Twinkies and Clicks

Did you ever run across someone you just totally click with? It’s happened to me a lot, especially in the past year or so. A big part of it has been all the cool people I’ve met on Books for Soldiers (that includes the ones that are no longer even active in that organization, BTW)… My “Twinkies” like Jo and Keira and Kim and Dawn, with whom I keep finding all sorts of interesting things in common. It always amuses me when we start saying and thinking the same things, and a huge part of the fun is also when I see in them, things I aspire to be some day. I’ve told Keira more than once, I want to be her when I grow up. (She is all of two months older than I am, I think…)

I had another one of those weird/fun/cool coincidences last night. There is someone I work with, that I’ve recently had occasion to talk to a little more than usual. If I’m not mistaken, we might actually be forming what could be called a friendship – always a pleasant surprise. Yesterday afternoon, he was working on a speech he had to give for a commencement last night. Like me, he waits until the last minute, and also like me, he agonizes over every word, every phrase, the slightest nuances, when the fact is that his thrown-together, last-minute effort still comes out sounding much better than about 90% of the population could come up with after two solid weeks of working on it. Side note: though I consider him a coworker, he actually works at another office. So we were carrying on a discussion about this speech via e mail, and early on I had offered to help him in any way I could. I would have written the whole thing if he wanted me to. He sent me a copy of what he had already, or rather, his intro, a space he left to tell the “how I got where I am” part of things (part of which I already knew), and then a closing piece which he said was flat-out lifted from something else and still needed to be modified. I really liked what he already had, and told him so. He asked if I would help him modify that last paragraph. Even though it was still missing the “how I got where I am” part, I could still see basically where the speech was going, so I dug back in my e mail (sometimes it pays to be a pack-rat!) and found a copy of something my sister had sent me, a commencement address given at Stanford by Steve Jobs (you know, the Apple Computers/Pixar guy). So I tossed that quote in at the end, and then did a little modification of the lifted paragraph, tied it up with a phrase that echoed something he had expressed in an earlier part of the speech, and mailed it off to him. On my way out the door already, I called him to make sure he’d received it, and to give him a little encouragement.

This morning, I got to the office and to my e mail, to find a copy of the full text of his speech. He had added in his story, and I realized that the more I get to know about this guy, the happier I am that we are becoming friends. He’s just a really cool person, and I love to meet really cool people. I liked his story of how he got to where he is. What I also liked was that he had taken the ending I’d given him and gone with it, not changing a word (and most likely delivering it with honesty and conviction). What I liked most, though, was that he mentioned to me that the quote from Steve Jobs that I had included, was actually something that he had looked at when he first started writing his speech, he just hadn’t been sure how to incorporate it.