My Friends are Awesome: Karen Z

I have three brothers. I always wanted a sister. I never had one, except briefly, when my father pulled a Brady Bunch and married a woman with two daughters, (all of them with hair of gold, like their mother.) If I did have a sister, I would want her to be Karen.

How awesome is she?! Let's look at the tape. Karen is the one person who emails me every day at my stupid job. She humored me when I suggested asking for reasons why she was awesome, receiving numerous replies.

I met her at my first full time job out of college. We mostly just talked about work stuff, but I struck up a conversation because I saw she was reading David Sedaris.

Karen shares my love of depressing songs. She is of the people who encouraged me to write a blog and she still reads it no matter how geeky it gets.

She reminds me of my favorite paintings, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. I think it's worth observing that I would not have given this painting a second though if I had not recognized something of Karen in it when I first saw it, so I owe it to her that I recognized something of her awesomeness in the painting when I did see it.

I think most importantly, Karen is also a tireless advocate of reproductive freedom, and rather than bitching impotently on a blog no one reads off in a corner of the internet, she actually does something about it.

She's also a loving foster parent to five giraffes.