Every person should be so lucky to have a glance like this on a day like this one.

To Rick and Jessica, on their wedding day, congratulations.

Once upon a time, there was a kitty, and, like most kitties, this kitty had a birthday. While this kitty said very little about her birthday, when her back was turned, many of the other cats gossiped about it. "Whatever shall we get Miss Kitty for her birthday?" they said.

Every now and then, this town catches me by surprise.

The first six months I lived here, I hated it and wanted to go 'home' - home, of course, being the quiet swaddle of friends and familiarity that was my collegiate life in Arkansas. But, with everyone graduated and moved away, 'home,' as I remembered it, no longer existed.

Without my friends, Conway was nothing but a collection of streets that connected a series of dormitories.

On my way back down the stairs, I poked my head into the living room, where Brad was packing up his things. He looked up from his packing, undoubtedly expecting me to say something at least halfway interesting.

Instead: "Blue or purple?"

I held out my hands, indicating the newly-scrubbed nails that, up to a few minutes ago, had been painted royal blue. "Purple," he said, with that bemused, louder-than-words look that said I was being silly, and why in the world was I asking him such a question of a geekboy anyway?

Thirty minutes later, the nails were purple.

Such has been the weekend.

Is it silly of me to say that I 'miss' someone, when for the vast majority of the years we've known each other, we've been nothing more than screen-printed words and occasional phone calls to each other? I think not. I've missed Brad—enough to say it when I know that my saying it publicly will probably make him grimace in embarrassment.

We sat next to each other on Kat and Sean's slipcovered sofa, in the living room that, over the past week, had begun to exhibit definite signs of habitation by its new owners. We were spread somewhere between the fullness of dinner and the cheerful obnoxiousness that was an evening of gaming with the wondergeeks. He flashed a grin at me and said, "You realize that as of next year, we'll have known each other for over half of our lives?"

I tried to count back without using my fingers, failed, and said, "Has it really been that long?"

"It was the summer of 1990 when we met," he confirmed. Yes, indeed—summer of 1990—before our birthdays, so we would have been square in the midst of the gawky year of 13.

Writers shouldn't be allowed to use phrases like "In the meantime, everything changed," regardless of the amount of truth such a statement might contain. It's too easy of a way to skip over the formative events between then and now, sacrificing story for speed.

Today, arriving in an airport an hour and a half south of me: Monica, for a visit that's been in the making for several years now.

It becomes difficult to explain a friendship when you realize that you can barely remember why you became friends in the first place. A quick bit of mathematics tells me that we were off just a bit when we did some phone calculations the other day; we were fourteen when we met. She might have been fifteen. She had the neatest handwriting I'd ever seen, had far curlier hair than I did, and she knew the worst puns in the world. Loved them. Gloried in them. (All these years later, I still remember the punchline "Kicks are for Trids!" even though I cannot remember the joke itself.)