Reply #35: I'm going to spend my 1000th post with you.

[Career Prole]

I live out in the middle of Texas. I was pretty sure I was the only liberal in the area. I drove off the old gang when things got so bad in the winter of 2002 that ignoring politics seemed irresponsible to the point of criminal negligence.
I wrote a letter to the editor or two (or three) and started alienating acqaintances too, but a girl I had once known briefly through work looked me up because she was a liberal too. I hadn't known. Another guy wrote to the paper a few months after that and she looked him up in the phone book and called him. We all had lunch together. There's seven of us now. For a long time we've been clinging to one another like shipwreck survivors bobbing in a big angry sea, and boy was I glad they were there. We've become very good friends in that lifeboat, faster than any friendships I'd ever forged before, and closer than "plain old friends" too.
We've seen land off in the distance, and the current surely seems to be carrying us toward it, but we ain't gonna stop paddling, no.
You're in the lifeboat too, you know. Keep paddling and don't think about those damned sharks...we're almost there! :grouphug: