She is all ambition and heart, rock solid and unquestioning.

Katie Colihan of KatieBlogs.com

Katie asked me to get coffee before we’d typed so much as 140 characters to each other. I actually stopped halfway between a side street in downtown New Brunswick and the spot where Henna’s car was illegally parked to read the notification on my phone.

You have to understand: people don’t take chances on me. I’m not among the instantly intriguing shimmery and sequin-rimmed cardigans hanging on mannequins in the front window at Express.

You also have to understand: that’s just the kind of heart Katie’s equipped with. She doesn’t need much to go on, just a little reassurance that you are a kind soul stuck inside a sometimes nasty and lonely world.

When I realized how many hands Katie had, how many pots of honey she’d dipped her paws into, I was only more impressed. Every single one of her five, count ‘em five, jobs is scheduled for a day of the week.

Mondays are for Stratejoy, Tuesdays and Thursdays for Love Bomb, and so forth.

And that does not bother her. She does not feel ready to drop one, two, three, heck even four jobs when some of us run and run and run and think we cannot even handle one.

She is all ambition and heart, rock solid and unquestioning. She knows the word “no” but chooses “yes” when she means it and doesn’t apologize to herself later.

She taught me about scheduling, about dreaming only big enough to keep you from hurling yourself onto the floor in quiet desperation that you cannot possibly do enough. She taught me a lot from her spot on the other side of the screen, probably only half an hour from the house I grew up in but a solid four-hour car ride from my temporary residence in western Virginia.

Mostly, she taught me that a cup of coffee is not a cup of coffee. That should she chisel a thirty-minute block out of her organized and jam-packed schedule to someday sip java with this girl over here, it will be for the same reason she runs wild and fierce in this big ole world.

She cares.

Enough to construct a giant love bomb when a best friend of mine was hanging onto hopes of her own happy ending like the last sheet of toilet paper on the public bathroom stall roll. She saves lives, literally, and reminds me that there is nothing wrong with juggling projects, with organized, facilitated chaos.

Maybe, I think, she’s making up for those of us sitting on couches watching Simpsons reruns. [Nothing against the Simpsons. I just had to pick a show.]