MAD ABOUT MADDY

My OGO is my best friend from college, Maddy.

She is beautiful and brilliant, incredibly kind, and always makes me laugh so hard I wish I had invested in a pack of Depends.

I met her my junior year of college after spending an amazing semester studying abroad in Luxembourg, where I took classes in a castle and spent weekends in Paris and Prague. (Okay, so I had a backpack and stayed in hostels, but it felt life jet-setting to me!)

I was pretty jaded about returning to the cornfields of Ohio to finish out the year, and struggled to reconnect with my old friends. It seemed that life had lost its luster.

But when I met Maddy a few weeks later, my perspective began to shift.

She quickly became my soul sister, my partner in crime. She reminded me that creating a scavenger hunt on the spot purely as an excuse to talk to a cute stranger can be just as fun as drinking champagne in front of the Eiffel Tower.

By simply being herself, Maddy has shown me how to be a true friend.

She is always the first to show up on my porch with a bowl of soup when I’m sick, and a bottle of wine and a copy of When Harry Met Sally after a break up.

I don’t know how she does it, but she always finds a way to make time for her many friends and her family, despite being ridiculously involved around campus, taking a crazy-hard course load, and working as a TA in a class that most people I know can barely pass.

She is the only girl I know who is confident enough to order rib tips on a first date.

She has the innate, unique gift of making every person she meets feel like they’ve been best friends since childhood.

She is someone who recently bought a giant Afro wig at a costume shop ago and literally hasn’t taken it off since, claiming it is “the best $10 she has ever spent.”

She is the only friend I know who loves to travel as much as I do and looks at life through the bright lens of adventure.

Maddy is witty, weird, wacky, and wonderful, and if the world was filled with more

OGOs like her, it would be a more fabulous place. That’s her on the right.