Oh, C. K. Dexter Haaaaven!

I think we all have a lot of best friends over the years. There's the childhood best friend, the one you remember fondly as life gets more complicated and you yearn for easier days. There's the high school best friend, the one with whom you make all sorts of promises about living next door to each other and winding up in the same nursing home. There's your college best friend, your home away from home. There's your other half, your significant other, who I hear should become your best friend. That's what I'm looking for, anyway.

Then, of course, there's your built-in best friend, your companion before you knew you needed one, the one person who knows you better than anyone because she saw everything that went into making you you. She's so special she gets her own title: Mom.

I find it interesting that most languages have a similar word for our female parents. Most of them are some combination of the [m] and [ɑ] sounds. Mother, mama, madre, mater, mère, mutter. I don't care what you write down as your kid's first word, those two sounds, a bilabial nasal and a low back unrounded vowel, are the easiest speech sounds for a human to create. Those sounds are the first attempts at speech that a child is going to make. That's just linguistic fact. It seems right to me that they should go into the title for the first person to be important to us in this life.

I love my mother. She really does know me better than anyone else in the world (despite claims you may hear to the contrary). She knows how to deal with me when I'm in a mood. She knows how to make me smile. She can read all of the double entendres I hide in my Facebook stati. She gets the sly references I make to classic films and old British TV shows (probably because she raised me on them).

She's absolutely magnificent.

Listening to: "Lucky" by Jason Mraz ft. Colbie Caillat
Reading: Falcondance by Amelia Atwater-Rhodes