Count Your Blessings

Which is exactly what I did tonight. I sat down at my desk, squeezed a square of desktop between my keyboard and the five piles of paperwork stacked next to it and started to write thank you notes to everyone who sent something for my birthday. It was too quiet, but all the CDs in my room somehow seemed wrong and I knew that if I walked out into the living room to find the right ones, I would get sucked into doing something else. So I turned on the television hoping TNT was playing re-runs of The X-Files but instead found some procedural show in which the detectives solve old, previously unsolved crimes. This one revolved around a 12 year-old girl who was killed in 1990. It turned out that she was the victim of a group of horrible girls whose bullying lead to her death. It hit me at some point that I was 12 in 1990 and while I wasn't the small, underdeveloped, glasses-wearing nerd, I was the tall, overweight, glasses-wearing nerd. There were some horrible girls in junior high and high school and while the worst parts of me hope that they are fat when I see them at our 10 year high school reunion, I also had a great group of friends who were there through thick and thin, then and now. And for that I am eternally grateful. So to those wonderful girls from the class of '97: THANK YOU!