one day in july 2008, i was just surfing around last.fm. i don’t know to this very day how i got to this profile, but i found a guy whose user pic was a great shot of tom selleck leaning out of some monster of a car in his shining mustache-glory.

there was no way i could just walk on by this profile, so i figured there was no harm in me saying hello and giving props where props go. what followed from there was a very nice shoutbox (last.fm equivalent of facebook’s wall) correspondence. i learned that this boy is named thierry, he’s french, and speaks/writes fantastic english. from there, we moved onto last.fm mail, and after that wasn’t quite personal enough, we started emailing each other. thierry has so far always held that he’s through-and-through french, but i have my misgivings because he’ll send me these enormous emails in english (not his native tongue) where i cannot find a single mistake. whenever i try to compliment him, he always brushes me off, saying he’s terrible. now that we’ve been keeping in touch for more than a year, we have each other on google talk so, sometimes when he’s up really late or i’m up really late, our lives will intersect and we’ll have a nice real-time chat. he lives on the northwestern coast of france so that means there’s a time difference of about six hours.

neither of us is really that large, but the distance between us is </cheestastic>

as far as our emails go, it’s nothing really out of the ordinary or lifetime movie-romantic. we talk mostly about school and our jobs and our friends and how drab each of our countries are. we also talk about visiting each other and how he wants to study abroad here and how i want to study abroad over there. i really do consider him a real friend. just tonight i received another of his emails, and he mentioned that he’d been re-reading our old emails and how funny it was to see where we both were when we first met. i’ve had the happy fortune of having several pen pals in my lifetime, but i readily admit i am a terrible one. i am the first to slack off, and i feel so lame when i get messages from thierry. he takes the time and puts in the effort to write me these passages of what he’s been up to and i don’t. i know that i should be replying to him instead of writing in this thing, but thierry is such a nice guy, i thought i would mention him.

i’m going to go write him a reply right now!