ode to claire

02Dec06

Having read my one-paragraph summaries of Marina, Leslie, and Andrew a couple posts ago, the light of my life/bane of my existence known to the rest of humanity as Claire Kim has demanded a write-up of her own.

Claire is insidious. She is one of the most hilarious people I have ever known, but she hides it exceedingly well when she so chooses. At times, Claire seems to have very little control over her facial expressions. Case in point: if she finds someone’s company even mildly distasteful, they will likely be subjected to her patented I-appear-to-have-stepped-in-something-unpleasantly-squishy-but-I-will-put-on-a-brave-
face-until-I-can-be-alone-and-find-a-curb-on-which-to-scrape-the-hell-out-of-my-designer-
boot-soles Look. When you get to know her, you realize that most of the time, she’s not letting her guard slip; she means for you to see this look.

Claire is small. She doesn’t like it, but she is. Despite this cold, hard fact, Claire refuses to embrace her potential for tiny cuteness, opting to put in the extra work and shoot for hotness/badass-ocity instead. She succeeds.

Claire makes you work for her approval. She is an evil mastermind, and has been known to reduce people to such a state that when she demands a piggyback ride right smack in the middle of Seoul’s most crowded clubbing district, the mule in question secretly feels slightly honored. Someday, Claire may quite possibly employ these powers to affect great change on a global scale; whether she uses them for good or evil remains to be seen.

Claire has amazing taste. She can pull off items of clothing and jewelry that I would not even dare to approach in a store. (Poncho, anyone?) I covet the ring she got in Bali. She knows this. She has promised to leave it to me in her will. This gesture fails to impress me, because at the rate I am going the odds of me outliving her are very very slim.

Claire is one of the most satisfying IM conversationalists I have ever, EVER communicated with. That may not seem like much to those of you who don’t IM a lot, but believe me, it is. She words things juuuuuuuust right, and her timing is impeccable. No one, and I mean No One, is more fun to be bitchy with. And no matter how irrational or random the topic at hand (we’re talking a truly vast spectrum here, ranging from how Wentworth Miller on Prison Break has sensitive, rash-prone skin to theories on why, exactly, a small toddler stared at me intently for a solid twenty minutes on the bus to Traflgar), she jumps right on the crazy train and takes it to places where no man, woman, or child has ever gone before.

Claire needs to move to America in tandem with myself, so I can stop missing her. It’s tiring.

… Dwetnya i-nyeon-a?

**NOTE: The Claire-Maya Lovefest photo collage I posted above makes me
feel like kind of a charlatan, because all those pictures were taken more
than a year ago, before my dispiriting slide back into obesity. I look
nothing like that anymore. (Not that ‘that’ was anything spectacular, but still.)
While I may have been tempted, in the spirit of honesty, to post more
current pictures as well, I was spared that moral dilemma because I
basically stopped letting people take pictures of me when I started
getting fat again last winter. The idea is, at some point, the powers that
be will finally invent a magical pill to make all my weight woes disappear,
and I will systematically alter the memories of everyone I have
interacted with since February, and it will be as if, aesthetically speaking,
this whole unfortunate interlude NEVER HAPPENED. Yesssss.

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