My Associations

Associations: Relationships between conceptual entities. They are relationships between objects, ideas and feelings.  Memory is structured as an association network which serves the purpose of informing about relationships between different things.

I associate different things in my life with different friends I have had through the course of my life. I question whether some of these friends know whether I associate these things with my friends, and I wonder if these friends know what impact they have had in my life.

Let me tell you about a few.

I grew up somewhat of a tomgirl (ironically I'm now Tom's girl! :-)).  Those who did not know me until after the age of 14 or so might be surprised to know that growing up I hated pink. I hated purple. I hated nail polish. And then I met my friend Laura Peter. She was a girly girl. Big time. She loved the nail polish. She loved the girly colors. And she taught me how to fall in love with them. For the past 15 years there have been very few days where I have gone without nail polish on my toes. In fact, it is something I not even comfortable going out in public without having on my toes. And pink- it is always my color of choice. Had I never met Laura, Emi's room most certainly would not be all pink and purple.

Then there is my friend Kaleigh Lundy. I  met Kaleigh in college. It's hard to believe that before I met Kaleigh I could not tell apart Britany Spears from Jessica Simpson. It was through Kaleigh that I fell in love with Us Weekly Magazine. This led to a 9 year addiction to the magazine that I actually just cancelled the subscription to this past winter (too much teen mom on the cover). Years later my friend, Tara Hofabuer, taught me about the website www.perezhilton.com.  Tara and I clerked through law school together and spent our summers reading all the celebrity gossip. I read Perez back when he had like 100,000 readers. I no longer read perez, but I read www.radaronline.com at least once a day.

And my friend, Andrea Smiens. She is my big word language teacher- specifically, the word rhetorical. And in 8th grade, this was a pretty impressive word to know. Andrea was impressed with my ability to constantly answer rhetorical questions. Particularly in the middle of algebra. Ironically I could answer all the rhetorical questions but not do well on the questions on my math test. And do you think to this day I can use the word Rhetorical without thinking of my friend Andrea? NO!!!!!!!!!!!

Oh, and my friend, Amanda Teed. Amanda grew up on the northside of Des Moines prior to moving to Ankeny which caused he to confuse herself as a black girl stuck in a white girls' body. Nobody could rap words from JayZ, Nelly, or Snoop the way this girl could. Well, except perhaps her twin sister Cassandra. I remember the first time I realized Amanda's talent. It was summer of 1999. The song heartbreaker was the number one song of that summer. During the middle of Mariah's song JayZ does a little rap. Amanda and Cassandra worked to outdo the other in rapping this part to the rest of the team. And it was from that experience that I made such a commitment to learning lyrics to songs. This talent has not gone unnoticed by other friends of mine as well.

I wonder if any of my friends' have any strong associations with me. I wonder if Emi will pick up any of these talents that her mom has acquired. I think she'd make the best pink wearing, gossip sharing, big word using, rapping friend anybody could have!