I haven't had a "best friend" in a very long time. I don't really share my secrets with anyone, and there's no one that I would trust above anyone else. Or, indeed, pretty much trust at all. Just not that kind of guy. However, I do have, to borrow a phrase from "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," a bestest friend of all my friends.

I could spend much time and space here describing how my friend Cheetara is so many things I'm not, but wish I were, how different we are, how brilliant she is, how much fun it is to be around her. How we argue back and forth about whose life is worse. (Usually, I win, at least by my count.)

But the most important thing about our relationship is that we make each other laugh.

Cheetara and I spend probably more time than is good for us instant messaging. I have to block her sometimes, just to get work done. But our IM conversations are priceless. They make me happy. So I've saved some of them, and I'll be posting them here, suitably redacted to disguise certain identities.

This page is sort of an experiment. We agree that our conversations are brilliant and funny, but I'm honestly unsure whether anyone else would find them at all amusing. IM can be a fantastically expressive medium; a single "OK" can convey a world of meaning. But I think that only happens when both people conversing know one another very very well. Reduced to a dry transcript, without the benefit of timing and our voices in each other's minds, these probably lose something.

Still, they're not a bad window into what it's like to be me, and for that alone it's worth having some of them here. If nothing else, read the one about 'Friends.' That one is pretty objectively hysterical.

 

  

Conversations Index

8 March 2002: The nature of evil; the number of days in Lent

20 March 2002: Pork for dinner; anxiety; ecstasy; drunkenness; Cary Elwes

13 November 2003: Crazy in love; large-headed infants; Vietnamese aromatherapy; sharks; a happier Prince Charles

22 November 2003: The One With the Cast of Friends

5 January 2004: Being an elf; civet cats; better bagels; ideal societies

More to come...
    What else do you need to know? Cheetara and I met in grad school. She has in her life been both a Spanish and a central banker. She's a native New Yorker. And she's now at Harvard Law. I mentioned the brilliant part already, no? Oh, and she used to be part of a band of cat-people who fought to save the planet from the nefarious Mumm-Ra.