Earl and I go a pretty long way back, all the way to first grade, and the first sign of this is that I’ll never be able to call him Tengal without laughing inappropriately. My first memory of him is this time he was trying to use a chair as a desk by propping it up on his lap, but it kept bobbing from side to side so he ended up spending more time keeping it upright then getting any work done. I was six, and I didn’t point out what a noob he was being because back then, I wasn’t the obnoxious biznitch that I am today.
I have Earl to thank for my being as loud and tactless as I am at this point, this point where I’m not even that loud or that tactless. I guess this gives an idea of how spineless I was when we first became a couple back in high school. It wasn’t that hard to get pissed off at Earl, and our relationship was a cycle of being pissed off one moment and giddy as a 12-year-old at a Hannah Montana gig the next. The fights grew bigger and bigger until finally I was just this resentful mess of PMS and female chauvinist rage. It took me a whole to recognize the neurotic spectrum of emotions that can only be felt when there’s genuinely something at stake.
Before that I’d never really expressed my anger at our shortcomings (or anyone else’s) or my sadness at the fact that it really wasn’t working, eve before the relationship starter, and it was hard to adjust to being friends after everything blew over. It is within that context that I can now say we really are friends. Friends who mock each other relentlessly, but friends nonetheless.
And multiply refuses to upload a picture, so here’s a puppy emoticon: 
Alice Sarmiento 