Today, December 17, 2010, is a very special day. It is my best friend Tiffany's 30th birthday! What I would give to be celebrating with her over wine and laughs in some woodsy cabin right about now. Sadly, for the past 8 years, we've lived across the country from each other. And although I talk to her several times a week, I still miss her all the time!
I wish I had a scanner and could scan some pics of Tiff and me in our incredibly mischievous early teens. We tore up our high school! Here are some of the antics we pulled off during our four years at Harrison High School:
- Signed our meanest teacher up for a professional escort service
- Came to school wearing only trench coats in an attempt to woo our Latin teacher
- Put dried pasta in all the vending machines (where you get your change) just so people would be like huh???
- Wrote an expose on a local theater director, accusing him of being sexually inappropriate (he was!), and placed them in bookstores around the town
- Created an email account for the mean teacher and wrote ridiculous messages to students and faculty
- Dressed up as . . . "ladies of the night" and tried to get a job at the Moonlight Spa, just so we could expose them as a secret brothel. It kinda worked! (Although at one point we got chased pretty far down dark streets by the angry Chinese proprietor). Our constant harassment resulted in their installment of video cameras right inside the door. (And for the record, they did get busted for prostitution not long after we went off to college. Tiff's mom mailed us the newspaper article!).
Tiff in a tree
We went off to college together at Tulane University in New Orleans, and lived together throughout our four years there. After college, Tiffany moved to Pittsburgh both for grad school and to be with her beloved, Matt, who was in a Ph.D. program at Carnegie Mellon, and I moved to San Francisco to teach poetry at San Quentin State Prison. Now, Tiff and Matt are bona fide home owners and parents to the darling baby Aria (human) and to the darling-but-kinda-bad Mia (canine):
the Merriman-Prestons
all of us at Tiff's beautiful wedding (reception)
it was in an art gallery in Atlanta!
Tiffany, me, and our third college roommate, Brenna
at my mama's house in 2005
for Tiff and Matt's Mardi Gras engagement party!
I love you so much, Tiff! I don't know if I would have made it through all these years without you. You're all the things I'm not: modest, composed, calm, wise, and totally unselfish. You're one of my life's greatest blessings. Happiest 30th birthday!