Amanda? Hmm. Where should I start? There's so much to complain, er, talk about. I mean, this could take days! Okay. Well...I guess my favorite thing about Mandy is that she doesn't really care what people think about her. Okay, okay. Everyone cares a tiny bit about what people think about them, but she doesn't outwardly show it. I mean, she used to care; she was all into trying to impress everyone at school with what she wore or how she looked. All for nothing, if I remember correctly. The people she was trying to impress just turned their backs on her, in the end. So she said, "Screw it." Now? Well she learned the hard way -- I know how hard it was; I watched it all unfold -- that it doesn't matter who you impress, so long and you're happy. And once people started taking her at face value, she was much happier, and a lot easier to be around.
She's also got an interesting sense of humor. And by interesting I mean sarcastic. It's not that she tells jokes, not directly anyway. But it seems that she'll randomly -- and I mean randomly -- say something remotely funny. It's one of the perks of hanging out with her because you never know when it's coming, and when it does? Whoa. She can have you laughing for hours, usually about nothing. Oh, and she's musical, too. I don't know how many instruments she actually plays, but she taught me how to play the piano, even thought I'm really not that good. Taught me right out of her Ben Folds Five songbook. Mainly she plays the guitar. She played in our high school rock ensemble, which is like the coolest thing in this miniscule town. She's really really good, even though she plays entirely too much Tragically Hip.
Another thing about Mandy is that, no matter what she's doing, she'll try to include the rest of us. Like, this one time, she got tickets for our friend Eric to see "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" for his birthday. So we got Eric out of school -- he was still in high school while we were all finished for the year -- and went down to New York City. We stood in line almost all day in the lobby of NBC Studios in Rockefeller Center, waiting to sit all the way up front. Then when we finally got in, our giant group was split up, unlike the first time when we were staring at him as he did the monologue. Me and Mandy were over by the aisle, and somewhere in the pit of my stomach, as Conan came out to warm up the audience, I knew disaster was coming. Long story short? I ended up dancing with, and hugging (although I'd like to call it being groped, thank you very much) Conan O'Brien. And that would have never happened if I didn't get along with Mandy. Random shit like that only happens when she's around.