My Own Personal Papparazi

As far as friendships go, I am incredibly lucky. I have several amazing girlfriends each of whom brings something different to my life and teaches me something valuable. They are women who have unique and varied opinions, lifestyles and personalities, but the thing I share with each of them is a mutual respect and a willingness to understand and accept differences. Now before you think that this is going to turn into a blog version of a cheesy Lifetime movie about girlfriends, stop right there. I just put my BFF into a cab to JFK and it got me thinking about quality friendships and how much they enrich your life. There is something beautiful about being around a person who knows you and loves you completely, not only understands and relates to your craziness, but truly believes it is what makes you so awesome, and allows you to just be you. I could make this same statement about Mike, although I would have to change "understands your craziness" to "accepts your craziness". And that, my friends, is the root of all problems between men and women.

Moving on, I had a fabulous weekend with Jill and I am grateful that I have a Jill in my life. I am looking through the 6,000 pictures we took this weekend and am loving that I can count on her to provide me with enough facebook profile photos for the next 5 years. She has a ridiculous camera and is constantly taking pictures of us, of strangers, of food, of doors, of garbage and basically anything that she thinks looks cool. And she's good at it. The girl will not pass up a good photo op. Example: Walking back to the subway from the Brooklyn Brewery on Saturday evening, she spotted two very old office chairs in front of a chainlink fence and insisted that we sit in them and have someone take our picture. It did not matter to her that they were covered in dried bird doody. You will notice me looking stiff and posed, trying to keep just one butt cheek on the chair, while she looks gorgeous (and eerily at home) sitting in bird crap.



A short while later, she convinced me to get on a bike chained to a tree and pretend like I was riding it. This shoot yielded some great shots and led to the following exchange:

Jill: "I love taking pictures of you..."
Me: (thinking it's because I am so lovely on film that I must be her muse)"Thanks! Why?"
Jill: "Because you are such a ham and attention hog that you will do anything I ask."

And this is why we are friends. She knows me and that I will do anything for a laugh, but she doesn't think it's annoying. We have cut away all those outer layers that you show to other people and have peeled back to the ones that you hide or try to disguise as something else. Meanwhile, Mike, being the patient man that he is tried not to show his irritation when she and I reviewed, deleted and retook several photos. Again, accepting the craziness does not necessarily mean you understand it.



Me waving to my peeps as I cruise down the street on my bike...that is chained to a tree...next to a minivan.



Insert your own caption.

The photo madness reached new heights when she started taking action shots, which she is fond of. Every time I would look at them, which were usually of me walking, I would think of US Weekly's ridiculous spread called "Stars - They're Just Like Us!", which shows celebrities drinking coffee, feeding a parking meter or shopping. Like this one below:



If I were famous and in US Weekly, it would be captioned something like "Emily Davis on her way to the post office - she's just like us!", which is probably a sign of the apocalypse that our culture has elevated people, most of which don't seem to have any discernible talent, to this status where we need to be reminded that they eat, sleep and poop just like the rest of us. I would love to see a section where they had pictures of misunderstood and discriminated against populations titled "Muslims - They're Just Like Us!" or "Gays - They're Just Like Us!" that showed the same thing. But that's just me. I will now excuse myself for 20 minutes to find out through Perez Hilton if anyone is in rehab and if Jon & Kate are still a trainwreck.

A few other tidbits about this weekend before I head off to class. First, Jill developed a new superpower this weekend which allows her to buy a new sweater, a pair of jeans, some sunglasses...or whatever, then lose it within 2 hours. No joke, she lost a bag of clothes who knows where that she purchased just hours earlier. The following day, she bought a pair of sunglasses from a street vendor, put them in the bag her breakfast pastry was in and then threw it in the trash. She also paid her subway fare 3 times for the same ride. So basically her superpower is incinerating money.

Second, we tend to spend a significant portion of our time together analyzing every aspect of our lives, our friends lives, our behavior and the human condition. I am sure any men reading just noticed blood coming out of their ears just imagining this scenario which I believe is their personal hell, but it's what we do. In our thorough analysis we realized that we are very aware of our mistakes but often make them repeatedly before learning from them, if ever. We decided that we should pen a book called "Learning Nothing From Your Past: A User's Guide". It will be due out in stores as soon as we stop staying out too late and spending too much money and get our acts together.

Finally, I want to leave you with the other running joke of the weekend (besides Mike saying "Don't give that to Jill! We don't want it to disappear mysteriously."), which involved Mike running up walls and jumping off fire hydrants shouting "HARDCORE!" and "EXTREME" a la the Office episode a few weeks back. Here's an action shot by Jill: