At first, we’re friends with those who play in the dirt with us and throw big Lego pieces at our heads.

Then we have those friends we meet in first grade, who will discover things with us on the playground and who will share their apple if we share our grapes. We do have some things in common with them, even if it’s just a love for grapes, apples and shiny things.

Then come the ones that help us look cool and tell us what to order when the hottie from school finally asks us out and decides to grab something at McDonalds. They’ll do some of our homework, sneak into movies with us, they’ll say funny things while we sit on roofs. They’ll think they know you better than you know yourself.

College friends will follow. Those are the ones who see you fall flat on your face after you’ve had too much to drink or will let you hide in their room at 5 am, because you don’t want to be in yours when the person you brought home last night wakes up. They’ll be like chosen brothers and sisters.

Then come your married friends, to go to softball games and organize bbqs with. You can always run to their houses and cry your eyes out when something awful happens and you don’t think you can keep it together any longer. They’ll have tea and cookies and if they have kids, the kids will try to cheer you up.

There’s one more kind of friend: The best kind.
The kind of friend that knows you from the beginning.
The ones that stick with you through the years.
The ones that allow you to grow and change without ever throwing past mistakes to your face.
The ones you can restart a conversation with, right where you left it a decade earlier.

Yesterday, one of those, who I hadn’t talked to in about 10 years, managed to find my email.

I’m happy he found me.
There are friends, and then there are those who we call friends for a lack of a better term, but that mean much more.

I have the blessing to have 2 or 3 of those.

Hats off to you, my dears, for having the courage and savoir-faire to keep up with me.

Apparently, Honk’s is not a normal dollar store.

I imagine it all came to happen when Mr. Honk, after being awake most the night, called the board of directors early one morning.
I imagine that together, they decided that being another dollar store simply wasn’t what they wanted to be.
I imagine they called Johnny, in marketing, and asked him to come up with something that would make their dollar store better.

I imagine the following week Johnny stood in front of the board and said:
“We are not a dollar store. We sell better things. Our plastic dolls have more eyelashes, our sponges scrub a tad harder and our pencils are sharper. How do we tell all this to our customers, and at the same time let them know that we are still affordable and easy going and not pretentious?”

At this time Johnny turned the page of the giant post-it pad that stood behind him and revealed a drawing of the picture you see above.

Ooohs and Aaaahs filled the room and Johnny knew this moment would mark his career forever.

“Honk’s"-he said. - “We’re not just a dollar store. We’re the dollar and a nickel store. We’re 5% better than the rest.”

My respects go out to Johnny and to the board of directors at Honk’s, for having the balls to make a sign like that.

P.S. I have never been inside Honk’s and I’m terrified of dolls, so I can’t really vouch for them having more eyelashes. I don’t even know if they have dolls. Johnny and the board of directors are not real people (that i know of) and if you feel so inclined to ever visit this lovely store, it’s located at 650 South Freedom Boulevard, Provo, Utah.

Reading tea leaves is an art.
Gypsy women will do it for you in Eastern Europe.
Witches will do it for you anywhere else.

I have no idea how to read tea leaves but maybe when I’m old and grey, I’ll go around looking inside cups, offering stories to those who want to hear them, because I have always wanted to be some sort of impostor.

Talking about tea… last night, as I was drinking a cup of blueberry tea, I realized the tea had stained the cup, and the stain fascinated me.
I stared at it for about 10 minutes before I snapped out of my trance.

I was trying to remember where I had seen that shape before.
Was it part of the mountains in Southern Utah or of the Mediterranean coast?
I knew in wasn’t the Alps nor the Balkans.
The stain looked so familiar…
So I took a picture, hoping that maybe one day it’ll dawn on me.

Maybe it’s nothing.
Maybe it’s just a blueberry tea stain in my cup.
Maybe I was terribly bored.

There are worse things than trying to make sense of a tea stain.
You can ask my dad about it and he’ll tell you about the time he brushed his teeth with depilatory cream while wondering why on earth we had bought such gross toothpaste.

I’m afraid absent-mindedness runs in the family, very much like tea.

Time to talk about Christmas gifts, now that we’ve put them all away.

Last holidays I received many pretty, wonderful things, but the best gift of all came from myself.
Was it an argentinian gardener?
A box of asian pears?
No.

I bought myself tickets to the ballet.
Which? The Nutcracker. It was Christmas.

Ballet is my lost true love, the one that could’ve been.

Let’s not tell that to my books, because they think they’re my only love.

Now, just between us, even though opening a book is a completely exhilarating experience, it pales in comparison to putting on pointe shoes and elevating yourself away from everyone and everything ugly.

It’s been about 10 years since I last wore my shoes, but they came safely with me accross the ocean.
There are some things one can leave behind, and some that are impossible to abandon.

So I bought 2 tickets and took my dearest Ryan with me, because honestly, who else can put up with me for a whole evening?
He had never been to a ballet before.
At the end of the performance, he said: What an interesting way to tell a story. So different.

He’s right.
No words, just body movements that captivate the soul while beautiful music fills up your ears.
As George Balanchine said: “In ballet a complicated story is impossible to tell… we can’t dance synonyms”

There was a blizzard that night, and Ryan, always careful, asked me if we should stay in and go some other time.
I couldn’t leave it for later.

On the way there, our car slipped on the ice and turned 180 degrees and on the way back, we had to drive at 20 mph.

It was worth every second.

Ah, the simple pleasures of life!

“Let us read and let us dance - two amusements that will never do any harm to the world.”
-Voltaire

Girl, you’ve got to know when it’s time to turn the page.
-Tori Amos

This past year hasn’t been the best for me.
I’m really glad it’s over.

2006 left on the shore of my current life a bunch of ugly things.
Some were my doing and some were not, but I’m not one to play the blame game.

There are awful things on my shore and I put some of them there, that’s all I know.

I don’t expect much of 2007, but I do wish the new tides would wash everything ugly away, giving me a chance to start from scratch.

It is scary to begin again, the same way that it’s scary to remove your training wheels or put your crutches in the closet.

They say we learn from our mistakes.

Here’s to not repeating them again.
Here’s to stop crying over spilled milk.

And so, full of fear and full of hope, as a proverbial newborn, a year begins.