Use somebody.

Even though Girls Scouts didn't exactly work out for me (Does it work out for anyone who has to wear a vomit-green polyester jumper to school every Monday?), part of my scouting experience stuck, even if my fellow troop members didn't. Make new friends and keep the old? I love that and I love people.

Most of my dear ones I've met the traditional way - through school and work. I met Dr. X, sort of, at a student-media event in college. Mummy Toe in graduate school. KB/BK in Mrs. Mullins' fourth-grade class. TM in the very same place. Hoover? Sadly, we were both teenage over achievers taking health class in summer school prior to ninth grade. (So that we had room for more "fun electives" later on - Humanities! Independent-study English! Journalism! EARLY NERD TRAINING!)

And there's a whole host of pals I've met pounding the pavement through miles and miles during countless muggy mornings. We fix the world's problems through sweat, tears and a gallon of Gatorade.


Family, well, you don't get to choose. Sister E and Sister S were born into a lifetime of suffering - I mean, friendship, with me.


There are other stray souls who orbit in and out of my life, too. I'm not so good at staying in touch with them. The baggers and checkers from Gerland's grocery store. The kids from summer swim team. Old neighbors. My besties from the dorm freshman year in college. The ladies I cracked jalapeno candy and wore hair nets with before I moved to Amarillo.

There's a new, odd group now that's entered my life. For the past two months, I've bared my soul with people I don't really know at all. They know things about me that I've shared with no one else, not even Dr. X.

No, it's not a support group for women with inappropriate celebrity crushes.

There's the stay-at-home mom cum former lawyer who doesn't travel outside the Inner Loop (God forbid she breakout with Suburban Fever or something); the bald, gay, ex-military guy covered in colorful tats; the single 30-something dude with a wicked sense of humor and too much hair growth - an attempt at camouflaging his fast approach to 40; the middle-aged liberal woman who likely spends her paycheck at Chico's and likes to drop the F-bomb every five minutes; the Indian man of indiscernible age who keeps calling his fiction submissions "essays;" and the college-student cum future literary genius who rolls her eyes at us and only reads Truman Capote.

They're members of my writing group. Through thick and thin, good times and bad - these people have stood by me. They read my stuff. They analyze it. They provide feedback. They don't make fun of it. And they're not afraid to be mean - they know I won't haul off and hit them, stop taking their calls or defriend them on Facebook. And I read their writing, too. They call me "The Professional" because of how much I like to mark up a page. Not sure if that's a compliment... But I don't care! Honestly, I don't care if they like me. These people don't expect me to remember their birthdays, bring food when they're sick and have no incriminating photographic evidence on me from ages 18 to 23. (Thank the Lord.) This is a win-win!

Sure, these aren't fully-realized relationships. We've simply bonded together over our love of the written word and making that an actuality for the seven of us. But these people have helped me so much. I could never thank them enough.