Telling the truth

So ... my friend in Rhode Island sends me emails all the time. I don't always send them back (bad zee!). Most of them are hilarious pictures of people who shop in WalMart, I wet myself at those emails. she finds them on a site? Every now and then, she'll send something sweet instead, like this email I got today.

I'd paste it, but obviously that doesn't work here, and I can't really motivate myself to trascribing the whole thing, but it talks of this woman, a friend of hers, looking through pictures and coming across one of her mother, post-dialysis, looking really happy as they talked. And as this woman's looking at this picture, she asks herself if she regretted anything about caring for her mother etc etc ... and she had none, because this picture centred around her letting her mother know she was loved, basically. She never had to regret the 'what if' factor.

So occasionally, I'm going to make posts. That tell the people I love that I love them. When I make these posts, I will use real names, instead of the aliases I put up ... because even if you can guess your alias, it's not as good as knowing the real thing, is it? All pretenses will be dropped.

I won't do them all together though, because I've already experienced the troubles of posting long posts.

So ... I'll start off with the girl who inspired me. Kerri.

I've known Kerri roughly four years. Obviously, given the distance, we've never met in person (I've met a handful of my American friends, and I get bashful with all of them), but I wish I had. Every Christmas we swap cards - hers are always hilarious.

She reminds me of everything good about America. She's caring and passionate (and yes, nationalistic) but she's funny in a way people forget. Americans do irony well, and Kerri can be a prime example of that. We met on a message board, and a lot of the kids on there were pretty juvenile (mainly a Canadian girl, an Australian girl and a couple of New Zealanders. Though we still loved them ... it's a little complicated) and I think at first Kerri's humour was lost on them - they thought she was serious and boring, when she was teasing them all along.

I can't remember my first impression of Kerri. I remember her growing on me more, she was always trying to sort out issues (which happens a lot when you have strong personalities come together, like we did on that board) and play peacemaker and motherhen. Before I left that board (not through choice, it was part of a rubbish fan club and my subscription ended) I think we all came to think of her as our online mother.

It's weird, because there's only two girls I've kept in touch with after that, Kerri and Martha. Martha's on my facebook, but Kerri's in a certain position workwise, so she won't go on facebook. It was hard enough getting her to open up on the board, and harder to get her on myspace. But when you crack that little nut ... she's gold.

I just wish I saw her, talked to her more often. God, I'm a rubbish friend ...