(Not included on this page: my grad-school friends!)
Jennifer, my best friend since 1993, our freshman year of high school. She's probably one of the only people I feel totally comfortable with, and she is ~certifiably~ the ONLY person I've told my most embarrassing and outrageous stories / activities to. We've also been "cohorts in crime" (as my parents like to call us) to many crazy ~ahem~ stunts and adventures. Strangely enough, though we've been best friends for over a decade, I've only met her mom once (at our high school graduation)... Wherever we go, something Lucy and Ethel-esque usually happens, or something in general goes horribly wrong, whether it's an unexpectedly-horrible movie, house-hunting with my parents, or being stuck in the bowels of a Roman pagan temple having to go through a pitch-dark room to get out. However, getting through crappy situations somehow makes the experience more fun, since we can find humor in almost any situation, and overcoming the crappiness (not that we SEEK it out) makes the stories more fun to tell later.
I guess you could call Jennifer a bit skittish. When Toy Story first came out, we went to a theater to see it, and when it got to the scene with the mutated toys in Sid's room, she started freaking out. When the spider-ish toy with the baby doll head turned around to face the camera, she had a meltdown, started screaming, and clawing my arm. Even the first-graders were shushing her, and once my arm recovered, it was of course hilarious. My dad takes special joy in freaking her out. He used to laugh like Chucky the freaky doll from the horror movies of the same name, and this would REALLY scare her. Then she saw an episode of "I Love the 80s" in which Dee Snider pointed out that "It's a DOLL. STEP on it - it's OVER!!!" So now the laugh doesn't scare her anymore, and my dad has had to find new ways to terrorize her.
The above picture was taken at a Halloween party circa 1995, and she's wearing one of our lovely high school uniforms. She went as a bratty Catholic school girl, hence the hairdo! She's obsessed with many guys, and I think she set some sort of record, actually... For the list, go here.
Jennifer again, this time looking very snazzy!
Some wacky pictures of Jennifer and I. I have the hard copy of the one on the right framed in my room at school, and it cracks me up every time I look at it!
Rick and I at our dorm's end of the year party in 1999. (Rick is the very first friend I made at college, way back in 1997, and we're still really good friends! :o) ) He's super-funny and nice, and even put up with my jerky ex-boyfriend (though he not-so-secretly hated the guy's guts). Overall, he's definitely one of my favorite people of all time.
Christina, my roommate for Fall 1999-Spring 2000. She was one of my favorite roommates of all time, and always had tons of stories about what was going on around our dorm. We often acted totally silly, running around our dorm and causing trouble in the middle of the night, and visiting / tormenting two of our guy friends who were also roommates. The two of us would also talk and laugh our heads off when we'd go to sleep at night (sometimes so loud that our neighbors would angrily bang on the walls), and a few times we even talked so long that the sun started to come up before we'd even gone to sleep! She ended up going to law school in Washington DC, but has since graduated, and we're still in touch after all this time.
Matt, one of my best friends of all time. He's super-smart, laughs a lot, is inquisitive and kind, and loves learning. Besides my friend John, he's probably the friend I have the most in common with. (On the right, he's laughing because we were chatting and I had just told him he looked like Scarface in his gangster-ish getup and chair)
Mid-1999, there was a large misunderstanding involving one of my ex-friends (who I now refer to as "Ho"), and through a series of events, I unfortunately really hurt Matt to spare my own feelings. I also ended up not talking to him for 6 years, always feeling horrible about what happened (though I will never feel bad about terminating the friendship with Ho). Finally, I got back in touch with him, found out he had been traveling the world for the last three years, he accepted my apology, and things went right back to how they used to be. I have very few friends who would accept an apology after being treated like crap for multiple years, and that's not a theory I'd like to test again.
Anyway, we now chat online on average about once a week, and I get to see what Asian internet cafes look like through his webcam. (Btw, this whole concept totally blows my mom away. One night when I was chatting with Matt at my parents' house, I told her about it, and she sat in front of the computer transfixed and amazed.) The first time I saw him after 6 years was a bit shocking, but he mostly looks the same. He also still has the same facial expressions - they always made / make it really easy to tell what he's thinking, which is a nice change from a lot of the other people I know. (The above center picture was taken technically in Bangkok, and the one on the left is him pretending to smoke a breadstick when he forgot his webcam was on - lucky him, I know how to do screen captures. Hee hee!)
Wes (another college friend), one of my favorite people, and Matt's ex-roommate - be SURE to go to his webpage. After he got married, we unfortunately lost touch - either that, or his wife doesn't want him talking to his female friends anymore. :..o( Wes was always super-adorable, though very skittish around me, according to him, because I'm a lot taller than him and tend to have spastic arm movements when I talk. Lol! Anyway, when I lived with Biray (see below), we were practically like the 3 Musketeers!
Biray, my roommate from Fall 1998, one of the coolest 'dudes' (she's the one who got me started saying the word dude) in the dorm, and one of the best roomies ever! She lived in Los Angeles for a while after graduating (she's about 2 years older than me), but has since moved back to Arizona, and we've kept in touch over the years.
Liz, a fellow Wisconsinite!
Miriam - we had the same majors and minors, were the same year in college, and both lived in the same dorm for three years! Coincedence??? Well, yes.
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Created sometime before 26 February 2001
