Homage to Tori:

I cannot let the sun set on this day, the 15th of February, without mentioning that my original BFF, Tori, turned 30 today. I'm kind of ticked off at myself for not being able to locate any the many, many childhood pictures of Tori and myself so this will have to do... for now (check back often!) I'm not exactly sure why I saved this particular declaration from Tori, seeing as it must have been one of literally a thousand, but nonetheless it brings me to a point that needs to be made. This is to all The North Face-wearing, facebook-profilin', cell-phone-textin' WASPy middle-schoolers of America... you DID NOT invent shorthand. Teenage girls WAY back in the day cornered the market on all this acronym nonsense. I can't even decipher notes written to me in 1991, which is eons before you were born, because of all the arbitrary abbreviations. And we used cool things too, like up arrows, that don't even have a text message equivalent. (Okay, you have emoticons--I'll give you that.) Someday, as time allows, I'll have to post the contents of any one of the bazillion notes I saved for some unknown reason that my mother has apparently grown tired of storing because she hands them back over to me in small but frequent truckloads. All us oldtimers can then play a game of Acronomics, ya know, to see if we still got it. But for now, I want to end with a simple "Happy Birthday!" to Tori, my very first BFF (not to be mistaken for a VGFF or even a VVGFF). LYLAS!