Yellow, Purple and Fjupy in San Diego

Wow, it seems that there are yellow-and-purple flowers anywhere I go! I took this while walking in downtown San Diego, on the way to Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues with my two best friends from high school.

When I asked Julia and Trixy to help me pray that 2007 be an Extraordinary Year for me, I didn't think that I would be blessed with a Fjupy Reunion! (Yes, God always does exceed our expectations.) It has been ten years since our high school graduation and two since our last get-together, but spending time with them negates all the time and distance we ever spent apart. These two are my fjupy womyn forever and I know we'll be friends until the very end (and longer), our husbands will be friends (John and Ade already are!) and our children will be friends too (will they also be the Bimbo-Bitch-Brain or the Lover-Lunatic-Poet trio?) - now that's something to look forward to.

Part of the Fjupy Friendship is our archive: part journal, part time capsule, part scrapbook; a companion between the three of us, recording our experiences and random thoughts. We've had three archives between us since our high school days and I brought a new purple archive with me to keep the tradition alive. We had the unveiling of the archive at our favorite Starbucks in San Diego. We only had two days together but we all had a great time (as these photos clearly show; thanks again, Ade, for being our official photographer!), including fjupy conversation about being Third Culture Kids and how our lives are forever changed because we're TCKs. (And thank you, Julia, for telling me about the cool TCK book! This deserves another blogpost for sure.)

Now in relation to my story, you may remember a character named Julia who uses the paperclip to bookmark her favorite prayer (and yes, Psalm 37:4 really is my favorite prayer). This character embodies both fjupy womyn as Julia and Trixy have been instrumental in strengthening my faith and prayer life back in our high school days. We had a lot of fjupy talks on big fjupy life-topics such as God, love and our futures. I'm not sure how many other 18-year-olds had deep-and-meaningful conversations like ours, but I always knew we were a little different and out-of-place ("in a world of silver paperclips"... hee-hee). Oh, and Viktor who flew the paper airplane is named after Julia's younger brother.

I can't wait until the next fjupy reunion...

Note: Fjupy (pronounced as "fyoo-pee") is a Swedish-like word we coined up to mean... well, everything! It can mean whatever we want it to mean, but usually it means deep-and-personal, pure, great, amazing; an adjective for those wow-I'm-speechless moments; a catch-all word to describe what Levin (my all-time favorite character from a Russian novel) meant when he said "words desecrate the loftiness of emotions" in Anna Karenina. (Yes, if you haven't guessed yet, I'm the Brain in the trio.) Levin is fjupy. YPC is fjupy. Love is fjupy.