A Day of Maura

Maura has been my closest friend for the past 8+ years. We first met when we were roommates in a quad my freshman year in college. We've been close ever since. Yesterday Maura went into the hospital for kidney surgery. In honor of this brilliant, foxy, and courageous chick (and because her surgery got me thinking about how much she means to me and all the crazy shit we've shared), I'd like to list some of my favorite Maura-moments today. Enjoy.

Her post-shower baby-powder trails;

The whole MichFest experience;

The time she got super-drunk at her apartment in Berea (partly my fault as I'd challenged her to a wine-chugging contest, not realizing she'd barely eaten all day) and ran around with television cables wrapped around her forehead until she got sick and ended up sitting in her armchair for hours throwing up in a bucket (all of which we got on video--heh heh);

One time freshman year when I was crying on my top bunk (God only knows why) but was trying to cover it up and she discovered me and was like "Are you CRYING up there?" (in a very League of Their Own type moment--"Are you crying? You can't cry in baseball!") and then almost started crying herself outta sympathy while reassuring me;

A trillion late-night Taco Bell runs;

The incoherent Lynds-Maura phone call begging me to please come down to their apartment when I returned home because they had smoked too much pot and were freaking out (this is the infamous Maura climbing into tub incident);

The plans we had to become a traveling musical duo called "Tongue in Chick" where we'd have a highly-sexualized show that'd include strip-teases and us coming on to each other while doing covers of various sexy songs;

The New York City hot tub experience (which requires explaining)--Maura, Mike (my ex-), and I went to visit my friend Lynds in Connecticut one week and ended up swinging over to NYC to spend the day. We rented a hotel room in Queens, but we rented it under the guise of only two people staying there and we snuck me in the back door. Anyways, we got a free hot tub in our room because management said that it wasn't working correctly--it didn't bubble. Anyways, we were out late and when we returned to the hotel room, we decided to fire the thing up. We filled it up and the three of us sat around in it, watching television and drinking malt liquor. By the time we started turning prunish, it was about 2 am. We got out, let the water out, and got ready for bed. A few minutes later, the phone rings. We all look at each other in surprise. Mike answers, and it's a hotel employee calling to ask if we'd been using the hot tub. Mike says yes, and the employee says they immediately have to come up and check out the hot tub. Maura and I panic and start running around because there's not supposed to be three of us there. We decide to both hide in the bathroom under the guise that Mike's "girlfriend" is taking a shower. We're standing around, shivering in cold bathing suits and dripping all over the floor while hotel employees parade in and out of our room. Listening through the door, we find out that apparently the people in the room beneath us woke up to water pouring into their room through the ceiling. The bubble-making apparatus was not the only thing broken on the tub after all. Finally the employees leave warning Mike not to use the hot tub again. We all scrunch up into the king-size bed and drift of into a restless night's sleep filled with terrifying dreams of employees sneaking into our room and finding out about the fugitive hidden within;

Mike and Maura singing and playing guitar in the stairwell freshman year;

How every one of Maura's birthdays ends up with people drunk and disrobed (most notably are the birthdays where we played Truth or Dare Jenga which resulted in a plethora of sundry--and nekkid--going-ons and another which ended with four of us strewn about my bedroom, nekkid and getting stoned together);

The wide variety of concerts we've seen together:
front row at Ani;
Bitch & Animal three different times;
standing outside in the cold to wait for the Indigo Girls to come out and then Maura getting perturbed because Amy Ray gave me a double-take and not her (heh heh);

Our little poetry-comraderie: back in college we'd constantly find ourselves sitting around reading each others' poetry and doing our own little mini-workshops of the poems (which usually consisted of us gushing over each others' work)--I miss this creative exchange;

The time we brought Maura back leftover pizza from Mama Santa's that had been sitting in the car for a while and she got horrific food poisoning from it;

Hanging out at the Crow Bar in southern Ohio--watching this chick singing covers of Rage Against the Machine tunes while locals gawked at us all (with our nose rings and outlandish clothes), stealing the crow off the ceiling (which I still have at home), and Maura drunkenly giving me a hard but happy-fun kiss as she stumbled out of the ladies' room;

The time on the way to Connecticut where I was driving her car and, in an attempt to adjust her sideview mirrors, accidentally hit the button to open her trunk (which was filled with all our clothes and belongings) on the freeway;

Maura getting upset when Mike and I first started dating and how I later (years later) found out it wasn't because she liked Mike--it was because she had a crush on ME and hadn't figured that out yet;

Smoking up on the benches out by the pond in Berea freshman year--Maura acting all cracked-out because of it (despite the fact that she hadn't quite figured out how to INHALE yet);

One of the last days of senior year in college--Maura and I watched a movie together in my bare apartment; in a happy end-of-college moment, we ended up squishing into my single bed together, staying up late and talking, and then drifting off to sleep next to one another;

The time she got stoned and tried to crawl into my kitchen sink (ultimately succeeding in completely freaking out my friend Jef);

There's a billion more stories I could tell, but I'll stop here.

The thing I love most about this girl:
She loves harder and more passionately than anyone I know.


Give a get-well shout-out to Mo in my comments section, you bitches!

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