Excel Spreadsheets

I don’t know how the part of life works when friends are no longer in our presence and we can’t text them or have cell phone access to harass them on FaceTime or send them work inappropriate Instagram reels of Lilli Hayes, but I do have a strong feeling that somehow my friend Anne has figured out a way to beat the Microsoft 365 terms and retain access to Excel Spreadsheets.

I also know somewhere she would be giving me shit about run-on sentences and Oxford commas. 

I guess that’s why I’m writing. 

I miss writing to my friend Anne knowing that she would always have something hilarious to say in response. That’s why she followed this antiquated Blogger link. She liked giving me shit. She wanted immediate access to poke fun at whatever jackassery de’jour I was into. But I always took a lot of pride in that, because it’s how I knew Anne took me seriously and considered me a good friend. She was intentional with her time. If she was dunking on me in the comments section, it meant that she actually cared about what I had to say. I know that she watched weird Russian videos of vacuum cleaner reviews and used to send me links of quack chiropractors because it was entertaining to her, but she didn’t waste her time on people. I miss having her around.

Anne did what I couldn’t in her blog - she wrote with a rare vulnerability about the hardest things in her life. I don’t know if she realized how many people respected her for that, and needed her words in their everyday lives. I respected her so much for that and for so many other things about the way she lived, but mostly I respected how genuine she was.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the best way to honor my friend, and I think mostly she would just want me to live and write honestly and with intention.

So I don’t know what the hell this looks like moving forward, but it seems like writing for a while should be what I do to both process losing my friend and honor her legacy as a person. Open to prompts. And friends dropping witty snark in the comments section - that’s what Anne would do.

Nat