Rita

Friendship is born at that moment when one person says to another, "What! You too? I thought I was the only one!" ~C.S. Lewis

While cleaning my room last week, I found a letter I wrote to Adam last summer in which I described first meeting Rita and realizing we were essentially the same person. I remember seeing Rita the first or second day (in a corps of 100, the four Asians are easy to spot), but didn't talk to her until we were standing in line together in the dining hall. In that first conversation, we learned the following:

1. We're both Chinese (but we sadly cannot speak Chinese together, as I speak Mandarin, and she speaks Cantonese).
2. We both worked for Teach For America as Campus Campaign Coordinators.
3. We both worked for Teach For America as Operations Coordinators.
4. We both plan to go to law school (me, right after teaching; she, sometime in the future).
5. We both have younger brothers.
6. We have very similar last names. (Hers is one letter more than mine, and we've joked that we could pull off telling everyone we're sisters, just with a name typo.)

I'm pretty sure we're the only people in our corps to have done both 2 and 3, too. Weird, right?

Sometime during Induction, we decided that we would live together with Jill, and it's amazing to me that we all get along so well, when we really only knew each other for a couple dozen hours before saying, "Yeah! Let's spend the next year going through the hardest experience of our lives together!" I am usually of the mindset that things can always be better and things can always be worse, but honestly, I don't think I could have better roommates in our corps, and I know that I could definitely have worse. 

Despite our similar experiences, Rita and I are pretty different personalities. She's more open than I, and it's something I really admire about her. She's open in the sense that she will say what's on her mind and share her feelings, but also in the sense that she's up for anything. When I didn't find a Sugarland fan to join me for their concert here back in August, Rita gamely went with me, paying $60 to see a band she'd only heard snippets of in my car. I honestly don't think I would have done that for a friend, and she genuinely seemed interested in going, not just as a favor to me. 

She's also the least on-time person I know, which is pretty surprising as TFA is all about timeliness, and she worked for TFA before she was a corps member. She readily admits that she should be given a half-hour lead time on anything. I think out of the five times she's flown home for breaks, she's missed her flight four of those times. (Or maybe three, plus the one time her friend visited and missed his flight back.) It's becoming a running joke. I picked up Steph, a fellow TFA-er who is Rita's co-worker, from the airport on Saturday, and she said, "I missed my flight this morning. I pulled a Rita." 

She makes up for her lateness with all her other redeeming qualities, though: she is hilarious, generous, and supportive. What more could you ask for from a pseudo-twin?