Denee is half an "ABC "(she came to USA when she was 11), 5 years younger than me, whom I met when I had to work part time in a Chinese restaurant in SLC, while I was stubbornly studying communication for which I could get absolutely no assistantship to help me out through the program. She and Speedy, a boy I know in the restaurant also and later became her husband, are the the only two friends of mine in USA that don't have a college degree.
I don't want to say that I have rules for making friends, but most of my friends turn out to be, of integrity, kind, and above all, highly educated. I guess it is because I was brought up under the influence of mom's theory "knowledge is the highest among all". But of course I was too young to understand it, so she motivated me to study hard using her other theory that, the higher degree a girl gets, the better chances she will have to meet really handsome boys-- which later proved to be false: boys can get more knowledgeable and (maybe) interesting when they are more educated, but not necessarily more handsome, the chances are they are more likely to be bald instead:(
I didn't intend or expect to be friends with Denee, simply because she and I are so different in so many ways, and lots of things about her are around the borderline of my comfortable zone. She smokes often but refuses to drink coffee with sugar because "it is going to make her fat". She sings numerous rap songs (actually she is best pop singer I know in real life) and speaks slang that she can't spell correctly. She wears belly button ring, tongue ring and more than two tattoos on her body (In contrast, the cruelest thing I have ever done to my body intentionally was to have my ears pierced--two piercings in each ear, which closed up later because I always forgot to put on earrings). "One person's meat can be another person's poison". This old saying accurately describes our feelings toward each other's tastes in many things.
However, there are reasons that make me never disliked her. She is young and cute looking: short and chubby, with tanned skin and big dark eyes. She never treated me unfairly although her complicated family background made her "cunning" and full of little "schemes". What's more, Denee and I were the only two people in the restaurant that were able to carry on some normal conversation without having to inserting adult jokes somewhere. and before I have a car, Denee gave me rides whenever she could. and after she sent me home at night, she often proposed to stay at my place for a little while because she didn't want to go home. I didn't need to treat her any more specially than throwing her a fashion magazine. She could usually manage to be happy and excited by trying out all the skincare and fragrance samples coming with magazine.
One solid credit I gave to Denee is that, she aways manages to keep touch with me in days I close my doors to the "outside world". Like my other long-term friends, she makes our friendship live on.
