Finding the silver lining

There are so many funny stories that my best friend Christie could tell on me.  Maybe I can get her to write a blog post sometime.  I doubt it though, since she just realized last week that I even have a blog.

Here is our conversation on the phone:

Me- “Hey, you need to read the 11 years of marriage post that I put on my blog.  (Being that she was my maid of honor, I thought she might enjoy it.)

Her- “Your what”?

Me- “My blog, don’t you read it?  The link is below my signature on my emails”.

Her- “Oh, is that what that is”?  “I always wondered why you had that there”.

Yes, she is a natural blond.  And even though we are 34, she is still blond as can be and has never even had highlights done.  That is a true blue, to the root- blond.  I wasn’t really surprised that she had not known what the web address was for, but it still made me laugh.

Christie and I lived in a townhouse together the year before I got married.  She had graduated from college and had started her first year, teaching first grade.  I had taken my first “real” job.  Before I had always worked for my Dad’s business or not made enough money to have multiple items withdrawn from my pay check…ie taxes.  I had lived a very “financially sheltered” life we will call it.  Really, I was spoiled rotten and my Dad took care of everything and my parents never made me get a job.  God Bless him, the man wanted to give me everything in life and he did.  But I have realized as I have aged, that his generosity kept me from learning real life lessons when I should have.  So, in this situation I had to learn them as they came.

I can remember sitting on our couch in our living room, holding my first real paycheck in utter disgust.  I knew how much I was paid an hour and I knew how many hours I had worked and it just didn’t add up.  There were all these other “things” that were subtracting money from the total.  And the total didn’t look so great then.  Christie walks in the door from a week of screaming first graders and I scream at her, “Who the hell is FICA and why are they taking my money?  I don’t know anyone named FICA, do I”?  As if “knowing them” would make it make sense.  After she picked her laughing butt up off of the floor she proceeded to tell me what (and who) FICA was and I was then laughing and mad that FICA took so much of my paycheck.  I can’t really get embarrassed in front of Christie, because she knows me like the back of her hand.  But that day I was embarrassed that no one had ever taught me this, and that I was 22 and was just now getting my first pay check that qualified for FICA.

Oh, we have laughed 100 times about that story and I always want to be present when she tells it to someone else so that I can see their reaction.  That is one thing that was instilled in me, the ability to always laugh at yourself.  And when that story is told I laugh every time.