Make new friends, but keep the old
This weekend Victor and I are flying to Florida to see my friend Ellen. We went to high school together, and then she moved to New Zealand. I only see her every once in a while now, and I think it's been about three and a half years since I saw her last. Her parents live in Florida now, and she's there visiting them.

I met Ellen in gym class in 10th grade. She was a transfer student whose family had just moved from Alabama. She was horrified to be going to my public high school in Arkansas, because she had been going to a private arts school in Birmingham. I was horrified at just being in Arkansas. Anyway, a friend of mine brought her to a party at my house that weekend. Ellen was extra horrified to find out that it was my 16th birthday party, a fact that our mutual friend had forgotten to tell her. Turns out it was the start of a great friendship. I even wrote a two-part article about the last time we hung out, in San Francisco. note: That's an old article I wrote for a now-defunct website called Radio Free Arkansas. I found it through the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, which has a cache of old websites. The pictures in this article don't work anymore.