My houseguests have left

Oh, to lose your houseguests! it's a terrible feeling, when they bring their bags down and start heading for the door and you were thinking "i'll slip a little *** into their tea and they won't leave for a good long time!" I like houseguestss who teach me new things and the dynamic duo of Cluck and Bridge are the best at teaching me new things.

that and they make me laugh until I vomit, which is no small feat, but not uncommon in our decade-long friendship.

For instance, they taught me how to use Bonjour on iChat with my Mac, so i can have conversations with other Mac users who are in the same 100 sq. ft. area as me without talking. There we all were, sitting ont he couch, watching the Smurf's and Deputy Dawg remixes chatting without saying a word. there was a lot of laughter. Communication is a beautiful thing.

Then, when we are talking, we are usually re-hashing some muddled, mixed-up story about some mutual friend who is a walking disaster and just too much fun to observe or leave alone. And since my boyfriend is a doctor, which by association makes me a Medical Professional (MP vs. MD, though I'd wager I have more sense than a good many post-residency MDs) we can also discuss everyone's many and varied medical ailments and conditions - including but not limited to bipolarity, CSF leaks of indeterminate length, halitosis, jacked up jawlines, impacted ear wax of decade-long accumulation, sinusitis, herpes...the list goes on and on.

And Bridge is a English-Lit degreed Librarian which means she has the power of infinate information at her fingertips! Now I want to grow up to be a singer-actor-UNICEF fundraising-Politician-Librarian which Executive Producer power in Hollywood and at the BBC. It's not too much to ask of life, I just can't figure out how to get started in my multiple-career of choice. Hopefully I'll focus better post-operatively.

Cluck is a good 50% of why I graduated college. 10%, incidentally, is directly attributable to my lack of desire to live with my parents again and the remaining 40% was 424 Crew. Anyway, after 3 months of freshman year I'd been attacked, moved, displaced - basically, I was a one-woman/girl (still wasn't 18) refugee camp.

And Cluck moved me in, gave me a bottle of southern comfort with a straw, let me eat everything with chopsticks (cereal included), read me wretched, terrible bedtime stories that were really biographies of incestous, crack-addicted inner-city families, and played along with my FAVORITE game: wake me up for class.

It's one of those classics where you tell someone who actually attends college to call and wake you up, or reach over and wake you up, for class. they know and you know that when they try to wake you up, you will roll back over and say "not today, i can't do sunlight today" but they gamely agree to do it time and time again. That's true friendship. Chuck did it for 2 years until I grew up enough to make other friends and move out of his bedroom.

And now they are gone. A whole 4 hours away back to their home where they will make other people laugh and dredge up information for others who will not appreciate the arcane knowledge nearly as much I would.

Perhaps I should move closer to where they are or find out how much a puddle-jumping plane would charge me to visit on the weekends. You just don't find people who love you for you every day of the week. and when you do, you have to stay until they get sick of you.

Sometimes, if you're very lucky- and I am - they never, ever do.