The day Anecia moved into my apartment.

The interior design girls at our apartment for a pancake pajama party.

Jamie, myself and Anecia at the Texas Tech Homecoming game.

It is amazing how small things you do will change the path or your life, or at least the way you live it.  I don’t know exactly how we became friends, but I think that we sat by each other in one of our Interior Design studio classes.  Soon enough, I was taking notes for Anecia and we were planning out our trip to the Texas Tech Junction to take geography.

 But before Junction, we first became roommates.  It was a great life experience for me to have Anecia as a roommate, an experience I had never had before.  Anceia was deaf.  This is why I started notes on carbon paper, so we could each have a copy, thus, becoming friends in the first place.  We had a strobe light that flashed when the phone rang and closed captioning was on all the time.  I made new friends, which I learned to talk to over the TTY system, allowing us to type over the phone lines.  There were so many things that I was never exposed to until Anecia and I became friends.  There were so many difficulties that I had never encountered, until I was with her and saw how those small things that I took for granted were things that others wished for. 

 Anecia never let her lack of hearing get her down or overcome her vivacious spirit.  She conquered she accomplished the goals that she set out for and she could see the bright side of how her hearing actually made her life better (for example, being in a loud bar and still being able to sign to your friends when hearing people couldn’t carry on a conversation).

 Thank you, Anecia, for teaching me to always be thankful for what I have and sometimes being “normal” isn’t the best thing.  Because of you I always try look on the sunny side of things.