Family on sale, 50% off.

Family on sale, 50% off.

In lieu of a this particular lapse in friendship, it was brought to my attention that I discount my sisters as just family and not my good friends.

Coming from a "broken family" that brought with it, for me anyway, a semi-truck full of Daddy issues (oh boy, that's post worthy enough in and of itself), I was lucky enough to have my family grow practically overnight when my mom found a great man to remarry.

I already have two blood related sisters that I managed to get along with relatively (no pun intended) well growing up. Barring the mailman/adopted allegory my big sis would feed me when I'd borrow clothes without asking or put maxi pads over the statue of David's man junk on the poster hanging in her bedroom, we got along just fine and dandy. My mom's remarry resulted in the addition of two more older sisters and a younger-by-not-much brother.

My new older sister is eerily just like me. We're considered "street smart". aka, we chose a lot of unconventional methods for taking on certain aspects of our teens and twenties. She smacked me in the face with a startling, yet totally necessary fact about me. I always discount my family as nothing more than family. I invest the dependency of so much of my happiness from the friends who could easily stomp me out like a flaming bag of dog poop on their front step and be done with me. I can't do nothing but agree with her. She may have called me a whore. Lovingly of course. Of course, I could also be doing an ever so poor job of incorporating improvisational name-calling for depth and effect. You decide.

This sisterly bitch slap has been just the thing I needed to help me get my priorities back in the right order. We all know I have a tendency to be a blubbering cry baby on here about not having friends, boo hoo, call the Waa-mbulance why don't you. It's not that I don't have friends. I am SURROUNDED by friends. I've come to realize, in a less than subtle way, that I fabricate this fantastical idea of what a friend is and the daily agenda that, just frankly, does not exist. Um, hi. Yeah. I am delusional.

All of the friends who rallied around me when I was feeling lower than low for dinner, fast-paced boot shopping (though unsuccessful, rather entertaining, ooh pretty dress), silly text banter, 2-hour phone calls. All of that, was real life friendship. At its finest mind you.

I have been doing my best to focus my energies on meeting and connecting more with all of you readers I don't know in person or met one time during a ridiculous trip to Los Angeles for a taping of Dr. Phil. (Hi Julie! Hi Suzanne!) It is wonderful to know that there are women in my same shoes out there that are willing to shoot the breeze with me. To jabber about gas station parking lot empires on Skype while we both try our best to keep our heads from exploding with all the gadgets and gizmos it has to offer. (Hi Loralee!) I'm going to stop there.

I could go on a completely new tangent about feeling like the quick-witted, funny girl again, but perhaps we'll save that for another day. We will. Promise. So we have posts about Daddy issues, being the inappropriately funny broad again, death and its inconsiderate degree of unforgiving suckitude in 2009, and wonderful, liberating new music soon to debut from wonderful songwriters...one in particular...but don't worry, I'll do my best to leave no (wo)man behind.