I was having a strange conversation with a good friend of mine that is still living in Thailand — I was trying to express how much I missed having him in my life on a daily basis and I had the most bizzare thought.

It’s always hard to convey how we feel to another person. Our words are so limited in communicating the abstract. Of course, some are better than others (hence, our poets) but still, even with the best command of language, we often fail at truly relating our feelings.

In this case, I was trying to say that my friend was very important, even vital to my life, but the best I could do was come up with body parts. Like, “you are like my heart” or “i need you like i need my kidneys” — not terribly poetic, but pretty vivid.

So, that got me thinking about other people I know and what body part they could be. We all have people we know that are a part of us, and help define who we are, but they can be somewhat… expendable… as we travel through life. Like toes and ears. We like to have them but we don’t really need them. Sure balance could be awkward without the requisite number of toes and I’d look might strange without ears, but I don’t needs these body parts. I could still enjoy life without them.

Thus, enter the new taxa for categorizing what different people mean to me.

• It’s good if you are a vital organ — a liver, a lung, a brain, etc.
• No bad if you are vital, but a duplicate organ like a spleen
• Not so good if you are non-vital — spleen, gall bladder, etc.
• Worse if you are a finger or toe
• I’m reserving sphincters and other excretion parts for those I can’t get out of my life, but don’t want
• I’m still trying to work in the muscles and bones into this scheme

Analogies, similies and metaphors are pretty awesome.