We Just Click

Throughout some of my columns my friend Megan has made a few cameo appearances. I met her when she asked me to volunteer with her company for a week during Extreme Makeover: Home Edition two years ago and we’ve been friends ever since.

We just click.

Earlier this year Megan – a small town, country music lovin’, cowboy boot wearin’ girl – moved to Los Angeles to take on the accounts of celebrities and events at a public relations firm. She’s always given tough love type of advice and L.A. has polished her straight-shooting abilities.

I look forward to seeing her when she is home visiting friends and family. She makes time for everyone in her life and she makes it look easy, which we know it definitely is not. Last week over the Thanksgiving holiday, we planned to get together at some fancy place for appetizers.

At the last minute she texted me saying she was making a late-in-the-game decision to go to Paradiso. We met in the lobby and right after the hugs and hellos she turned serious and said, “They don’t have cheese dip in L.A.” That’s a big deal for this girl, as she believes that cheese dip is a separate food group.

We set up camp in a corner booth and when the meek server approached us she probably dreaded having us in her section.

“Hello, we need cheese dip – STAT,” Megan told her. As we looked over the menu we saw that the restaurant had added a “Cheese Dip Trio” on its appetizer menu. Three types of cheese dip in one order? Done and done.

After ordering Megan got a gleam in her eye as she pushed a belated birthday present to me across the table. I opened it and laughed out loud. She had gotten me mustache band-aids and a button with a unicorn on it.

I know these things seem random, but the mustache craze is out of control and I’ve fallen victim to thinking it’s awesome to put a mustache on anything. The unicorn button is in relation to a phrase Megan found and shared with me, “Always be yourself. Unless you can be a unicorn. Then always be a unicorn.”

Random? Yes. Entertaining? Absolutely.

Megan has some of the sharpest people skills of anyone I have ever met; she can read people and see right through them, a talent I often wish I had. After struggling for months I asked her opinion on a business decision. She took another bite of cheese dip on a tortilla chip, thought for a split second, and said, “You know the answer to this, but let me tell you my opinion. You need to do X, Y, Z,” and she laid out her entire argument. I thanked her, but she said it’s always easier to see the answer in someone else’s situation because they’re the ones stuck in the middle of it with so many options to consider. So wise.

Her many moments of brilliance are balanced with unique and interesting comments like the one we parted with, “I kind of hope you get a paper cut or something soon – I am dying to see how one of those mustache band-aids looks on you.”

Only Megan.