FFFF Week 1 Recap: "Best Breakup Song"

Week one of the Facebook Fun Friday Fray got off to a rollicking start, with answers ranging from the contemporary Grammy-winning dulcet sounds of Adele (courtesy of FFFF’s self-appointed co-founder Mike O’Neill) to the classic Motown stylings of Frakie Valli and the 4 Seasons.  We had a splash of modern pop culture heartbreak back story in the form of Kanye’s anti-love song to Amber Rose, and we even had a little bit of attempted rule bending in the form of multiple answers (mostly by people named Andy…)  Overall I was pleased with the wide variety of musical genres and years represented in the answers.  Clearly bad breakups and the songs that nurse us through are cross-generational.  However, despite the multitude of feisty, fun, (and one especially) filthy answers, there can be only one winner, so without further ado…

Winner, Week 1: Meatloaf’s “Two Outta Three Ain’t Bad, submitted by my esteemed uncle Andy Treesh.  Great song by a great artist (even if his “acting” career was poorly thought out), and one of America’s best singer of breakup songs we love to belt out in our showers and cars.

Runner Up, Week 1: Me, actually.  Further proving my awesomeness.  Or the love that my FB friends have for songs sung by Canadian vegans jilted by Uncle Joey from Full House.  I’ll just let you all think about that for a few minutes.  Sadly, no points awarded for runner ups (runners-up?) in the current scoring scheme of FFFF, though this could be up for discussion in the future.

Hat of Shame, Week 1: By unanimous vote of FFFF’s board of directors (ie Mike and me), no H.O.S. will be awarded for week 1, as everyone came up with decent answers.

Besties

One of the best days of my life happened in first grade.  I was actually sitting alone, dejected one afternoon at recess, because my former best friend Samantha had just informed me that we were no longer best friends (for some long ago forgotten reason, one that was clearly of highest importance in first grade).  Just as I was contemplating how I was going to convince my parents to let me transfer to the school across town (one more likely to have first grade students made out of “best friend material”), I was approached by a girl from my class who I knew only vaguely.  “Hi, I’m Laura. Do you want to be friends?”  While I wasn’t quite sure what to make of this gangly, red-headed girl with a clear penchant for being loud, I realized quickly that I didn’t really have anything to lose, so I said “sure.”  The rest, as they say, is history.

It’s actually a little hard for me to recall meeting Laura, because it’s hard for me to remember a time in my life before her.  Ever since that fateful spring day at Carlin Park, we have been friends – best friends, in every sense of the word.  Oh sure, we experienced our fair share of squabbles, girl fights, fights over boys, disagreements, and time periods of growing apart… but, when the gossip died down, the crushes faded, and the other social circles broke apart, we always grew back together, and picked back up where we had left off.

After 25 years of friendship, I could dedicate an entire book to the Tales of the Adventures of Laura and Meagan (and really, I think I should someday).  We did things lots of childhood friends do: rode bikes, had sleepovers, gossiped, planned parties, went on trips… We also did lots of things that maybe not all childhood friends do, and even a few things we probably shouldn’t have… we anonymously tee-peed her neighbor’s house one night, but then felt so guilty about it we went over in the morning to help clean up.  We went to Cedar Point religiously every summer throughout middle and high school – starting our planning weeks in advance, including who else would be invited (boys? No boys?), where each person would sit on the drive there (depending on who was crushing on who that particular year), and the exact order of rides, how long we were willing to wait in line for each one, and how many times we would ride each coaster… and we would not deviate from the plan. (And we wonder why our friends didn’t think we were any fun???).  We share(d) an obsessive love of Pride and Prejudice – BBC version, obviously – where we discovered that perhaps the only man who could come between us (and possibly still could) was Colin Firth.  We, and this is true, staged a guinea pig wedding, complete with invitations, guests, gifts (mostly hay and carrots), a maid of honor (another guinea pig), and a best man (a large black rabbit who dressed up for the occasion – in a tie we stole from her dad’s closet.  The highlight of the day was when said best man went missing for 15 minutes or so, yet we were physically incapable of looking for him because of laughing so hard at the thought of someone finding a large black rabbit in a neck tie…)

We were in band together, youth group together, we scrapbooked together, and lived only about a mile apart, so shared rides to school for years.  We nursed each other through bad breakups, sucky relationships, and life and career crises.  We’ve had countless adventures together.  We met Tori Amos together.  In essence, we tackled the various yet inevitable travails of childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood together, and came out on the other side still connected.

Today is my dear friend Laura’s 30^th birthday, but unfortunately she will be unable to read this blog post.  Now, before you instantly think this is going in a macabre direction, I will tell you that Laura resides on a tiny island in the South China Sea, where she lives and works full time rescuing and rehabilitating endangered sea turtles.  Yes, you read that correctly, my best friend is officially the coolest person in the world. 

One of Laura’s most memorable attributes from childhood was her love of animals.  This was not always channeled in a positive way – examples that come to mind include her shutting my cats in windows, dressing my dog in pants, and us approaching a clearly altered raccoon in the middle of the day, because Laura was worried it was injured (turns out it had rabies…).  However, with work experience and formalized education, this has matured into a serious, passionate, and not-to-be-underestimated life mission of saving endangered species.  Laura has lived in China for over a year, where she co-manages and is integral to the daily operations of a floating hospital for injured and dying sea turtles of various species.  She works 7 days a week, from dawn until dusk, and the things she has been able to accomplish have been nothing short of amazing.  And did I mention she doesn’t get paid for any of this?  Yeah.  That’s how passionate this girl is about saving her turtles.  There are many things that I love and esteem about my Laura, but this, her single minded fervor for bringing these animals back from the brink of non-existence is her most admirable and defining trait.  When humanity looks back on the history of our planet, I truly believe that the most remembered and honored of us will be the Lauras of the world: those who fought tirelessly to prevent our fellow creatures from disappearing from Earth entirely.  I am fiercely proud of her.

And I miss her.  Every day.  When I look in the mirror and see the aggregation of the things I have experienced and become, I see Laura.  She is a person so integral to my development and identity that, whenever we find ourselves in the same place, we are able to simply pick back up where we left off.  Regardless of the time that has passed.  The connection I feel to her is more than the sum total of our shared experiences – it is a bond that is difficult for me to fully describe, a strong, tightly woven silver thread between our souls that has existed long before our physical presence on Earth, and one that will exist long after.  She is the yin to my yang, the light to my dark, the cheese to my macaroni… She is my best friend.  She is my soul’s reflection in another body.

As time and physical space have moved us apart, I have become increasingly aware of what a precious and rare gift a friendship like ours is.  I think that we all probably have “soul mate” friends, but I don’t know that we all find that friend in this life.  Lucky for me, mine only lived a mile away.

So, Happy birthday Laura.  So far, it seems like life on the other side of the 30s isn’t so bad.  I miss you, I love you, and I am incredibly proud of you.

For more information on Laura’s Sea Turtle rescue and rehabilitation, visit http://www.seaturtles911.org/

Facebook Fun Friday Fray

Welcome, Facebook Friends and Blogging Buddies.  If you’ve made it this far, you have at least a cursory interest in what the Facebook Fun Friday Fray might involve; (and/or you accidentally clicked on the link while ignoring a friend request from your high school principal) and I am here to tell you. 

In the spirit of summer fun and frivolity, actual “social” networking, and to showcase that I have a very eclectic and hilarious group of friends, it is time to formalize the Facebook polls you’ve seen on my feed lately.  Here’s how it will work:

Every Friday (ish… hey, I’m busy) I will post a new status or question open for comment and answer.  For example, today’s FFFF is “Best Breakup Song.”  Then you, as my Facebook Friend, will post your opinion of what is the best breakup song ever written.   Feel free to then “like” your own answer, as well as any other answers on the feed.  At the end of the week, the answer with the most likes is the winner, and one point will be awarded to the clever soul who posted it (in the event of a tie, each person will receive one point).  Only one answer is allowed per person, and polling and voting will be open for one week before the next question is posted.  Also, you don’t have to post an answer in order to vote, so if you can’t think of a breakup song or you think this whole idea is more ill-conceived than Crystal Pepsi, please still vote on the answers.  Someone’s pride and/or bragging rights are on the line; which segues nicely into…

At the end of the summer (and/or whenever we get bored with this) the friend with the most points will win an awesome prize.  Trust me, it’s gonna be great.  Not like Woot Bag of Crap great, but still pretty good.  In addition, Mike and I will be buddy blogging (aka bantering in a public format) about the previous week’s answers every Friday, where we will also announce the winner, honorable mention(s), and the coveted Hat of Shame for the week’s worst answer.  (If you ever wanted an insider’s look into the life-altering, earth-shattering, and galaxy-moving things that married people squabble about, here’s your chance.)

The only other rule to know is to please be respectful – the fun we will be making of each other is intended to be good-natured.  Feel free to use the feed to campaign for likes from the masses, as well as run smear campaigns against your competitors’ answers.  Otherwise, I encourage you to think creatively, and realize that the “right” answer may not (and frequently won’t) be the obvious answer.  Just as in the classic thinking man’s game Apples to Apples, the key to FFFF is to know your audience…

We’ve already come up with a pretty fun list of questions to post every Friday, but if you have any poll suggestions, please email or PM them to me.

Happy Voting!

Wooden Shoes

As soon as I saw them, I knew they were mine. I knew they would fit, and fit perfectly, before I even tried them on. Walking with my mom through rows of metal shelves in my parents’ storage garage, my eyes were drawn to them almost immediately, despite the dim lighting and the seemingly unending piles of flotsam they were half-buried under in the back corner.

Like many families before us, this year mine has discovered the “after” that happens when a loved one passes into the afterlife. After my grandfather’s death this winter, my parents and my uncles plunged head first into sorting and arranging The Estate of Endless Complication and Confusion. It has been an exhausting, frustrating, and sometimes downright unbelievable journey; and one that is unfortunately far from over. For starters, my grandfather was a pack rat. And that is putting it mildly. Believe me when I say I cannot adequately describe the sheer volume of things that my grandfather had squirreled away in his house, basement, attached garage, 4 outbuildings, storage shed, trailer… So much stuff, in fact, that my parents have spent the bulk of the past 5 months simply sorting, packing, and moving the valuables to their storage buildings.

Which is how my mom and dad ended up with a bomb in their garage. No I am not kidding. No it is not live, thank goodness, but yes, it is a WWII-era, 250lb black metal torpedo-shaped incendiary device with the words “practice bomb” printed right on it. (When I asked my dad how he was sure it was, in fact, inactive, he replied, “Well, it didn’t explode on the drive down here.”) Why did my grandfather have this? I told you, he was a packrat. How did he acquire it? We have absolutely no idea. In addition to this large and possibly illegal-in-some-way historic weapon, my parents have now found themselves the guardians of: an approximately 100 piece collection of brass flugelhorns, hundreds of antique guns, fifty-plus grandfather clocks, unopened bottles of brandy from the 1950s, and amazingly, a Ford Model-T and a Model-A. Again, it would be impossible for me to describe the abundance of glass bowls, figurines, tools, bikes, wagons, mirrors, barrels, plates, and so on that my Grandfather accumulated over his 70 years of life. Suffice it say, it will take the remainder of this year to catalogue and appraise it all.

This is how I came to be in possession of the wooden shoes. An exquisite, honey-colored seamless and smooth pair of wooden shoes with the words “Dutch Clogs: Made in Holland” stamped on in the inside. A windmill imprinted in the top of the right shoe, a tulip on the left. My grandfather bought them in Amsterdam during his European deployment in the 1950s and brought them back to the U.S., where they presumably remained in his custody until he died. I never had a chance to ask him about them; indeed until a few weeks ago I didn’t even know of their existence, and I can’t quite explain why I was so drawn to them. Partially because of their uniqueness, certainly because of their superb craftsmanship and near-pristine condition despite spending fifty years in a garage, and likely because of my own Dutch heritage. Something else though… I would like to think that my Grandfather bought them specifically for me. Now, I know technically that’s impossible, but I imagine him winding his way through some narrow Amsterdam alley, seeing the shoes in a shop window, and stopping to buy them for… someone. He didn’t know who. Size-wise they are clearly women’s shoes, and he had any number of women in his life to gift them to: his mother, sisters, cousins, even future wife. But, he held on to them.

Yes, it’s entirely possible that he just forgot about them, or whoever he bought them for didn’t want them or they didn’t fit, or a thousand other explanations for their existence in my Grandfather’s array of lifetime possessions. But they are mine now, and regardless of how they came to me, a part of me believes that they were always meant to be mine. There is no way my Grandfather could have known in 1958 that he would have a Dutch-descended granddaughter with size 7.5 feet who truly loves and collects beautiful shoes…all he knew was that they were something exceptional that he needed to buy. I think about him discovering them, about his lifelong love of adventure and for beautiful and unique things, and I feel connected to him still. I feel connected to those parts of him that live on in me. I look at the wooden shoes my Grandfather bought me, and I am happy.