"I don't wear gym clothes every day. At least once a week I wear those khakis, plot twist, through a curve ball at ya."

I needed a break by the end of 7th period today. It had been a long day and I needed to just not be a teacher for awhile. I loaded up the yellow box with all of the string, tape and scissors and met the FBC girls in the LGI room. It was a huge crowd this afternoon and we started things off with screaming and running around while they played Dominican Chaos. 

Dominican Chaos is one of my favorite games of all times. You learn a lot about emotions while you're playing this with your team. 

See Camdyn there with the white sweater and mis-matched socks? That's pure joy.

See Maddie in the purple Patty? That's rage.

Don't worry-- Maddie recovered just fine.

I've been having a lot of conversations about friendship lately and observing groups of friends in action. Friendship is hard. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not always the best friend to all of my people but I hope that I'll keep getting better at being trustworthy, genuine, kind and present.

I was talking with one of my Senior girls today about what she wished she could have told herself when she was in 8th grade. "You do you," she said, "You can't control how other people are going to act." She's right. There's no point in trying to change your friends if you don't like the way they're acting. You are in charge of yourself and only you.

KCraig and I were talking with one of our Junior High girls about having "fun" with her friends. We asked her what that meant and she told us that they get invited to all the cool parties every weekend but then they end up on their phones, getting into trouble or being stressed about not getting into trouble. When we asked her what would actually be fun she said, "Well I really like when we order pizza and watch funny movies like Clueless and we'll play ping pong and see how hard we can hit the ball." Option two sounds like a lot more fun to me. What kind of fun do you want to have? Find friends that want the same thing.

I thought the universal truth about friends was that they are supposed to be nice to you. But I'm finding out from students and campers and YL girls that I love that "being nice" isn't always on the list of friend qualities. And I think that's such a mistake. If you can't trust your friends, they make you do things for them, they intimidate you or make fun of you then I don't really see how they're your friends.

You deserve great friends. You really do. Don't keep investing in the people that aren't the kind of friends you want. There are more people out there who would love to be your friend if you just give them the chance.