idk my bff leona

my good friend jenna has moved to atlanta - the ATL - the dirty south. she is gone and most sadly admitted, is the better for it. it was her time to move on and up in life and this was the most logical and promising step. but why, you ask, entitle this entry “Leona” and not jenna? well, to give you a quick and dirty break down, take out your cell phone. start a new text message and turn on the predictive text. now type in jenna or 53662. if your phone is like mine, it will instead produce the name leona. which in turn tells you that your phone believes it is much more probable that you know and correspond with a girl named leona and not a girl with the antiquated and almost unheard of name in this day and age jenna!
if you know jenna, and many of you do, leona just fits and it was a serendipitous day when we discovered this faux pas of predictive text. it takes time (that you somehow appear to not have when using T9) to save into the phone’s memory that in fact you, unbelievably enough, DO know a girl named jenna and actually talk about/to her more than that other girl leona. now up until now, if you are not intimately acquainted with jenna’s alter-ego leona, you have been saying it all wrong! the correct pronunciation is said in a east coast, sickly, old aristocratic woman’s voice…leeeoooooona – add in a daaaahhhhrling if you’re not already too embarrassed. now jenna is not limited to leona as her only amusing moniker. her other designations include, but by all means are not limited to: big red (i have never ever called her this), jennie joe, it’s evil twin yenna yoe, and my other favorite, mary.
big red speaks for itself when you look at the picture attached to this blog – she has very red hair. end of story. jennie joe, on the other hand, has a much more involved story. jenna is one of the many children of “the joes.” you must be inducted into this very elite family. my name being rather hard to come up with a good joe name, is still not officially associated with it’s own unique joe. my daughter, eisley, has been inducted and was christened joe-e or joey however you want to look at it. you know you’re “in” when you get your “joe” name. whoooooooaaa – if only i knew how to attach a sound byte and you could hear a joe’s “whoa.”
now we come to the story of jennie joe’s long lost evil twin yenna yoe. when jenna was applying for scholarships for college like most high school seniors, she decided to use every resource available to her. she even applied for an hispanic scholarship and won it – she is somehow within the qualifications of the scholarship just hispanic enough and she will prove it to you if asked to. this fact is pretty laughable in that jenna is the most “white” person i have ever met. we’re talking stereotypically vanilla. j.crew wearing, starbucks drinking, mayo on her wonderbread girl. but when you get her going, and yenna comes out, all of a sudden we’ve got jennie from the block on our hands! she turns her j’s into y’s and says “chure” instead of “sure” and “ju know” for “you know.” yenna yoe isn’t completely evil, just a little and unfortunately gets blamed for all the times jenna is just being plain ornery!
now for the final and most endearing, mary. this time, for reasons i can still not figure out, the correct pronunciation is maaaaaaahry…same as leona, but with a british flair. jenna has an obsession with the little house on the prairie tv show. jenna would even go so far as to auto-tune my tv to watch little house on the prairie when she comes over and looks at me with a look that pleads “pretty please with sugar on top” whenever it is listed on the upcoming shows. i inevitably allow her a (in my opinion a generous) minute or two before i can’t handle anymore and we simply must switch it back to something really good like, america’s next top model re-run marathons, or even the real world (actually anything on mtv is better). i’m sure you have all seen the show: laura ingalls with her orthodontia needing teeth, pa with his his goofy grin, big floopy hat and sound god-fearing advice on every subject from being honest to when to plant your wheat every year, nelly the town’s pretty, rich and stuck up girl who turns out to actually be ok in the end, and of course, mary, laura’s older sister and the only other way to remember her…the blind one. jenna has perfected and spread what is called the “mary stare” and we have many a picture to prove that it is a phenomenon sweeping the nation. i’ll tell you how to do it in pictures and you can start it in your own circle of friends too. first really try to embody the spirit of living in the old west – this is key. then look about a foot to the right and up from the camera. smile blankly making sure to let your eyes glaze over and not focus on anything. there you go, it is as simple as that. you can even carry on conversations with your friends in this manner…i’m sure jenna would love you to.





so that’s jenna explained in terms of her nicknames. she is my good friend…no scratch that…great friend… no, still not right…she is closer than most of my blood relatives…she is my sister. and i miss her…