.  That kind of person that instantly makes you laugh and seems to roll their eyes at the same things you do and isn’t sensitive to sarcastic comments about their t-shirt (for future reference, the old navy, patriotic flag shirt you got for five bucks in 2002 is not acceptable to wear in public. It’s questionable for working out. Possibly okay for gardening.  I’d defer to your husband on whether you should sleep in it).  Friendship is all about chemistry.  You just fit or you don’t.

 

Sometimes you try really hard because you want it to work.  You meet for lunch and you have common interests and this new person obviously sees the value in great shoes.  Or they look on the outside like you’d fit together, being all zen and yoga and blond and hip. But after stilted conversation and awkward pauses, you must move on.  Or meet in groups.  Or just make a silent, unspoken pact to talk about one common thing, like your kid’s school or books or your rotten, cruel bosses.  I have one friend that all we talk about is kids.  The moment we start asking about each other or politics or celebrities, the air becomes thick and stale.  So we revert to talking about time-out strategies and how to minimize whiny talk and the breeze starts to flow through the shiny sky yet again.  Focus on the strengths, people.

 

I think the reason I cherish my friends so much is that I value their contribution to the world.  Each of them has such unique gifts.  And they give so much of themselves.  I have one friend who acts as if her sole job on this earth is to support me.  Once, after reading my novel six (million) times and giving me feedback, she then proceeds to text me and asks how my husband’s trial went and if my daughter had a good birthday.  How does she know these things?  She’s an attorney with two grown kids of her own.  How can she possibly care that much about my life and remember all these details? I can’t even remember her recent hair color! I called her once on her anniversary, when she and her husband were out for pre-dinner cocktails in Washington, D.C., to whine about some minor, trivial thing, and she just walked out of the restaurant like it was the most natural thing ever in order to listen and convince me that it (whatever it was) would all be okay.  It’ll work out, she said.  Trust me.

 

I could write pages upon pages about how special my friends are.  How much they add to my life.  How many ways they enrich my soul.  How lonely I’d be without them around.  I try and remember to tell them, but I’m too self-focused to always do so.  So here’s to you, BFFs in my little section of the world.  Husbands and kids are great, but nothing adds sparkle to life like girlfriends.

 

Best friends forever. Unless you insist on wearing that old navy t-shirt.  Then, you’re on double secret probation.

Filed Under: Friendships, Humor Tagged With: , , ,