Today, I sent off K’s birthday present to Papua New Guinea. His birthday isn't until July, but I wanted to give postal officials plenty of time to deliver it.




Work has been brutal the past two weeks. I’m a social worker and when I did clinical social work, the term ‘brutal’ would have been used to describe gut-wrenching situations or devastating circumstances. Now that I’m in academia, the term brutal is used to describe any of the following conditions:

• working with people that have egos bigger than fucking Saturn
• being managed by someone who regularly plagiarizes your ideas
• conducting site visits in rural Missouri and being evacuated due to tornados

The past two weeks were all of the above. As a social worker, I’ve been in some serious ‘what-the-fuck’ situations. Typically, those situations come as a result of mental or cognitive disabilities. In academia, I’m not really sure why the fuck people do the stupid shit they do. Anyways, it’s been a rough two weeks and I can cross ‘almost died in a Baptist church basement in the middle of Missouri with a Jack Russell terrier, twenty preschoolers and two chain smokers’ off of my bucket list. When I got home yesterday from my site visits, I was happy to have K’s birthday present preparation serve as a distraction. And no, I didn't really send Alex Warra to PNG.

K is a fun person to shop for, because he appreciates any gift. He told me once that he never got a gift for his birthday when he was little. And it wasn’t because his family was poor, but because it’s just not done in his culture. Imagine that combined with ‘gift giving’ being my language of love and you know there are a few hurt feelings occasionally. K likes to read and new books are hard to come by in PNG, so I go to bookstores and spend time finding books I’ll know he’ll like. It makes me feel good, selecting what he likes, knowing he’ll soon be reading it, and I smile when I think of him holding a book that I bought him and sent to him. Along with his books, I sent him some t-shirts, baseball hats, DVDs, some American candy (PopRocks!), GIS computer software, and a few other little things. I also included some gifts for his family that he can pass on to them. I’m trying very hard to win the title of Best Auntie and that requires bribery and gifts.

I miss K. A dozen times a day I realize he’s not here. I still miss him and even though he left almost a year ago, the missing-my-best-friend feeling hasn’t diminished.