What can I say?

There were a dozen white roses on my desk when PJ arrived to walk me to dinner that night. After I turned to grab my ID and keys, I caught him covertly staring at them. I looked away when he met my eyes and those flowers became the silent elephant that followed us to dinner.

I felt hopeful that night when he and his two guy friends left and I stayed behind with the two girls in his group of his friends. I thought that this was the sign that I was becoming accepted as their friend, and not just that girl their friend liked. But the conversation paused and their eyes met. They way they held each other's stare froze my blood.

Y was direct. "I hear you got some flowers today."

I could've lied. D knew that PJ was a young man trying to impress me in way that was more than friendly and, honoring our agreement we could see other people, he sent my flowers to my roommate's mailbox. This was clearly a sign he'd been out of college for a while--the package slip was the best part of receiving any gift.

But I didn't lie. "I did."

The silence from the other side of the table was deafening and my words tumbled over another to fill it. "You see, I'm dating this guy, and so he sent me those flowers, but it's okay because we agreed that we can see other people."

They looked at each other again and this time JA took the lead. "PJ really likes you. You need to tell him about your boyfriend, or we'll have to."

There wasn't anything more to say.

Terabithia

I can't remember the first time that I met T, but I know neither of us has forgotten the night we first forged the connection that still links us.

Bored after a few quarters, we left our first Homecoming game and wandered off into the warm night. Humidity always feels like a caress to me, sometimes holding me oppressively close, but that night it was friendly and comfortable as we walked. T led our exploration of our new campus, wanting to share a new discovery with me.

His discovery turned out to be a tree close to the far end of campus. While it was far taller than I am, its branches spread around it to the ground. T held a branch aside for me and I discovered that where I anticipated more branches lay, there was large open space--large enough for a class, more than enough for a young man and the young lady he was impressing.

We stood for hours under that tree just talking. At least once we leaned toward one another and as my heart pounded I wondered if our first kiss was imminent. I didn't know that our first kiss was still months away when I shivered from nerves in the tree-shadowed yellow sodium glow of the streetlight.

Somehow the image of T that I carried with me during college never managed to capture the romantic side he showed me that night. Despite his long memory for me, the CDs he's made me and the guitar solos that he once left on my voicemail, I always forgot that he is a true romantic at heart. I guess that explains why I was surprised when the most special gift he brought when he visited was a pressed leaf from that tree. How appropriate that he shared a momento of our beginning just as our romantic relationship was ending.

Snipped

When I was a senior in college, my roommates and I had this big party. In order to distinguish ourselves as hostesses we all wore candy necklaces. Before the party we made a pact that we were each going to have at least one guy snack on our edible jewelry that night. At the end of the night I was the only one who had lived up to our bargain and it was only T's goatee that had tickled my neck that night.

When T came to visit me during our last failed relationship attempt, he brought me more than 10 small gifts--including gifts that represented moments we'd spent together. One of the gifts he produced out of his suitcase was a candy necklace. Little did he know that I had two candy necklaces in my pantry waiting for his visit. For that one moment we were on the same page, but my inability to share my emotions left the pantry door closed and he never knew.

I opened the pantry door last night looking for sprinkles and instead came out with two old candy necklaces. I snipped the strings and used the candy to decorate today's cupcakes.

Fifty thousand words

Five reasons I should’ve had a camera phone over the weekend:

1. The airport security guard on the Segway.


2. The 50 family members meeting their newly adopted Guatemalan infant relative.


3. So that kid across the aisle and I could have both taken pictures of my friend walking down the aisle.


4. Dancing with the bride, groom and my former roommates to our favorite song from that year: Any Man of Mine by Shania Twain.


5. To capture my favorite moment of the whole weekend: being enveloped in a group hug by the bride and two of the amazing women she and I lived with.

Faith restored

It is hard to feel ambivalent about love and marriage when you see a friend of yours marry someone that she loves so much and you know that they have overcome hard times and made sacrifices to be together. May they always remember the happiness of this moment.

Prep

Have you ever read a book that made you wonder if the author got into your head, somehow exposing your wishes and worries? That's how I felt Sunday night as I stayed up way past my bedtime finishing Prep in only the third sitting.

Prep follows Lee, a girl from the midwest, through her high school years at a boarding school on the East Coast. While Lee is a scholarship student, most of her feelings of isolation originate from her fear that she can't fit in. Lee's journey through school reminded me a lot of my high school and college experiences--the great friends I made, sometimes lost and sometimes kept; the wonderful roommates I had; and the fear I often had that everyone was watching me.

I grimaced when Lee pushed away the object of her affections, settling for a private affair rather than the possibility of a relationship. I gasped when I saw heartbreak on her horizon and wanted to stop her when she pushed him away again. I know how rare second chances are. But don't think that this book is about romance--it is about growing up, knowing your place, and finding out you didn't know your place at all. We all see skewed reflections of ourselves in the funhouse mirrors of adolescence.

After I finished the book, I laid in bed exhausted but held my eyes wide open. The dim shadows of my bedroom were the only thing keeping me from closing my eyes and waking in Lee's life or even worse, waking up back in my teenage years. As I lay there, I knew that reading a book that touched me so personally should have taught me something. More powerfully I realized that the lessons Lee learned as the book ended whispered of epiphanies I've had in my life and lessons I still struggle to hold onto.

Admissions

When I visited Wash U as a high school senior, I met this guy. We were both waiting in the admissions office for a shuttle to the airport and we ended up chatting for over an hour. I thought he was flirting with me, and while he wasn’t “my type”, I was flattered and curious. I often wondered about him after I got home and broke the news to my parents that my college education was going to be very expensive.

Sure enough, that fall he showed up in the engineering school too. When I was a freshman I was pretty involved in the Engineering Student Council, and he quickly found his way there as well. As I saw him in action, I determined he was cocky—coming off as a bit of jerk—and the memories of our interlude in the admissions office were easily shoved to the back of my brain.

Surfing through my friends and their friends today on Friendster, I came across his name and picture. I was surprised to see his name and face on my computer screen, but my jaw literally dropped when I saw his current location: Denver. Nearly nine years later and we’re living practically next door to one another. Even though I’m curious about what brought him to my area, I didn’t message him. Nothing in our shared history drives me to reconnect with him—except that afternoon in the admissions office.

Fall

Last night I left the office and shivered from the fall chill I felt through my fleece jacket. When I felt that fall chill in the air, as is my habit, I tipped my face toward the sky and smiled. I love fall.

There are two kinds of fall days in Colorado: days that make you long to stay in and days that make you long to go out. Yesterday was a day that would have been better spent curled under a blanket on the couch at home. A cozy grey sky always reminds me of a blanket and makes me yearn to shut off my alarm clock and burrow deeper into my bed. Every sound is muted, even the rustle of dry, yellowing leaves as the wind caresses the trees. The office even seems quieter on a day like that.

Most fall days here make me nostalgic for my college freedom—I can barely stand to be cooped up in the office when the sunshine is so golden and clear. The mountains look close enough to touch and the breeze is just pure calming energy. Days like that give me boundless hope for the future. It is those days I want to spend outside—whether that is sitting under a tree reading or walking through downtown with a friend.

Today R emailed me from Florida and mentioned she was going to try and make it to the beach this weekend. Coastal residents might have the beach, but I have warm sunlight stroking my face and neck when I run errands in the middle of day under a sun so bright that everything seems touched with gold. I love fall in Colorado.

Perspective

I was a senior in high school and had never attended one of my school dances. I told friends that I wanted to go but only with a date--still never taking any personal initiative to fulfill my wish. One of my friends decided to play matchmaker, asking me that question familiar to school hallways across the nation, "Would you say yes if he asked you?" And so it came to pass that F asked me to Homecoming.

I came down the stairs that night into my parents' entry in a new dress, hair and makeup done. My mom swears she heard him whisper "Wow" at my appearance and then look around to see who said it. From there we went to his house for more pictures and to meet up with another couple. Dinner followed and then the dance--all in all a very typical high school dance experience complete with an awkward slow dance.

While we had a nice time, I never expected that it was anything more than two friends attending an event together. I clearly discovered that his perspective was different starting that following Monday. F met me at the end of my classes and literally tried to carry my books to my next class. I soon began racing out of my classes as soon as they were finished, rushing far enough that he wouldn't be able to catch me. I was a coward and never discussed my feelings with him. I never considered it a relationship and I never gave him a chance.

After our ill-fated pseudo-relationship, F and I slowly built a friendship out of the awkwardness and hurt feelings. Actually, more accurately, he made all the moves to become my friend and I warily accepted his gestures, never trusting that his motives were to be my friend and not a result of any feelings he still had for me.

Years later we were IMing one another from our respective college campuses, just a few hours apart. I was telling him some story about D, a man I started dating the spring after our aborted relationship. He reciprocated in kind, and his comment about his first love made me wonder if it was me.

What does that month of 1996 look like from his perspective?

Wishing dust

I finally watched 13 Going On 30 tonight for the first time. In this movie, Jen's newly 30 character has to redesign a teen magazine and in her presentation she recreates the high school dream that the media sells every teenage girl. Having undergone a Big-like transition, she doesn't remember her teenage years and to some extent I think that is why it seems so attractive. Even those of us who have primarily positive memories of that time also remember the turmoil and uncertainty of trying to find our way as our world changed around us--or maybe as we changed in a static world.

When I was a senior in high school I wrote an essay for a college application which illustrated the concept of parallelism. In the first paragraph I described those expectations that John Hughes had led me to desire: a cute boyfriend on a sports team, a car in the driveway with a bow on my 16th birthday and easy achievement of my dreams. Then I contrasted those expections with the realities of high school life including Saturday nights studying at home and the lack of transportation. But I ended the essay with my characteristic optimism, describing my expectations for college--all the things I thought I would have in high school but didn't.

As I approach a personal landmark birthday this week, I find I'm in a similar place. I look at my life around me and think that sometime soon, maybe once my age ticks forward, I'll start to live the twenty-something life I thought I would, the life that Jen wished for in the movie tonight: flirty and thriving.

History is a teacher

I briefly dated my friend F when I was a senior in high school and he was a junior. My best friend had started college and I was still finding my place in school without her. Lunches while I dated F included his group of friends and even though our relationship ended fairly quickly, his friends didn't ostracize me. While I didn't have their shared history and sometimes felt like I was in a different world as a senior facing college applications and graduation, I appreciated being included when celebrating the holidays and eating otherwise lonely lunches.

My attraction for PJ was instantaneous and I plotted to catch up with him at the movies the night I met him. After my first dinner with his friends, I was automatically included in their group. Despite not being his girlfriend for another year and a half, and even after our breakup six months later, I lived with friends that were originally his and was there to celebrate when two of them got married.

Today at the end of the day my newest teammate at the office came over and chatted with me. Thus far she has kept pretty much to herself, save chatting and playing Ultimate Frisbee with her friend from college--the guy I went out with last weekend.

Looking back at my past, I see one possible future playing the role as the older and wiser girlfriend like I was with F's friends. If I'm lucky, perhaps I could end up with lifetime friends like those I gained from my attraction to PJ.

John the fish

When I was a sophomore in college, my five roommates and I were living in a dorm that had once been a men's dorm. How could you tell? The urinal in our bathroom.

We decided to make our urinal a decorative and practical feature of our suite. A plant was our initial idea, but we took this opportunity to instead introduce a suite pet. His species: Beta fish. His name: (wait for it...) John. I also suggested Harry or Dick... Thanks folks, I'll be here all week!

It was soon discovered that the water level in the urinal dipped when the toilet was flushed. My roommate E became certain that we were traumatizing John by making him live in that environment. This led to an argument--I insisted that the fish did not have enough brain cells to be traumatized, but she insisted that he could, arguing, "You're not God and you're not the fish!" To make her happy, we soon moved John to a bowl in our living room.

One day about a week after John moved to his new home, E was awakened by the cleaning lady. She was very agitated--she had flushed the urinal as she was prone to do occasionally to circulate the water and then noticed the sign:

Please do not flush the urinal--the fishy wouldn't like it.