Yes, they are. And that's how long I have been dealing with the phrase, "Melissa rocks!" Yes, it's an exclamation, not a statement or question.

In 2004, I took a hot and cold stone massage class. Soon after, I was trying to come up with a clever way to include my name, massage and stones or rocks into a domain name. No combination really worked.

At the time, melissarocks.com was the site of a woman named Melissa who had been on one of the MTV reality shows (don't remember which one, atm). The .net version was open though so I got that and used "massage@melissarocks.net" as my email address, since that was the closest I could get to what I had wanted.

My bffs in Austin were my bffs because they loved me simply for who I was, a la Bridget Jones' Diary. They thought that my domain name was clever, and it stuck for good as my personal catch phrase when we went to the Armadillo Christmas Bazaar. There was a single attempt at the four of us trying to go together from booth to booth, and then we all went our separate ways.

When we were grouping back together to leave, someone was looking for me and another someone noticed where I was looking at mineral specimen (my polished mineral and gemstone collection is something I am unlikely to ever surrender, no matter how many times I move!), pointed at me and said, "Melissa! Rocks!"

I heard this and joined them in laughing at the declaration of how to find me which nicely mirrored the domain name that few beyond our group knew about. It was a pretty ridiculous private joke.

I'm not that vain in real life. I mean, I will tell you that I am rockstar when it comes to massage and energywork. And my friends all agree that I am pretty awesome. But usually, I'm pretty modest. Swear it. ;)