Happy birthday, Tracy!

(I said I wasn't going to do this anymore except for 30th birthdays, or else I'd never write about anything else, but since Tracy wasn't a reader last year, Happy 31st!)

I met Tracy more than five years ago in New York, kind of by chance, but it's funny, because of everyone in the world, she has probably made the biggest impact on my life as I know it.

In the fall of 2001, I was 25 years old and wrapping up my first three post-college years in New York. I lived with two guys in a huge apartment on 86th street, and while it had been fun for a long time, I had gradually come to resent sharing my apartment with a fraternity house. (My two roommates were wonderful and I am still friends with them - it was their friends that they continually invited over for post-parties at 4 AM, when my 25 year old self started calling it a night at 2.) Our lease was up in November, and we had all agreed it was time to go our separate ways.

I wasn't ready to live on my own yet, and didn't know anyone else who was looking to share an apartment; so, I started looking on Craig's List for someone who already had an apartment, had furniture, and in fact, just had an available bedroom for me to move into. Tracy's ad offered exactly that. I spoke to her on the phone, and she sounded perfectly normal, but this was back in the day before EVERYONE used Craig's List and I was a little bit wary of who, exactly, I would be meeting on there. I had already ruled out anyone in the East Village, or truthfully, below 14th street, so when I saw that she lived on 44th in a doorman building, I figured she was pretty safe.

I showed up and we hit it off immediately. It was a Sunday, and we had both blown our curly hair straight because we both had dates that night with guys who were both coincidentally named Mike (and who would later, coincidentally, come to screw us over). It was love at first sight. I left feeling happy and hopeful, and only slightly worried that Tracy would find someone else that she liked better than me. But I worried for nothing. I hadn't even made it home when she called to tell me that she really liked me and that she wanted me to be her roommate. YAY!

We had a lot in common, but because we each had our own group of friends, we didn't immediately spend boatloads of time together. Weeknights we'd spend on the couch watching TV, but most of our weekends we'd spend separately with our own friends, mine from Syracuse, hers from the University of Wisconsin. One thing that has always touched me was her first birthday party after I moved in, when she started introducing me to her other friends as her roommate, and then backtracked, and said, "Wait, but I mean, my friend, too." I would never have even noticed the difference, but because she thought to clarify, I began thinking of her as my friend and how lucky I had gotten through the powers of Craig's List.

Less than two years later, though, her life started moving in a different direction, and Tracy decided it was time to move back home, to LA. Other friends of hers had started moving back and her older sister had just had a baby, so she felt that the time was right to make a move. Tracy was the first person I knew in LA, and when I took my first work trip, in Feb 2004, she let me stay with her for a weekend to see how I'd like it. I loved it.

Coincidentally (or not) three other people I knew from New York (two were my roommates from 86th Street) moved to LA that year, and, sure enough, barely a year from that first work trip, I was here as well. While the other people I knew here were all guys, Tracy made it her job to take me under her wing and invite me out and call me three times a week and make sure that I wasn't getting homesick. When I started getting homesick, she'd invite me out more; and, when a guy I was dating broke it off after five months, she knew exactly what to say and what to do to make me feel better. Through her, I met other friends, and gradually came to make my own life here in Los Angeles, if not only from the people that she knew but from the confidence she gave me to get off my ass and out of my apartment and do something.

I honestly don't think I would have moved here without her, and I can't even imagine my life now without her in it. I wrote before about my bus theory and how there are people that are meant to get off and there are people that are meant to stay on, and if you told me back in 2001 that I was about to meet a lifer on Craig's List, I would have been surprised.

Now, because she has led me so well for so long, I am putting her in the driver's seat.