Insert Terminator quote here

Socially, my friends tend to fracture into four categories: work, school, church, and family. Of course there’s probably a miscellaneous category (insert GLEE quote here: “Cause everybody’s got a random”), like the local pizza shop owners that remember your name and preferences and chat every time they see you. But, for the most part those four categories cover the gamut for me.  With one week left, I’ve begun to say “see you later” to quite a few friends and emotionally it has been enlightening.

Take work for example.

Last week my co-workers said goodbye by hosting two different events. Over burgers, fries, cupcakes and chatter I realized that saying goodbye to work is really only bittersweet. The sweet part is not working… (insert Forrest Gump quote here:  "That’s all I have to say about that!”) The bitter part is leaving the people I’ve worked with.

For the last 4+ years, I’ve spent eight hours a day, five days a week, and 45+ weeks a year with the same people. We've celebrated each other’s marriages, divorces and new babies and we've grieved with each other when family members passed. We've volunteered together by lending out our talents or buying chocolate/cookies from someone’s kid. We've celebrated every holiday together at work events where we ate ourselves into oblivion and when Michael Jackson died we honored him with our own Thriller montage. We've argued, laughed, cried, and forwarded the most inappropriate work emails to each other for more than 1800 hours a year, so needless to say I’m going to miss these people.

My “school friends” will also be missed.

This week, we finally walked across the stage and received rolled up pieces of paper with advertisements inviting graduates to spend even more money with the college. Hard left: the exorbitant amount I had to pay to get a master’s degree should include photos, caps & gowns, key chains, license plates and everything else to “help commemorate my experience!” (insert What’s Love Got To do With It quote here: “You wrong Anna Mae.”) But I digress…

We worked in cohorts during my master’s program; meaning that I went through the entire program with the same eight people.  There’s no faster way to get to know someone, than to place them in a pressure cooker together and make them work. So, seeing these people walk across the stage and accept their degrees was completely gratifying – we did this together!

Whether it’s friends from high school, college, or church, at different times in my life I have literally captured pieces of myself in the presence of these people and now I understand how fabulous it is to have really great friends in the peripheral. I say “peripheral” because these are the friends who you may not talk to every day, every month, or even every year, but if you see them in public or know that they need help with something in private, you’d run over an old lady carrying a disabled newborn in a rush just to say “hi” or to help them in whatever way you can.

With that said, see you later The Jones Group and bye, bye Mercy College. "Hasta La Vista, Baby!"