Happy 23rd Birthday, Diana!

The first day of college was a big day, and I had big hair to go with it, despite the fact that I woke up about 2 hours prior to move-in time to keep that from happening. Bumble & Bumble has yet to produce a hair product that can fight moving into a dorm that was constructed in the early 1900's, with no air conditioning, up 3 flights of stairs and during a heat wave. As I unpacked, with my hair piled in a frizzy knot on top of my head, in waltzed a girl in a white tube top carrying a matching quilted Chanel purse. Her blonde hair was pulled neatly into a pony tail and I can't say I was that surprised; it was private school in Southern California after all. Her mom Ann, who looks exactly like an older version of Elle Woods, followed as she hopped over my mound of partially unpacked boxes and exclaimed "I'm Diana!".

Diana was the reason I had any friends at all for my first semester of college, and with out her I don't think I would have made it past the first week. She helped me break my socks-and-birkenstocks habit (at least for a while), taught me how to use valet, and let her family become my so.cal-family when mine was so far away.

I call her my eternal-roommate (I never got out of the habit of introducing her that way), and she was my first visitor when I moved to Portland after graduation. Isn't it funny the way that you never realize how much you love a place until you show it to another person? We had happy hour at 23rd & Hoyt, bopped along as Sallie Ford played at the Doug Fir, went and had our pictures taken in the Photobooth at the Ace Hotel {pictured} and went hipster-watching in American Apparel.

It's pretty wonderful having someone visit you in a strange, new place who remembers a part of you that no one else even knows about. Neither of us can quite explain the awkwardness of that first day of college, but whenever we try it some how starts with Diana saying "that haiiirrrrr...".