I just received an e-mail from my friend Kari telling me how excited she is to visit us this weekend. Now, I haven't seen Kari in a while. After spending two years in graduate school at Columbia, and then a few more working at a bank in Philly, Kari decided to ditch the corporate life and join the Peace Corps. She was "stationed" (I don't know the correct Peace Corp lingo) in Grenada, the nutmeg capital of the world, she tells me (coincidentally, I grew up in Connecticut, which touts itself as the nutmeg state, even though I don't think I ever tasted nutmeg in the ten years I lived there). Now Kari's back from her respite from the conventional working world, and coming to visit for the weekend. At the end of Kari's e-mail, which was sent from work, I noticed her new title for the job she recently landed at one of the biggest banks in the country - vice president. MY Kari a VP? Doesn't seem possible.

We met when we were a mere 22, freshly minted diplomas in hand (hers from Georgetown, mine from Smith). We were hired by the same company and discovered that we were both East coast transplants to the desert (we were in Arizona at the time) and that a girl she grew up with in New Jersey was my college roommate Freshman year (the roommate only lasted less than a semester, but that's another story).

The girl Kari moved to AZ with ditched her after a month to go live with her hockey-playing boyfriend in NY; I was cohabiting with my college boyfriend who was working at a liquor store at the time; Kari and I were employed by a company that eventually had its president sent to jail for tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions; and we were making nothing, so we had no money and knew practically no one (we ended up becoming friends with Jennifer, another woman we worked with in a similar post-college situation). So, we were kindred spirits from the get go.

(A quick aside. First, if you're going to be broke, I highly recommend doing it in a place where your apartment has a pool and tennis courts, the weather is sunny, and Corona is cheap. Two, moving across the country with your college boyfriend isn't such a great idea if you treasure your sanity and hope to escape in one piece - even if you can get a discount on beer purchased from the liquor store he works at.)

In any case, Kari, a woman who used to crank call the frozen yogurt store I worked at in the evenings (did I mention we were broke?) and ask me the flavors of the day in funky accents just so she could make fun of me, is now a VP. I won't even mention what Kari did to earn extra money, but it involved a vividly colored sash and an Italian vocabulary that included Viva Italiano (which possibly wasn't as bad as Jennifer's supplemental income, which required donning cowboy boots and a peasant skirt).

I have a million stories that would call into question whether Kari should be handling municipal securities for a bank entrusted with billions of dollars, but then I'd just be inviting fair play, and there's no way I'd want her to share stories about me. The high flying world of frozen yogurt can get ugly at times, and even those employed by The Cultured Cow weren't immune. So I'll just keep my mouth shut.

I just got all the employment info for my upcoming teaching stint. They need to have copies of my college and graduate school transcripts. So, just went through the process of requesting the info from Smith and the University of Chicago, and I have to admit, I'm intrigued. It's been so long, I can't wait to see what I got in that Middle Eastern Religion class my junior year, and my grade in the MBA course from hell (an investments class where I was supposed to be learning how to price options and futures using some formula two Noble prize-winning economists devised as a way to torture unsuspecting students who had no desire to ever enter the world of high finance).