Scary Thoughts For The Day

I was feeling a little down the other day at work, so I decided to shoot my friends an e-mail. I titled the e-mail Scary Thoughts For The Day, and this is what I wrote:

1} I've been doing payroll for exactly six years today.
2} I will be coming up on four years at my current agency this May.
3} I will have been employed fourteen years with the state this March.

I sent this to my two closest friends, Dee & Sister G, and waited to see if I would get a response. I wasn't really expecting any because it was near the end of the pay week, and I knew that both of them would be wickedly busy.

So I was pleasantly surprised when I got a response from Sister G, and this is what she said:

1} I have been friends with G since February 6, 2004.
2} What's scary is that I'm still friends with G today January 5, 2010.
3} The most scary part of it all is the first thing he said to me was, "filing can be fun" and I wanted to punch his lights out...lmbo (for those who aren't familiar with text, the acronym stands for laughing my butt off)

Twelve minutes later I got this response from my friend Dee:

1} I have been with the state nine years, four months, twenty-four days and three hours.
2} Can't remember the day I first met G, but can remember saying to myself, "gee what an odd looking person with suspenders, who wears suspenders?" And low and behold many years later still friends with suspenders man :)

With those two responses, the opening salvo to a one-hour incredibly-riotous-tears-rolling-down-the-face e-mail exchange between three people who really couldn't help themselves that day. The topics that were covered were as diverse as you could possibly get. We talked about sex, warped imaginations, the alternative lifestyle, music, Steve Urkel, bathrooms, looks and even Austin Powers.

Note: I have an incredibly small circle of friends. How small? You can count them all on one hand. These people were the ones, who in spite of the fact that sometimes I would forget to put brain in gear before engaging mouth and saying some incredibly stupid things, stood by me through all my peaks and valleys of the past six years. By the same token, I try to stand by them the same way they stood by me, through all of their peaks and valleys of the past six years, and for the most part I would like to think that I succeeded in doing so.

With this e-mail exchange, we happened to touch on a particular part of our lives (we all first met at the same agency in 2004) in which at the end the bad memories more than outweighed the good memories. So we took those bad memories and used them as cannon fodder, and in the process had a ton of fun and learned a little bit more about each other.

For instance, my friend D is what you call 'a quiet type'. She very private, very religious, mellow, and slow to anger. But hidden beneath that mellow exterior, is a person who has an incredibly sick sense of humor (and I mean that in a good way). She has said stuff that at times has made my jaw drop to the floor in amazement, and that my friend is very hard to do.

My other friend, Sister G (I called her sister because we both share the same zodiac sign in the same month, she is one year older than me and we bicker like siblings) has a sense of humor which is more in line with mine, which is to say that it's funny, provocative, and full of double entendres. She has said things over the years that has made me think about choosing my words very carefully before responding, because if I didn't (which was quite frequently), I would be taken out to the proverbial woodshed.

Both of my friends have that special knack of making a person feel good about themselves. I am forever grateful that they managed to let me (and to a smaller degree my family) hang around with them for so long, because in doing so they have taught me how to let things simply roll off my back and roll with the punches.

They are two truly special people and honestly, I do not know where I would be today if I had never met them when I did. When you experience something bad (like I did in '03 when I got laid off from work), you never think that any good can come out of it. Sometimes though, a very small seed of good can happen. This was one of those times, because even though the worst thing that happened to me crushed my spirits for six months, it ultimately put me on the track to meeting them and made me what I am today.

Believe it or not, there is a question that goes with this post: Do you have friends that can do exactly what I just described? Can they, with just a simple twist of the word, lift your spirits for the rest of the day?