Tag: awkward

November 1, 1998. Having an off night at swing dancing. (#197)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 9 Comments

I got in my car, which was parked next to my house, and drove off.  The radio came on, with a commercial attacking state attorney general David E. Larkin.  Larkin was running for governor, and the election was two days away.  I changed the channel; I was tired of political advertisements this time of year, and I was planning on voting for Larkin so I did not want to hear what his opponent had to say about him.  Many of the things he was being attacked for were the exact reasons I was voting for him. My candidate of choice, who could not run again because of term limits, won four years ago, but Larkin was expected to lose this election.

I parked outside of the University Bar & Grill and walked inside, by myself.  My roommate Jed sometimes rode with me, but he had told me this morning that he would not be home when I left, and he would get there later.  I looked around the room and saw some vaguely familiar faces, people I had seen here before, but no one I actually knew well enough to talk to. Matthew was about to begin teaching the beginner lesson, as he always did.  I walked out to the floor with the others, where Matthew was directing us to assemble into two concentric circles, those dancing the lead part on the inside and those following on the outside.  Traditionally men led and women followed, although I had seen a few people switch gender roles occasionally.  I stood on the inside, and a girl I had never seen at the U-Bar stood across from me.  This girl was very attractive, slim with reddish-brown hair pulled back into a pony tail, and blue eyes.   She wore a light blue dress.  “Hi,” I said.

“Hi!” the girl replied, smiling.  “I’m Brooke.”

“I’m Greg.  Nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” Brooke replied.  “I’ve never been here before. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“That’s okay,” I replied.  “That’s why you’re taking the lesson before the dance starts, right?”

“Exactly!  So how long have you been dancing?”

“About four months.  I’m not that good.”

“I’m sure you’re better than me.”

“Give yourself more credit,” I said.  “Just have fun with it.”

“That’s a good way to look at it.”

We stopped talking as Matthew demonstrated the basic step.  I knew the basic step pretty well, but if Brooke was here for the first time, I wanted to make sure she saw what he was doing.  I practiced the basic step with Brooke a few times.  “I think you got it,” I said.

“Was that good?”

“Yes.  Looked good to me.”

“Thank you!”

Matthew called for us to switch partners.  “It was nice meeting you,” I said to Brooke.

“You too!” she replied as she moved on to the next partner.

Matthew had us practice the basic step again with our new partners; my next partner had not yet figured out the basic step the way Brooke had.  Next, he taught the outside and inside turns, as he always did, as we tried each one with a few new partners.  The second half of the lesson changed from week to week, and this week he was teaching the basic step of a different dance, the Charleston.  The last thing we learned was how to switch between East Coast Swing and the Charleston, something I had never learned before but wanted to, since I did not know enough Charleston to dance it for an entire song.  At this point, the circle of partners had gone completely around, and I got Brooke as my partner again.

“Hello again,” I said.

“Hi!” she replied.

“How are you doing so far?”

“I think I get it!  I just need to practice.”

Brooke and I worked through the basic step of the Charleston, and then transitioned into the basic step of East Coast Swing, just as Matthew had shown us.  “You’re doing really well,” I said.

“You think so?”

“Yes.”

“Thanks!  So do you go to UJ?”

“Yes.  I graduated last year, and now I’m in the student teaching program.”

“You’re gonna be a teacher!  That’s exciting!  What grade level?”

“High school math.”

“Nice!  I always liked my math teachers, but it wasn’t my best subject.”

“I get that a lot.”

“I’m a freshman, majoring in psych for now but I might change that.”

“Do you know what you want to do?”

“I’m not sure yet,” she said.

We tried the steps again, then Matthew called for us to switch partners. I asked Brooke, “Save me a dance later?”

“Yeah!” she replied.

After practicing Charleston, and switching from East Coast Swing to Charleston and back, with two more partners, the beginner lesson ended.  Brooke walked off the dance floor with her friends, and I would have done the same except that none of my usual group of friends was there tonight.

I stood to the side of the dance floor watching people dance the first song.  When the second song started, I looked around for someone to dance with.  Brooke was dancing with a guy from her group of friends that she came with, and I did not know any of the other girls there that night.  A girl I did not know stood next to me, not dancing, so I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“No, thank you,” she said, with no other explanation or excuse offered.

I slowly walked around the room, in the general direction of the bar, but I did not attempt to ask anyone else to dance.  None of the people I felt safe asking to dance were here.  No Courtney, Cambria, or Erica.  No Bethany Bradshaw. No Michelle Parker; she was only sixteen, but I knew her family from church, and her older brother Brody was one of mine and Jed’s other roommates, so I was comfortable dancing with her, and she understood that I was not a creepy older man.  I would have even danced with Sasha if she were here, despite the awkward situation I created a few weeks ago when I confessed my unrequited feelings for her.  After having just been rejected asking someone I did not know, I was not sure that I felt comfortable asking another stranger.  I looked back to the bar and saw the bartender say, “Here you go,” pushing a reddish-brown drink with ice and a straw forward to a spot where no one was sitting.  No one claimed this drink.  After several seconds, the bartender was still looking at me.  I asked, “Is that drink mine?”

“Yeah,” she replied.  “I saw you coming over here, I remember you always order a Roy Rogers, so I just figured I’d get it for you.”

“Thank you,” I said, smiling.  I took a sip of my drink, feeling pretty important that the bartender knew my usual drink.

I continued walking around the room, walking past a girl who was sitting alone, not dancing.  “Would you like to dance?” I asked as I walked up to her.

“No,” she replied, shaking her head in the negative.  Just a few seconds ago, I felt important, but apparently I was not that important after all.

I looked back toward the entrance and saw Candace Walker arriving.  I knew her from when I used to be in University Chorus, and I had seen her here relatively regularly since school started back up again.  “Hey,” I said to Candace.

“Hey, Greg,” she answered.  “What’s up?”

“Not much.”  I heard a new song start to play, so I asked her, “Would you like to dance?”

“Sure!” she said.  “Just give me a minute to put my stuff down.”

When Candace returned, I led her to the dance floor and started doing the basic step and turns.  “Is Jed coming tonight?” she asked me.  I had introduced Candace to Jed in September, the first night of dancing after he moved back up here for the school year, and the two of them seemed to hit it off well.  They had talked and danced together for most of the rest of that night, as well as most of the other times I had seen both of them at the U-Bar on the same night.

“Yeah,” I replied.  “He said he’d be here later.”

By the time we finished our dance, as I walked over to where I left my drink, I could see Jed walking in the door.  “There he is,” I said.  The two of us walked to Jed, saying hello.

“Hey,” Jed said to both of us, then turned to Candace and asked, “Are you sure you’re supposed to be here?  You have a midterm tomorrow you should be studying for.”

“I know,” she said.  “I’ve been studying all day, and I think I’m as ready as I’ll ever be.  I needed a break.”

“Well, you came to the right place for a break!  You want to dance?”

“Sure.”  Candace walked onto the dance floor with Jed, leaving me alone.

I looked around.  Brooke, the girl I met during the beginner lesson, was standing not far from me, talking to one of her friends that she came with.  I remembered that Brooke promised me a dance, so I walked up to her and asked, “Would you like to dance?”

“Not right now,” she said.

Undeterred, I turned next to her friend and asked the same thing.  “No, thank you,” her friend said.

I sat at a table facing the dance floor, the same table where Candace and Jed had placed their things, and watched everyone dance, slowly sipping my Roy Rogers.  About three songs later, I got up to use the bathroom and get another drink, and when I returned, Jed and Candace had sat back down, deep in conversation.  I did not feel right interrupting and asking Candace for another dance.

No one else that I knew was there, and no one else that I knew showed up later that night except for Ben Lawton.  I had nothing against Ben, but I was not looking for guys to dance with.  After about an hour and a half, at the halfway point of the night, Matthew gathered everyone into a circle for the birthday dance.  I was bored and frustrated, since I had only danced two times so far that night, once with Candace and once with a stranger who was actually kind enough to say yes.

For the birthday dance, everyone with a birthday that week would stand in the middle of the circle, and people would jump in and dance with one of the birthday people until someone else cut in.  Usually each person’s turn lasted for about thirty seconds.  Today there were two guys and one girl in the circle.  I stepped in about a minute after the song started, slowly walking toward the birthday girl.  I took her and started doing the basic step, then turned her to the outside.  “Happy birthday!” I said.

“Thanks,” she replied, smiling.

I was about to try what I learned in the beginner lesson today, switching into the Charleston basic step, when another guy came up and stole her from me.  I walked back to the circle on the outside, feeling defeated.  I hardly got to dance with her at all.  That other guy cut in way too early.  I sat down for a while.  Maybe I would have more luck the second half of the night.

As the regular dancing started again, I sat on the sidelines slowly sipping on my third Roy Rogers of the night, wondering if drinking something alcoholic would make me feel better but not ready yet to give up my personal opposition to drinking alcohol. Ben Lawton saw me and came over to say hi.

“Hey, Ben,” I replied.

“How are you?”

“I’m not having a good night, honestly.  No one is dancing with me.”

“Just go up and ask.”

“I have been.  I’ve mostly gotten turned down.”

“That happens sometimes,” Ben said.  “Don’t let it get to you.”  But it was in fact getting to me.  Not only was I feeling like some kind of loser, but I was bored, just sitting there watching people dance.  I took a sip of my Roy Rogers, and Ben asked, “What are you drinking?”

“Roy Rogers,” I said.

“Do you not drink alcohol?” he asked.  “You’re old enough, aren’t you?  I always thought you were in my year.”

“I turned twenty-two in August,” I explained.  “I just don’t want to drink.  I don’t like the idea of being out of control of myself.  It doesn’t seem Christ-like to me.  And I didn’t grow up around drinking.  My dad drank a lot when he was younger, but he’s been sober since I was in elementary school.”

“Makes sense.”

Ben and I continued making small talk about my student teaching and his classes; he was my year in school, but he had not graduated yet.  When the next song began, he said, “I’m gonna go dance.  It was good talking to you.  I hope you enjoy the rest of the night.  Go ask someone to dance.”

“I’ll try.”

I got up and noticed Brooke standing by herself.  She promised that she would save a dance for me.  Maybe she was ready for that now.  I walked up to her and asked, “May I have that dance you promised now?”

“No,” she replied, sounding a bit uncomfortable and irritated.  She walked away from me.

I sat back down, confused.  She seemed so friendly when we were paired in the beginner lesson.  What changed?  It almost felt like she had suddenly found out something about me that made her want to avoid me.  But, if so, what did she find out?  And who told her?  The only people I knew here were Jed, Candace, and Ben, and none of them would have any reason to make Brooke not want to have anything to do with me.

I sat there bored and not dancing for another half hour after I talked to Ben.  By now, it was 10:15, and I had pretty much given up trying to find someone to dance with.  I was ready to go home.  Jed had driven separately, so I did not have to stay until closing and give him a ride home.  I was not having fun, and I was under no obligation to stay.  I walked around to make sure I said good night to the few people there whom I knew.  Jed and Candace were sitting at a table, talking; I told both of them that I was feeling unusually tired, and wanted to call it a night early, I said the same thing to Ben a few minutes later.

As I walked toward the door, I saw Brooke and her friends standing at the side of the dance floor.  Brooke made eye contact with me, and I stopped for a second, holding on to a shred of hope that she was about to realize that she had not yet fulfilled her promise to save me a dance.  Then I looked away and continued walking.  It was not worth getting turned down again.  I started to walk away.

Just as I turned away from Brooke and her friends, I heard a voice behind me shout, “Yeah!  Turn around and go home!  You’re weird!”  I turned back to look at them, and they were all giggling.  I started walking away from them again.

As I passed the bar, the bartender who had made my Roy Rogers asked me, “Another one?”

“No thanks,” I said.  “I’m gonna call it a night early.”

“Sleep well!  I’ll see you next week!”

I nodded, then walked to the car and sat there for about five minutes, thinking, before I turned the car on.  I do not know if it was Brooke or one of her friends who called me weird.  I do not even know for sure that their comment was directed at me, but it certainly appeared to be. None of this made sense to me. Brooke was inexplicably two-faced, acting friendly and nice and then suddenly turning on me.

One person was nice to me that night: the bartender who made my drink.  I genuinely appreciated her gesture.  The fact that she knew my regular drink without me even having to say it really made me feel like I belonged there, like Sunday swing dancing at the U-Bar was a part of my life and I had a place among the people there.

But nothing else tonight gave me that feeling.  My usual friends that I danced with were not there, and they had been showing up less and less often since school started.  And now I was finding it impossible to dance with new people. I realized on the way home that night that I was no longer having fun swing dancing.  New episodes of The X-Files were scheduled to begin the following week, at the same time as swing dancing, and when I found out that Eddie Baker and John Harvey and their roommates at the De Anza house were going to start their X-Files watch parties again, I chose that over swing dancing.  The nice bartender had said that she would see me next week, but she did not see me the following week.  In fact, I never saw her again.

This was not, however, my last time swing dancing ever, nor was it even my last time swing dancing at the U-Bar.  I went back under somewhat different circumstances several months later, but I eventually quit again.  That is a story for another time.

I came back to the world of swing dancing in 2007.  I was in my early thirties, living about thirty miles from Jeromeville across the Drawbridge in Laguna Ciervo, and I followed some friends from the church I went to at the time to a weekly swing dance in midtown Capital City called, appropriately enough, Midtown Swing.  As I went through the beginner lesson and started dancing with my friends, all the muscle memories from eight and nine years earlier came flooding back to me.  I even saw Ben Lawton there; he was still around and still swing dancing after all those years.

I was also caught off guard that night in 2007, because Lacey Kilpatrick was there.  That was only the second time I had seen her since moving away from Jeromeville, and things still felt a little awkward, plus it was completely unexpected because I never knew her as a swing dancer.  And that encounter was even more strange in hindsight, since I became a regular at Midtown Swing for about a decade after that, and I never saw Lacey there again.  Wait… I haven’t mentioned Lacey in this story yet.  Hold that thought.  That is also a story for another time.

Readers: Have you ever quit a regular hobby? What made you quit? Tell me about it in the comments.

I wrote on the other blog some behind-the-scenes information about this episode: click here.

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March 30, 1998.  My last first day of class as an undergraduate. (#167)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I opened the door of 105 Wellington and sat down.  After four years here at the University of Jeromeville, so much was familiar about everything I was doing this morning.  I rode my bike to campus on the usual route.  Wellington Hall had two floors above ground and a basement, full of nothing but classrooms of all sizes, and I had had many classes in Wellington before.  I was pretty sure I had even had a class in room 105 at some point, although I did not remember for sure which one.  Most of the people taking this class were juniors and seniors majoring in mathematics, with a few computer scientists and engineers in the class too.  I recognized many familiar faces from other math classes.  Jack Chalmers.  Katy Hadley.  Silas Penfield, whom I also knew from church and Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  A guy named Alan, who bore a striking resemblance to the actor and comedian Norm MacDonald.

“Greg!” Jack whispered loudly, waving.  He motioned to an empty seat next to him.  I waved and nodded, walking toward the empty seat and waving to Silas on the way.  Katy was not looking at me.

What was unfamiliar was the subject itself.  The class was called Linear Programming, Mathematics 168.  I needed one more upper-division math class to finish my Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics, and the only prerequisites for this one were lower-division calculus and linear algebra, both of which I enjoyed and found relatively easy.  But I knew very little about what linear programming actually meant.  The word “programming” made me think of computers and writing code, but the description in the course catalog did not seem to mention computers.  It said something about solving optimization problems, which I assumed meant determining the best way to do something.

The professor, Dr. Wu, was also unfamiliar to me.  I had not taken a class from him before.  He began the class by giving an example of the kinds of problems we would be studying.  “Suppose you’re planning meals with two different foods,” he said.  “Each serving of food A contains 2 grams of fat, 1 gram of carbohydrates, and 5 grams of protein, and each serving of food B contains 3 grams of fat, 4 grams of carbohydrates, and 4 grams of protein.”  Dr. Wu paused to write these measurements on the board.  “And let’s say you know that the meal has to have at least 15 grams of fat, 20 grams of carbs, and 30 grams of protein.  And you know that each serving of food A costs, say, 35 cents, and each serving of food B costs 50 cents.”  After writing the rest of the problem on the board, he continued, “How many servings of each food should you buy to minimize the cost, but still have the required amount of protein, fat, and carbohydrates?  That is a basic example of a linear programming problem.  We have something we need to maximize or minimize, but it is subject to constraints.”  I nodded, writing an abbreviated version of all of this in my notebook.  Linear programming seemed fairly straightforward as a concept, something I could visualize in the real world and express symbolically using the language of mathematics that I already knew.

The rest of that first day of class was even more straightforward.  Dr. Wu quickly reviewed some key topics of linear algebra that would be important this quarter.  I remembered all of them well, but I still took notes anyway, because of my tendency to be overly cautious when it came to studying.

After that class, I had a two hour gap before my next class.  I walked across the street to the Memorial Union and read today’s Daily Colt, completing the crossword puzzle successfully. I tore out the completed crossword puzzle to hang on my wall at home with all the other crosswords I had completed this year.  With nothing else to do for two hours after finishing the crossword puzzle, I got an early start on math homework, reading the beginning of the book and working on the first homework assignment.  I found the same example about nutrition that the professor used; he took it directly from the textbook.

When it came time for my next class, I walked south across the Quad toward Orton Hall, the other major classroom building here on the older side of campus.  As I headed across the Quad, I saw a slim, bespectacled girl with straight brown hair walking toward me.  I noticed that this girl kind of looked like Sasha Travis from church, which made me realize sadly that I would not get to say hi to her every day this quarter.  Last quarter, I did an internship every morning helping out in a math class at Jeromeville High School, where Sasha was a student, finishing her last year.  I would always see Sasha in the hallway, or at her locker, as I headed to where my bike was parked after my class was done.  Even though Sasha was still in high school, I felt like she and I had gotten to be friends, through those conversations in the hallway, and the fact that she was Erica Foster’s best friend.  Erica, a freshman at UJ, was part of my social circle already, since we were both youth group leaders at church.

As I approached this girl who looked like Sasha, I kept looking at her, realizing more and more that it was not just a resemblance; I was pretty sure this actually was Sasha.  But what was she doing on the UJ campus during the school day?  She smiled at me and waved.  Yes, definitely Sasha.

“Sasha?” I asked.

“Hi, Greg!” Sasha replied.  “How are you?”

“What are you doing here?”

“Jeromeville High has a program for high-achieving seniors to take classes at UJ during the day,” Sasha explained.  “I just got out of English 10.”

“That’s cool!” I said.  “I’m pretty good.  Three classes today.  I’m on my way to Christian Theology, with Hurt.”

“I’ve heard such good things about Dr. Hurt!  Erica took one of his classes last quarter.  I didn’t see you this morning.  Are you still TAing with Mr. Gibson?”

“No.  That was just for a quarter.”

“I have to get back to the high school,” Sasha said.  “I’ll see you later.”

“Yeah.  Have a good one!”  As I continued walking to my class, I felt a little jealous that Sasha grew up in a university town where high-achieving students had opportunities like that.  Taking university classes as a high school senior was even better than taking AP classes for college credit.  Growing up in working-class Plumdale, I was discouraged from taking too many AP classes, and the nearest university was in Mount Lorenzo, forty miles away.

I continued walking toward Orton Hall.  Dr. Hurt’s class was in one of the larger classrooms of Orton Hall, with about sixty seats, and the class was about two-thirds full by the time I got there.  I expected a lot of my friends from church and from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship to be in this class, and while a few of them were, it was not as many as I had expected.  I sat down against the wall, on the opposite side of the room from the outdoors-facing windows, and looked around as Dr. Hurt prepared to begin his lecture.  My eyes moved toward a corner of the room I had not seen as I was walking in, where I saw Carrie Valentine sitting with a notebook on her desk.  She looked up and made eye contact and waved at me.  I did my best to smile, nervously, and waved back.  Dr. Hurt began speaking just at that moment, saving me from having to decide whether or not to go talk to Carrie.

Last year, Carrie was always friendly to me, but things seemed a little tense the last few months ever since she turned me down for a date.  She had said that everything was okay, that I had done nothing wrong, but I was not sure if she really was treating me differently, or if it was mostly in my head and I was avoiding her.  I felt relieved that Dr. Hurt had started class before I could talk to her, which I guess meant that I ultimately did not want to talk to Carrie right now.  I wondered if things would ever feel normal with us.

Dr. Hurt explained an overview of the class.  We would be studying the development of Christian theology from the period of the early Church through modern times.  Our study would include different schools of thought for subjects in which different branches of Christianity had slightly different beliefs, as well as some rejected schools of thoughts that had been deemed to be heresy over the years.  We would learn about the natures of God, Jesus Christ, and the Trinity; salvation, sin, and grace; and the role of the Church, among other topics.

I was still fairly new to practicing my Christian faith, and while this class did not satisfy any specific requirements other than giving me enough units to be classified as a full-time student, it was definitely something I wanted to learn.  Jeromeville was a secular public university, but our Religious Studies faculty included Dr. Hurt, a renowned New Testament scholar.  It was nice that I could still learn about Christianity in this context, even though secular public education did not include things like prayer and worship time.

When class ended, I looked up; Carrie was talking to someone I did not know, absorbed in conversation.  I got up and left before she saw me, avoiding the question of what to say to her and whether or not things would be awkward.  My next and final class on that Monday was in an hour, back in Wellington, on the other side of the Quad from Orton.  I began walking back toward the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit, but decided to just sit on the grass of the Quad instead.

The Quad was a square lawn about five hundred feet on each side.  The University of Jeromeville was founded in 1905 as an agricultural campus, with crops growing on the area that later became the Quad.  After becoming surrounded by buildings over the first three decades of the campus’ growth, the Quad was converted to a permanent lawn.  It was ringed by tall, mature European cork oaks, with other trees scattered across it at irregular intervals.  To the east were the oldest surviving buildings on campus, Old North and Old South Halls.  The Quad also bordered the Memorial Union building on the north, Wellington Hall and one other building on the west, and the library on the south, with Orton Hall on the southeast corner.

The weather was pleasant, on the warmer side but not uncomfortably hot, mostly sunny with blue skies dotted with a few clouds.  People sat on the Quad, reading, talking, napping, and eating.  I sat cross-legged and took the lunch I had packed out of my backpack, and I ate as I watched people walk past.

About ten minutes before class was scheduled to start, I walked across the street to the west to Wellington Hall, then took the stairs down to the basement.  The class was in room 6, which was a small lecture hall with around a hundred fixed seats, sloping toward the front of the room as in a theater, with an aisle down the middle.  Physical Education 43, Healthful Living, was not a class that would have been on my radar to take.  My lifestyle would not exactly be considered healthful, but the class was required for the teacher training program that I would be in next year.  And it was only two units, meeting for one hour twice a week, so it would not be as much work as most classes.

I sat in a row that was still mostly empty, one seat in from the aisle.  As the room gradually filled over the next few minutes, I looked around to see if anyone I recognized was in the class.  I saw two or three faces that I recognized from various places, but no one I knew in particular.  Then my eyes reached the door in the back of the room.

You have got to be kidding me, I thought.

Carrie Valentine walked through the door.  She saw me and immediately made eye contact, smiling and waving, noticing the empty seat next to me.  I waved back.

“Hey, Greg!” Carrie said, sitting in the seat next to me.  “Looks like we have two classes together!”

“I know,” I replied.  “What did you think of Hurt’s class so far?”

“Looks like it’ll be interesting.  There’s a lot of that kind of stuff I don’t really know.”

“Yeah.  Same.  I grew up Catholic, and going to Jeromeville Covenant now, I’m always interested to know about differences between Catholics and other Christians.”

“How was your spring break?”

“It was good.  I went to see my family for most of it.  We had an 80th birthday party for my grandpa.”

“Oh, how nice!  Are you and your grandpa close?”

“Yeah.  This is Mom’s dad, and they always lived just a mile away growing up, so we saw them all the time.  I got to see some relatives I don’t see often.  Some came all the way from Oregon.  A lot of Grandpa’s friends were there too.  What did you do over break?”

“Really nothing.  Just relaxed at home.  Hung out with my parents and my sister, and saw one of my friends from high school.”

“That’s nice.”

The professor, Dr. Payton, began speaking, introducing herself first, and telling us to make sure that we were all in the right class, PE 43, Healthful Living.  “The class is always around this size every quarter,” Dr. Payton explained, “so I am not going to get to know every one of you personally.  But if you ever see me around campus, feel free to wave at me and just say, ‘Forty-three!’  That way, I will know that you were a student of mine in this class.  I’ve been doing this class for twenty years, and you wouldn’t believe some of the places I’ve run into people who recognized me.  I’ve had strangers on airplanes come up to me and say, ‘Forty-three.’  My husband and I went to an opera in Bay City, and one of the ushers at the theater remembered me.  The strangest one of all was when we were on vacation in France, and we toured a historic monastery.  Some actual monks walked past the tour group, and one of the monks leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Quarante-trois.’”  A few in the room chuckled.

As Dr. Payton continued outlining the class, it became apparent that I was not sure what I was expecting from this class, but what she was describing was not exactly it.  I expected somewhat of a rehash of what I had learned in high school health class: nutrition, exercise, hygiene, and of course sexuality.  But in addition to that, this class would cover other topics, including stress management, relationships, and alternative medicine.  “Please be respectful if there is anything you don’t agree with in this class,” Dr. Payton said.  “One year, I was reading the teacher evaluations at the end of the year, and in regards to the homeopathic medicine presentation, someone wrote, ‘I don’t believe in voodoo.’  Homeopathic medicine is not voodoo.  It is a type of medicine with theories and methods practiced by people around the world.”

Since UJ was a secular public university, and I was a Christian, I expected that I would probably have disagreements with some of the material in the chapters on relationships and sexuality.  But Dr. Payton’s request to be respectful certainly seemed reasonable.  And while I generally associated homeopathic medicine with New Age hippie nonsense, I would even approach that with an open mind when we got to that chapter, since I knew little about it.

I stood and stretched when class was over.  “Do you have any more classes today?” Carrie asked me.

“No.  I’m done.  I’m headed home now.”

“Nice!  I have a discussion now on Mondays, but I’m done after this class on Wednesdays.”

“Enjoy your class,” I said.  “I’ll see you around.”

“Yeah!  Have a great afternoon!”

I walked back to my bike, unlocked it, and rode north to the end of West Quad Avenue, where I turned left onto a road heading generally northwest.  I passed more classroom and lab buildings, then rode through the North Residential Area to the intersection of Fifth Street and Andrews Road.  I continued north on Andrews Road for almost a mile, then turned left and zigzagged through the neighborhood to my house at 902 Acacia Drive.  The house was quiet; I was the first one home today.  I connected to the dialup Internet and got on Internet Relay Chat.  A nineteen-year-old girl from Texas named Melody, whom I had met in this same chat channel a few days earlier, was on; I messaged with her for about half an hour, telling her all about my day, about my new classes and the uncomfortable situation of having two classes with a girl who said no to going out with me a couple months ago.  Melody told me about a party she and her friends went to over the weekend.  I heard someone else get home and told Melody that I needed to go, but I would email her later.  I did not want to tie up the telephone line during the day with other people in the house. 

I had finished my last first day of class as an undergraduate.  So far, this quarter did not seem too difficult.  I had one more class that did not meet today, Fiction Writing, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 10:30.  That class sounded like fun, and hopefully it would not be too tough, especially since I liked writing fiction to begin with.  This would be a good way to finish off my bachelor’s degree.

About a month later, we reached the lesson in health class about homeopathy, and we had a guest speaker that week.  About five minutes into that lecture, I completely understood why the anonymous former student had called homeopathy voodoo.  Nothing about the presentation made any sense from a scientific perspective.  I questioned why this belonged in a serious class at a prestigious university, but Jeromeville was enough of a hippie town and school that I was not entirely surprised either.

Although none of these classes had assigned seats, it was human nature for most people to sit in or near the same seat each time class met.  Because of this, Carrie and I typically sat on opposite sides of the room in Dr. Hurt’s class, but we almost always sat next to each other in health class.  By the second week of the quarter, I genuinely felt that whatever awkwardness might be lingering between Carrie and me was gone.  We did not talk about my failed attempt to ask her out; I just did my best to put that in the past and move on, and Carrie never did anything to make me feel bad about what happened.  That incident did come up in conversation once, three years later, in a respectful and productive way that gave me a lot of closure regarding why she said no.  That mutual respect is part of the reason why Carrie is the only one of my many unrequited crushes from my Jeromeville years with whom I am on speaking terms today.

Readers: Have you ever had an experience where you were in close proximity to someone with whom you had issues in the past? How did that go? Tell me about it in the comments.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

Late October-early November, 1997. I made a movie. (#150)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 15 Comments

These days, in the era of YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok, it is difficult to believe how recently it was that common people did not constantly make their own videos.  In the 1990s, doing so required a camera that cost hundreds of dollars, and was the size and weight of a medium-sized textbook, at minimum.  Also, it was necessary to record these videos onto a tape, and to make sure that there was enough room on the blank tape to record the video without erasing any existing footage.  Showing someone a homemade video required a television connected to a VCR or to the camera itself.  The Internet existed, but the processing and connection speeds of computers in that era limited most Internet uses to text and standard-definition photos and graphics.

I never had a video camera growing up.  I wanted one so badly.  I had many ideas for movies and shows I wanted to make.  My brother Mark and I, along with whatever neighborhood kids were around, would sometimes act out performances that would have made good home movies.  We had a weird variety show called The Mark Show, full of characters based on various inside jokes, and a game show called Messy Room, inspired by Double Dare and Fun House and the other kids’ game shows that briefly became popular in my preteen years.  For some of our shows, we would record the audio so we could at least listen to them later, but they were the kind of performances that would have worked much better with video.

Now, in my early 20s, my creative project was a website called Dog Crap and Vince, which I began shortly after I taught myself the basics of HTML, the code used to make websites.  Dog Crap and Vince was a series of crudely illustrated stories about the adventures of two quirky high school students, and it would have worked much better as video or animation.  I still did not have a video camera, nor did I have the money to buy one.  But I had more connections now than as a child, so when I showed Dog Crap and Vince to the boys from the youth group at church, and mentioned that it would work better as a TV show or a movie, Zac Santoro offered to ask his dad if I could borrow their video camera.  And thus one of my most involved creative endeavors of my life so far was born.

That night, we had talked about beginning the project Sunday after church, so when I walked up to Zac, Ted Hunter, and Danny Foster after church and asked if they were ready to start filming, I felt inwardly frustrated when Zac replied, “Huh?”

“The Dog Crap and Vince movie.  You said you talked to your dad about borrowing your video camera, and that we could start filming today.”

“Oh, yeah!  He said you could borrow it.”

“So, like, now?  Are we going to your house?”

“Sure.”

“I can’t,” Ted said.  “My mom said I have to come straight home.”

“We talked about this on Wednesday,” I reminded Ted.  “You said you’d be free on Sunday, and that you would play Vince.”

“I forgot.”

“Well, I can still get the camera, and maybe we can film some scenes that don’t have Vince in them.”

“Film some scenes?” a voice behind me asked.  I turned around to see Jim Herman.  I knew Jim from seeing him around church; he was older than me, I would guess in his mid-thirties, presumably single because I never saw him with any sort of family.  Everyone at church seemed to know Jim.  “What are you guys doing?” Jim asked.

“We’re making a movie,” I explained.  “I’m borrowing a camera from the Santoros.”

“You think I could go along and help out?”  Jim’s question caught me off guard, and when he saw me hesitate, he added, “That way you can all be on camera at the same time, and I can be the cameraman.”

“Sure,” I said.  “That would be helpful for scenes I’m going to be in.”


By the time we got to the Santoros’ house, we had already made a change to the script.  The boys had decided to film a scene that broke the fourth wall, in which I would knock on Zac’s door asking if Zac could come make a movie with us.  Although I had carefully worked on this script for several days, this change seemed like it would fit the quirky, offbeat nature of the Dog Crap and Vince world.

Zac, Danny, Jim, and I walked up to the front door of Zac’s house.  I knocked on the door, and Zac’s dad answered a minute later  “Hi, boys.  Hi, Greg,” he said, shaking my hand.  “Jim.”  Had I been more observant of body language and subtle cues, I might have noticed a shift in Mr. Santoro’s tone when he addressed Jim, but at the time I thought nothing of it. “Here’s the camera,” Mr. Santoro continued, handing me the camera.  “Please be careful with it.”

“I will,” I said.  “They wanted to film a scene here first.  Is that okay?”

“Sure!”

I handed Jim the camera as we filmed the new scene.  Zac’s six-year-old sister answered the door, and I asked if Zac was home.  Zac appeared a few seconds later, and I said, “Hey, Zac.  Let’s make a movie.”

“Okay!” Zac announced excitedly, acting overly dramatic in a way that I had not intended.

“Go get Danny,” I said.

Zac turned his head toward the inside of the house and called out, “Danny!  Let’s go make a movie!”  Danny ran out of the house a few seconds later, Zac following, me following both of them, and Jim following us with the camera.  “We’ll pick up Ted on the way!” I shouted, since Ted was not there.  The two boys, for reasons unknown other than the fact that they were teenage boys, jumped onto the hood of my parked car.

“Cut,” I said to Jim a few seconds later, taking the camera back after he stopped recording.

“Ow!” Danny said.  “You kicked me in the head!”

“What?” Zac asked.  I played the footage back on the camera’s small screen, and just before Jim had stopped recording, I saw Zac’s foot connect with Danny’s head as they climbed on my car.  “You have to leave that in the movie!” Zac said.  “Sorry, Danny, it was an accident.”

“It looks good,” I said.  “I think it would be hilarious to leave that part in the movie.  Especially since it was an accident.”


The leaders from The Edge, the junior high school youth group from church, would have dinner at the Parkers’ house before youth group on some Wednesdays.  The Parkers’ oldest son, Brody, was a sophomore at the University of Jeromeville and one of the Edge leaders, and their youngest, a girl named Michelle, was a student in the youth group, the same age as the boys I was making the movie with.  Michelle was playing Kim, Dog Crap’s love interest in the movie.  I had arranged with the Parkers and Michelle’s real life friend, a girl from the youth group named Shawna Foreman, to film a scene when the leaders came to the Parkers’ house for dinner.  The two girls were in Michelle’s room, talking about cute boys, when Michelle’s character, Kim, admitted that she liked Dog Crap.  I held the camera for that scene, and one take was good enough.

The Parkers had two telephone lines in their house.  Adam, the youth pastor, was downstairs using one phone to call the other, so that I could record Kim answering the phone in her room.  After Shawna’s character left, the final film would cut to Dog Crap fidgeting in front of his phone, working up the courage to call Kim and ask her to a school dance.

“Hello?” Michelle said in character as Kim.  The final film would then cut to Dog Crap chickening out, awkwardly shouting into the phone, “You have the wrong number!”  I continued running the camera as Michelle got a confused look on her face and said, “Oh, sorry.”  Michelle hung up the phone.  Then she looked up and said, “Wait a minute!  How could I have the wrong number? I didn’t call anyone!”

I played the tape back on the camera’s small screen.  “It looks good,” I said.  “Thanks.  We’ll do the dance scene after The Edge tonight.”

“Sounds good!”

“Do you need me again?” Shawna asked.

“Those were your only speaking lines, but you’ll be in the background at the dance.”

“Great!  I’ll see you tonight!”


Five Iron Frenzy, a punk-ska band with a Christian background who were too edgy to get much attention on Christian radio, was very popular with the Edge kids at the time.  Ted told me that he had gotten the band’s permission to use their music in our movie; he was probably not telling the truth, but I did not bother to check.  After The Edge, I filmed the school dance scene for the end of the movie in the youth room.  Five Iron Frenzy’s “Where Zero Meets Fifteen” played while Dog Crap and Kim danced.  The others in the background danced in much sillier ways than I had imagined; I was losing control of just how quirky this movie was, but I just wanted to get it done.  And quirky was good for a project like this, I thought.

“I love this song!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap.

“Me too!” Michelle replied in character as Kim.  “It’s my boyfriend’s favorite song!”

“Boyfriend?” Dog Crap said.

“Just kidding!  Vince told me to say that.”

I wanted to imply that Vince was playing a prank on Dog Crap by telling Michelle to pretend that she had a boyfriend. I wanted Dog Crap to say something like “I’ll get him back for that,” but what Zac did instead was shout, “Vince!” and run out of the room.  At this point, I was not going to be picky; that would have to be good enough.

Kim’s comment about her boyfriend was a reference to a scene from earlier in the movie.  I had to shoot the film out of order, to accommodate everyone’s schedules, and I took careful notes of what had already been done and who was needed in each scene.  In the boyfriend scene, which we had not yet recorded, Dog Crap and Vince were at school, talking at lunch.  Dog Crap said that it is hard for him to ask a girl out because, whenever he starts talking to a girl, she will start talking about her boyfriend, so that he will not ask her out.

“That’s not true,” Vince replied encouragingly.  “There’s Christine.  Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Christine and said, “Hey, Chrsitine.  Did you figure out that one math problem you were confused about?”

“Yeah,” Christine answered.  “My boyfriend is good at math.”

Dog Crap walked back to Vince with a look on his face as if to say I-told-you-so, and Vince said, “That was just one girl.  It’s not everyone.  There’s Samantha.  Go talk to her.”

Dog Crap walked up to Samantha and said, “Hi, Samantha.”

“My boyfriend says hi to people,” Samantha replied.

At least that was how I pictured the scene in my head.  When we recorded it a few days later, Vince said “go ask her out” instead of “go talk to her” for Christine.  That seemed out of place if the whole point of the movie was that Dog Crap wanted to ask out a different girl from these two.

Christine and Samantha each had only one line, and I recorded their parts for that scene after we finished the school dance scene.  It turned out better than I had planned.  When I first started working with The Edge last year, a girl named Samantha Willis had said some awkwardly silly things to me.  When I wrote this scene, I named this character Samantha because I had Samantha Willis in mind to play the role, and fortunately, she agreed.  “My boyfriend says hi to people a lot!” she exclaimed excitedly on camera, before adding “Bye, Dog Crap!”  It was perfect.

We filmed one more scene in the youth room.  I played Matt, the school bully, who was also trying to ask Kim to the dance despite Kim’s frequent rebuffs.  In this scene, near the end of the movie, Kim turns Matt down again.  “I’d rather go out with someone who crawled out from under this table!” Michelle exclaimed in character as Kim, lightly shoving Matt away.

Just then Zac, in character as Dog Crap, crawled out from under the table, where he had been looking for something he dropped.  Dog Crap greeted Kim, who smiled at him, and he used the opportunity to ask her to the dance.  I thought that scene was particularly brilliant writing on my part, and Zac and Michelle acted it perfectly.


On Saturday, I picked up Zac, Ted, Danny, and Michelle, as well as Jim, who did not have a car.  We went to a nearby school, with classrooms that opened directly to the outdoors with no hallway in between, to film the scenes taking place at school.  It was more common in those days for school grounds to be left unlocked, open to the public, and all of the school scenes took place outside of classrooms, so this would be good enough for my purposes.

While Dog Crap was trying to find a way to ask Kim to the dance, Vince was training for an upcoming video game tournament.  My bully character, Matt, in addition to trying to steal Kim, was also bragging that he was going to win the tournament.  Dog Crap’s cousin had told him about Fish Boy, a mysterious video game master who lived in Jeromeville.  I also played Dog Crap’s cousin; my two characters were distinguished on camera by Matt wearing a hat and Dog Crap’s cousin not wearing a hat.  Of course, though, in one scene I forgot to wear the hat as Matt, and confusion resulted when I showed the movie to people later.  I did not know how to run a costume department.

In character as Dog Crap’s cousin, I suggested that we all travel to Jeromeville to meet Fish Boy, and Ted replied as Vince with a brilliant ad-libbed rant.  “Jeromeville?” he said with a crazed look, grabbing my shoulders to get my attention.  “I’ve heard about this place!  They have frog tunnels!  And roundabouts!  And you get arrested for snoring too loud!  It scares me!”

I was not expecting this, but I stayed in character and calmly replied, “But Fish Boy is there!  You’ll win the video game contest for sure.”

Vince, instantly back to normal, said, “Oh, yeah. Let’s go!”

Later, we drove around to film scenes from the Jeromeville trip.  In character, I got lost several times and made multiple wrong turns, including getting stuck in a roundabout circling multiple times.  I took Jim and Michelle home, since I was done with their scenes, and the rest of us went to the Fosters’ house to film the scenes with Danny playing Fish Boy.

Danny’s eighteen-year-old sister Erica, a leader with The Edge, joined us as we walked a quarter mile to the nearest gas station, where the characters had to stop to ask for directions.  I had intended this scene to be a shot-for-shot parody of the scene from The Empire Strikes Back where Luke Skywalker meets Yoda, without realizing at first that the little green stranger who finds him is Yoda.  The boys wanted to go into the gas station store and get snacks.  I wanted to focus on getting my movie done, but since these boys were doing a favor for me for free, I let them.  Afterward, I reminded everyone of their lines and started the camera.

“We’re being watched!” Zac said in character as Dog Crap, noticing a girl next to them.

“No harm I mean you,” Erica replied, using her normal voice but Yoda’s characteristic syntax.  “Wondering what you are doing here, I am.”

“We’re looking for a video game master.”

“Fish Boy!  You seek Fish Boy!”

“You know Fish Boy?” Dog Crap asked.

“Take you to him, I will!”

For the next scene, we returned to the Fosters’ house.  After an awkward blooper in which Ted forgot his lines, Ted, in character as Vince, angrily spoke up about how they were wasting their time.  Luke Skywalker had done the same when Yoda took him to his house.

“I cannot teach them,” Erica said, turning away.  “They have no patience.  They are not ready.”

“I was once the same way,” Danny replied from off camera.

Dog Crap and Vince looked at Erica, wide-eyed.  “Fish Boy?” they said.  They turned to each other and added, “Fish Boy’s a girl?”

“No, silly!” Erica replied, no longer speaking like Yoda.  “I’m no good at those games!  Fish Boy’s my little brother.”

Danny emerged from his bedroom, wearing some weird mask and carrying a hockey stick.  Neither of those details was in the script, but this movie was already weird enough, so I allowed it.  I continued recording as Fish Boy showed the other two shortcuts and special techniques for the game they were playing.  After we finished, I thanked Danny’s parents for letting us their house.  I took Ted and Zac home, then went home myself.


Over the next couple weeks, when I had time, I finished recording the remaining scenes.  I edited the movie with a very unsophisticated setup of two VCRs connected to each other.  We had a watch party on the big projector screen in the youth room at church after The Edge the following week; most of the Edge leaders and some of the kids who were in the movie stuck around to watch.

By modern standards, the movie was pretty terrible.  I knew nothing of acting, directing, or editing, and with my rudimentary equipment, the video and sound quality was subpar.  The characters’ clothes inexplicably changed from one shot to the next within the same scene, and twice during the movie, my shouts of “Cut!” were audible at the end of scenes, since editing a video with two VCRs was not a precise technique.  The film was only half an hour long, too short to be considered a feature film.  But we had so much fun and made so many memories during those few weeks.

The Dog Crap and Vince movie had a lasting legacy in my life.  The boys from The Edge and I quoted lines from the movie to each other for years to come.  I watched that movie so many times with so many people that I still remember much of the dialogue by heart.  And Samantha, the boys’ classmate whose boyfriend said hi to people, became a regular character in the web series.  It was later revealed that the character’s last name was Whitehead, and years later, among my adult friends, the act of bringing up a significant other in conversation out of context became known as “pulling a Samantha Whitehead.”

Those few weeks that I spent making the Dog Crap and Vince movie also set in motion a chain of events that took a much darker turn.  I had no idea at the time that anything like that would come to pass from it, or that anything like this would happen among a Christian community such as Jeromeville Covenant Church.  Looking back, though, in that context, it makes sense now why Mr. Santoro, normally a warm and friendly man, seemed aloof when he greeted Jim Herman on the day I borrowed the camera.  But that is a story for another time.

This project was also the beginning of my realization that I prefer creative projects I can do alone over ones requiring the involvement of others.  As much as it is fun to bring others into my creative mind, coordinating everyone’s schedules and dealing with flaky people caused much frustration.  The same thing invariably happened every other time I tried to involve others in Dog Crap and Vince projects.  But for the people who did stick to their commitments, I now have a record of the role they played in my life.

Readers: Tell me in the comments about something creative that you worked on with others. Did it all go according to plan or not?

As always, the episodes featuring Dog Crap and Vince were inspired by Cow Chip & Lance, an actual creative project that some people I know have worked on for decades. It has been inactive for a couple years, but some of their material is still available for viewing (click).

Also, if you like music and aren’t following my other site yet, Song of the Day by DJ GJ-64, go follow that one.

And I updated my Greg Out Of Character blog for the first time in several months, with a post that has little to do with 1997. Go follow that one too.

If you like what you read, don’t forget to like this post and follow this blog. Also follow Don’t Let The Days Go By on Facebook and Instagram.

January 9-10, 1997.  New year, new classes. (#114)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 5 Comments

I walked down the center aisle of the bus, looking for a place to sit.  It was rainy outside, so the bus would fill up quickly, although one nice thing about living a mile and a half beyond the edge of campus was that my bus stop was one of the first ones on the route in the morning.

At the next stop after mine, I noticed out of the corner of my eye a girl wearing an Urbana ’96 T-shirt boarding the bus.  I wondered who this was, which campus Christian group she belonged to, which church she went to, and if we ever crossed paths at the convention in Urbana during the break.  I looked up, about to ask her about her shirt and point out that I was at Urbana too, when her eyes lit up and she smiled.  “Hey!” she said.  “How are you?”

Apparently we had crossed paths before.  Where?  What was her name?  “I’m good,” I replied.  “How are you?”

“Good!  I really like my schedule this quarter.  What about you?  What classes are you taking?”

“Advanced calculus, Euclidean geometry, Nutrition 10, and RST 141.”

“Two math classes?  That’s your major, right?”

“Yeah.  What are you taking?”

“English, history, psych, and bio.  It’s a lot of work already.  How is the Religious Studies class so far?  Which one is 141?”

I realized at this point that I was going to have to see this through and act like I knew who this girl was.  She was Asian, with dark wavy hair down to her shoulders and chubby cheeks.  I felt terrible for not remembering who she was.   “John,” I said.  “The Gospel and Epistles of John.”

“Nice!  Is that with Dr. Hurt?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  “I had him for RST 40 last quarter.”

“I took that last year,” the girl said.  “It was a really good class.  But I haven’t been able to take anything else he’s taught.  I always have other classes I need to take at the same time.”

“I know what that’s like,” I said.  “I had to choose between Hurt’s class and chorus this quarter.”

“I didn’t know you were in chorus!  How often do you guys sing?”

“We have a performance at the end of each quarter.  We spend the whole quarter rehearsing, pretty much.”

“That sounds fun!”

“Last quarter was the first time I did it.  I’m hoping I can still make it to the performance this quarter, to support the people I sang with last quarter.”

“That’ll be nice,” the girl said.

Since I was fully committed to pretending to know this girl at this point, I continued the conversation.  “How was the rest of your break?” I asked.

“Good,” she replied.  “Pretty boring.  I was just with my family, in Willow Grove.  What about you?”

“Same.”

“Where are you from again?”

“Plumdale.”

“Where’s that?”

“Near Gabilan and Santa Lucia.”

“Oh, okay.  Not too far from Willow Grove.”

“Right. About an hour.”  At this point, the bus was pulling off to the side of the road at the bus terminal on campus across the street from the Memorial Union, so as I stood, I said, “Hey, it was good running into you.”

“You too!  I’ll see you tomorrow at JCF?”

“Yeah,” I replied.  That definitely helped; now I knew she was someone from Jeromeville Christian Fellowship.  But why did I not recognize her?  And now that I had spent an entire bus ride pretending to know her, it would be more awkward to admit that I did not recognize her.  Hopefully I would figure this out soon.

Today was Thursday, which was my lightest day of class, as was usually the case.  All I had on Thursdays this quarter was the discussion for Religious Studies.  I worked 10 hours per week for the Learning Skills Center on campus, so for the rest of the quarter I would probably have tutoring groups to run on Thursdays.  For this particular Thursday, though, I just stayed on campus for a few hours, buying a few things I needed at the campus store and doing math homework in a quiet corner of the library.

Early in the afternoon, when it came time to go home, I left the library and walked toward the bus stop.  The rain had stopped by then, but since the ground was still wet, I stayed on the sidewalks, instead of cutting diagonally across the grass of the Quad like I would have otherwise.  I looked up at one point and saw Haley Channing approaching.  The sidewalk was narrow enough, and the ground wet enough, that there was no way to avoid coming face to face with her.  This was the first time I had seen Haley since our serious conversation at the beginning of finals week.

I looked up again to see Haley now about ten feet away, making eye contact with me.  I halfheartedly smiled and waved.

“Hey, Greg,” Haley said.  “What’s up?  How was Urbana?”

“It was good,” I said.  “I learned a lot, although I’m still trying to process exactly what it means for my life.”

“Yeah.  Discerning God’s will can be like that.”

“How have you been?” I asked in the most neutral possible way, knowing that this must have been a hard Christmas for the Channings.

“Okay,” Haley replied.  “It was good to be together, but, well, you know.”

I had never experienced that kind of loss so close to the holidays, but I imagined it was not easy.  “Yeah,” I said, nodding.

“Are you heading to class?”

“I’m done for the day.  Heading to the bus.”

“Nice.  I still have a class and a discussion this afternoon.  I’ll be here until 5.”

“Wow,” I replied.  “Good luck.  I’ll see you tomorrow?”

“Yeah.  Have a good afternoon.”

“I will.”

That did not go too badly, I thought as I continued walking toward the bus stop.  Haley and I still seemed to be on good terms, and I managed not to say anything awkward about her mother’s passing.  Although Haley had done nothing wrong by not reciprocating my feelings for her, the situation still made me feel like a failure.  This couple sitting across from me on the bus held hands and kissed for the entire ride; seeing them certainly did not help my mood.  I would probably never get that opportunity.


None of my roommates appeared to be home when I got home.  I went to my room and turned on the computer, clicking the icon for the program that made the dial-up modem click and whir so that I could check my email.  I had three messages: one from Mom; one from the TA for Religious Studies, who was starting an email list for our class; and the one I was hoping for, from a new Internet friend named Amy. I skipped the other two messages and went straight to Amy’s.

From: “Amy D.” <ajd1973@aolnet.com>
To: gjdennison@jeromeville.edu
Date: Thu, 09 Jan 1997 15:48 -0500
Subject: Re: hi!

Hi!  I hope you’re having a wonderful day!  Yes I would love to read some of your poetry!  It’s so cool that you like to do that.  I’m not a very good writer.

To answer your question, yes I am married… my husband and I got married two years ago.  We don’t have kids yet.  We wanted to wait a few years.  What about you?  I’m sure a nice guy like you probably has a girlfriend, right?  She’s a lucky woman!

How have your classes been so far this semester?  You guys start early!  I could never handle taking two math classes… you must be a genius!  I hope you have a great day!

Amy (your big sis)

I first met Amy through an email I got while I was in Plumdale the week before Christmas.  I had made a personal Web page last year, and I updated it occasionally with the things that were going on in my life.  Apparently Amy randomly found my page and liked the Bible verses I had quoted.  After the first few emails we exchanged, she started jokingly calling me her little brother, because she was a few years older than me, she never had a brother, and I reminded her of what she had pictured a hypothetical brother to be like.  That was sweet.

Of course she would be married.  I could never realistically expect a nice girl to just fall in my lap out of nowhere and actually be interested in me back.  Girls just never liked me like that.  It probably would not have worked out anyway, because she was almost three thousand miles away, in Massachusetts.

I opened the folder on the computer where I had saved my creative writing.  Last summer, I was on a bike ride on the other side of Jeromeville, and I rode past the house at 2234 Baron Court, where Haley Channing and her roommates had lived last year.  On the ride home, I kept thinking about the first time I went to that house, when some friends from JCF found me having a bad day and decided to include me, and how one of these new friends, Haley, had such a sweet smile and pretty blue eyes.  I wrote a poem about that night and called it “2234.”  A few months later, when I was struggling with my feelings for Haley, I wrote another poem; I called it “2235,” intending for it to be a sequel to 2234.

while i was in that house that awesome night
a bomb was planted deep within my soul
when bad turned good and everything seemed right
the evil bomber came and took control

today when i am with my friends
i hear a scary ticking sound
it’s growing louder every day

do i run away and hide?
do i leave without a trace?
do i stand here at ground zero
while it blows up in my face?
do i carefully inspect the bomb
so i may then defuse?
do i set the darn thing off right now?
i’ve not a thing to lose

i know the answer will come
but how much pain must i endure
and how many friends must i lose
before it arrives?

During finals week in December, after I told Haley I liked her and she was not interested back, and after Eddie Baker found out I liked Haley, I spent several study breaks writing another poem called “2236,” since that was the next number after 2235.

On this day,
a great weight has been lifted
from my shoulders.

I wanted to run away and hide from you,
to keep from dealing with this.
But God had other plans for me.
So I turned and said hello.

When I found out
that my friend knew all along,
I knew that it was over.
So I let go.

Now there is no more bomb
waiting to go off.
The Lord is doing His will,
leaving me free
to strengthen those special friendships I made
during that cold winter night.

When I wrote 2236, I was feeling at peace regarding Haley.  I was no longer feeling so peaceful, and the poem now felt somewhat inauthentic.  However, the poem captured a specific feeling at a specific time, which was not necessarily what I would feel forever.  I copied and pasted those poems, along with the original 2234, into my reply to Amy.  I also answered no to her question about having a girlfriend and explained what had happened with Haley, to give her some context for the poems.



All four of my lectures this quarter met on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, as had usually been the case with my schedule.  It was sunny on Friday, so I rode my bike to campus.  I parked near Wellington Hall and walked inside to Advanced Calculus.  I had left the house a little later than usual, and when I arrived, almost but not quite late, the room was about three-quarters full.  I saw an empty seat behind Katy Hadley, a cute redhead math major who had been in several of my classes over the years.  I walked toward that seat, wondering if today would be the day I would finally get to talk to Katy.  I really only knew her name because I had seen her write it on papers before.

As I sat in the chair, the momentum of my heavy backpack carried me awkwardly out of control, and my left foot swung forward, hitting the leg of Katy’s chair and Katy’s ankle.  “Ow!” Katy said, turning around looking annoyed.

“Sorry,” I said sheepishly.

Anton, the professor whom I had had once before, began talking about bounded variation in his thick but comprehensible Belgian accent.  I hoped that a mathematics lecture would distract me from the embarrassment of having blown it with Katy, but it did not.  About ten minutes into class, I quietly tore a page out of the back of my notebook and wrote on it, I’m sorry I kicked the seat.  I discreetly passed the note to Katy.

About a minute later, as I was writing down theorems about functions of bounded variation, Katy turned halfway toward me and placed the paper I gave her back on my desk.  That’s okay, she had written, with a smiley face.  This was progress, I supposed.




Later that day, after I was done with classes, I ran into Taylor Santiago and Pete Green, friends from the freshman dorm two years ago who I now went to church with.  They were walking in the same direction I was, so I walked with them, and we shared stories about our first week of classes.

“I ran into Schuyler Jenkins this morning,” Pete said.

“Schuyler Jenkins!” Taylor replied.  “I haven’t seen her since freshman year!”  Schuyler was a girl who had lived across the hall a few doors down from Taylor freshman year, upstairs from me.  She was short, barely over five feet, and she could be both short-tempered and whiny at various times.  She did not speak to me for several weeks that year, after I played a prank which hurt her much more than I thought it would.

I unlocked my bike and began riding.  “Where are you guys headed?” I asked.

“Bus,” Pete replied, pointing to the northeast.

“I’ll follow you,” I said, riding my bike very slowly alongside Taylor and Pete toward the bus terminal.

“Greg?” Taylor asked.  “Has anyone else told you that your bike might be a little too small for you?”

“Actually, yes.  A few other people told me that.  I just got something cheap when I first came to Jeromeville; I didn’t get it properly sized or anything”

“It seems like you might be comfortable on a bigger bike.”

“This one is starting to fall apart,” I said.  “I’ll keep that in mind someday when I get a new bike.”  I know now that I did not keep that bicycle regularly maintained.  The chain needed to be cleaned and lubricated, and a few spokes in the back were broken, making the back wheel wobble.  “Not only is this bike too small, but it makes weird squeaking noises, and it wobbles in the back,” I explained.

“Sounds like Schuyler Jenkins!” Pete said.

“Haha!” I laughed, loudly.

“Wow!” Taylor said.  “Greg, you should name your bike Schuyler.”

“That’s hilarious!” I replied  I had never made the connection before between my bike and Schuyler.  But from that day on, I called my bike Schuyler, and I loved telling that funny story so much that I named my next bike Schuyler II.

I took Schuyler out for a ride in the Greenbelts after I got back from class.  The weather was colder than I would have wanted it, but after having rained for a couple days, it felt nice to see the sun again.  I showered when I got home, then went to Jeromeville Christian Fellowship that night.  I saw the girl I had spoken with on the bus the day before, wearing a name tag that said “Anna.”  When I got home, I found my phone and email list for JCF; there was one Anna on the list, a sophomore named Anna Lam.  That was most likely her, but her name did not register in my memory at all.

Haley was at JCF that night, but we did not get to talk beyond saying hello.  I was okay with that.  Haley and I were on good terms, but sometimes I was still going to feel weird about our past.  That was normal.  So what if Haley did not like me as more than a friend.  So what if I had an awkward conversation on the bus with Anna Lam, and my new Internet friend Amy D. was married and not interested in me, and I accidentally kicked Katy Hadley in class.  I still had friends who cared about me, and the right people would stay in my life.  Hopefully something would work out for me eventually.

Author’s note: Do any of you name your vehicles, and if so, what’s an interesting story behind the name of your vehicle?

Also, yes I did really just painstakingly edit every episode to include the episode number in the title. Maybe if someone who just happens upon this blog sees that it is episode number 114, this person will actually be motivated to go back and read episodes 1 through 113… yeah, that’s probably wishful thinking.

May 11-16, 1996. A montage of awkward moments. (#83)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 25 Comments

The Associated Students of the University of Jeromeville, ASUJ for short, was the organization responsible for student activities at UJ.  They held two major festivals every year.  They were less than a month apart, since both involved traditions specific to spring.  The Spring Picnic, which began decades ago as the school’s open house and grew into a major festival, was interesting and fun.  The other festival was called the Mother Earth Festival, held on Mother’s Day weekend.  It was a bunch of hippie stuff, not really my thing.

I attended the Mother Earth Festival exactly once, in 1996.  It was a Saturday afternoon, I was bored, and I decided to check it out, so I got on my bike, parked it on campus, and walked around the Quad.

The Quad was packed.  Craft and vendor booths lined the edges of the Quad, with a sea of humanity in between.  I walked along the row of booths, peeking at what was happening inside.  Face painting.  Beads.  Tie-dyeing.  Henna tattoos.  These round things with feathers on them that the sign called dreamcatchers.  At the south end of the quad, the temporary stage where I saw Lawsuit at previous Spring Picnics was set up, and two musicians were playing instruments I could not identify while some lady in a long skirt with armpit hair frolicked and pranced on the stage.  I walked up the other side of the Quad, looking at other booths, before deciding that nothing here particularly piqued my interest.  The most memorable thing I remember seeing in the fifteen minutes I spent at the Mother Earth Festival was this girl with big boobs sunbathing in a bikini.  She and her flat-chested friend were not dressed as hippies at all, and their armpits were actually shaved.  I looked at them for about five seconds, then moved on so it would not look creepy.

As I approached the place where I had parked, I walked past a bench and saw a girl named Maria who was in my Advanced Composition class last quarter, sitting on a bench looking away from me.  I took my rolled-up copy of the Mother Earth Festival schedule of events, and I tapped her on the shoulder with it.

Maria turned to look at me, except it was not Maria.  This girl had a similar build, hairstyle, and coloring, but otherwise looked nothing like Maria.

“I’m sorry,” I said.  “I thought you were someone else.”  I walked away before the other girl could respond.

Why did I do that?  I kept replaying the embarrassing incident in my mind as I rode my bike back home.  Maria had not been not looking at me, I had no need to go out of my way to say hi to her, and I did not really want to talk to Maria anyway.  The angry political messages on the buttons all over her backpack clearly indicated that she was not the kind of person I wanted to get to know, and I did not find her attractive.  And now some other girl probably thought I was a weirdo, all because I had decided to be friendly.


Unfortunately for me, I tended to be just as awkward around girls I actually did find attractive.  Two days later, during a break between classes, I was walking around the Memorial Union looking for a place to sit.  I held a slice of pepperoni pizza on a paper plate and a Coca-Cola in a reusable large plastic mug.  Some division of ASUJ was handing these mugs out free a few weeks ago, to encourage people not to fill up the landfills with disposable cups.  Drinks were 25 cents less at the ASUJ Coffee House for customers bringing their own cups.  Of course, I had a disposable paper plate, but at least that was biodegradable, and bringing an actual plate to campus would be somewhat unwieldy.

I looked out the window to a courtyard-like area, which was surrounded on three sides by the building.  A large round fountain sat in the middle of the courtyard, but it was dry and had been ever since I began attending UJ.  Metal tables and chairs were arranged around part of the courtyard.  I felt that familiar jolt of excitement and nervousness as I saw Haley Channing sitting at one of those tables, alone.  Finally, this might be a chance to talk to Haley one-on-one with no one else around.  I almost spilled my drink as I opened the door leading to the courtyard, but caught myself.  “Hey,” I said as I walked up to Haley.  “May I sit here?”

“Hi, Greg!” Haley replied, smiling.  “Go ahead!”

I placed my food on the table and sat down.  “How’s your day going?” I asked.

“Pretty good, except I have a paper to write.  I’m gonna be busy tonight.  You?”

“I’m good.  I have a lot of math homework, though.”

“What math class are you taking?”

“Applied Linear Algebra and Combinatorics.  Two classes.”

“I have no idea what either of those mean.”

“Linear algebra works with matrices.”

“I kind of remember matrices in high school, a little bit.”

“And combinatorics is about problems that come up with counting combinations and things like that.  If I have license plates with three letters and three numbers, and I need to figure out how many possible license plates there could be, that’s a combinatorics problem.  At least that’s what we did back in the first chapter.”

“Interesting.”

“It is.  I also really like the professor for that class.”  I looked up and saw a familiar face walking toward us; it was Claire Seaver from church.  I waved, and Claire walked over to our table.  

“Hey,” Claire said to me.  “How are you?”

“I’m doing well.  Claire, this is Haley–”

“Hi, Haley,” Claire interrupted, smiling.

“Hi,” Haley replied with a tone of recognition.

“How do you two know each other?” I asked, trying to hide my shame in not knowing this and being caught off guard.

“Chorus,” Haley replied.  “I used to do that last year.”

“I keep telling Greg he should join chorus,” Claire said.

“You should!” Haley told me.  “I’ve heard you sing.  You have a good voice.”

“Maybe,” I replied.

“How were your weekends?” Claire asked.  “Did you guys call your mothers for Mother’s Day?”

“I did,” Haley said.

“I saw this thing on the Internet the other day where you can send someone flowers by email.  You get an email, and it’s a picture of flowers with a personalized message,” I said.  “My parents just got email recently, Mom loves email, so I sent one of those to Mom.”

“That’s fun,” Claire replied.

“If I’m going to send flowers to my mother, she’s gonna get real flowers,” Haley said.  “No emails and pictures for my mother.”

“I need to get going, but I’ll see you guys later,” Claire said.  We both waved and said goodbye as she walked away.  As I took a bite of my pizza and chewed it, I kept thinking that I was probably blowing it with Haley.  I had tried to introduce herself to someone she already knew, and she disapproved of my Mother’s Day gift.  After I swallowed my pizza, I attempted to resurrect the conversation, asking, “Do you still do chorus now?”

“No.  I did last year, but I have too much going on now.”

“That makes sense.  I played piano as a kid, but I was always so self-conscious about performing for others.  But I’m starting to get over that.  This year I started singing in my church choir; that’s how I know Claire.”

“Nice!  Chorus is always looking for guys.”

“Maybe I will for next year,” I said.  We continued making small talk as we finished eating, and I hoped that she could not read disappointment in my body language.  I could not help but feel like I had embarrassed myself in front of her.


Whenever I introduce two people now, I always ask them first if they know each other; this is a direct result of that incident all those years ago when I tried to introduce Claire and Haley.  But that was still not the worst awkward moment I experienced that week.

I was back in the Memorial Union a few days later, looking for a place to study, and I saw a familiar brown-haired face sitting at a table by herself.  It was my friend Lizzie, one of those people whom I initially crossed paths with just because we knew someone in common.  Lizzie went to high school with Jack Chalmers, another math major who had been in multiple classes with me.  Last fall, Jack and I had linear algebra together, and Lizzie had a class in the same classroom right before ours.  Jack and Lizzie would say hi to each other as we waited in the hall and her class exited the room.  Jack talked a lot, and he talked fast, and sometimes he would say hi to Lizzie in the middle of a sentence with me.  He would say something like, “Hey Greg I’m totally not ready for this test and I blew off studying last night Hi Lizzie! so I hope I don’t bomb it because I totally need to keep my grades up.”  Eventually, I started saying hi to Lizzie when I saw her around campus, and we had actually had conversations beyond hello a few times.

“Hey,” I said, approaching Lizzie’s table.  “Mind if I sit here?”

“Hi!” Lizzie exclaimed enthusiastically.  “Go ahead!”

“Thanks.”

“How’s it going?”

“I’m doing okay.  Just busy with classes.  What about you?”

“Same with me.  I have a midterm tomorrow.  But the school year is almost over!”

“I know!  Are you doing anything exciting this summer?”

“Just going home and working.  I need the money.  What about you?”

“I’m staying here, taking a class.  This will be the first time I’ve been in Jeromeville for the summer.”

“I hear it gets really hot!”

“I kind of like the heat, though.”

“What class are you taking?”

“Computer Science 40,” I explained.  “I’m taking CS 30 now, it’s required for the math major, and I love it.  There’s an upper division CS class, Data Structures, that counts toward my degree in place of a math class, but it requires 30 and 40 as prerequisites.  It’s really hard to get CS classes because there are so many CS majors, and not much computer lab space, so they put a cap on how many can enroll, and CS majors have priority.  Enrollment wasn’t restricted for the summer class.”

“Smart!” Lizzie replied.  “You’re a math major, right?  That’s how you know Jack?”

“Yeah.”

“Why didn’t you major in CS, if you like it that much?”

“Because I didn’t want something fun to turn into work.  Also, my computer knowledge was several years out of date by the time I got here, and I knew I’d be competing with kids whose knowledge was much more advanced.”

“That makes sense.  So you’re just taking the one class?”

“Yeah.  First session.  I’m not taking any classes second session.  I’ll probably just hang out here and try to find something fun to do.”

“Like what?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.  “I’ve discovered over the last couple years that I like to write.  I’m working on a novel now, when I have time and I’m in the right mood.”

“That’s so cool!”

“Just for fun,” I said.  “I know, I’m a math guy, I’m not supposed to be a writer.”

“There’s nothing wrong with being both!  What’s your novel about?”

“There’s this guy, he’s a senior in high school, but he needs a fresh start, and he wants to leave his past behind.  So he goes away to live with relatives.  And he feels like he isn’t ready to move on to the next part of his life, so he pretends to be younger so he can have a couple more years in high school.”

“Wow,” Lizzie said.  “Where’d you get the idea for that?”

“I guess I’ve kind of wished for that myself,” I explained.  “I feel like I really grew a lot my senior year of high school, but then just as life was getting interesting, my friends and I all graduated and moved away and lost touch.  I wonder how I would have turned out if I’d had another year or two to grow in that environment, if I would have gotten to experience more things I missed out on.”

“Well, I think you turned out fine.”

“Thank you,” I said.  Then, after a pause, I added, “You can read it if you want.”

“Yeah!  It sounds really good!”

“I could email you some of what I have so far.  Does that work?”

“Sure.  Let me give you my email.”  Lizzie tore off a piece of paper from a notebook and wrote on it, then passed it to me.  I opened it and read what she wrote, very confused for a few seconds, then suddenly frightened and embarrassed as I began to realize the full implications of what I read.

Lindsay’s email:
lkvandenberg@jeromeville.edu

Lindsay’s email.  I had known this girl, whom I had been calling Lizzie, for over seven months, and this whole time her name was Lindsay.  I had never seen her name in print before.  I knew her through Jack, who talks really fast, so when I heard Jack say “Hi, Lindsay,” it came out sounding like “Hi Lizzie.”  I suddenly tried to recall every time I had actually spoken to Lindsay, trying to remember if I had ever called her Lizzie to her face.  I could not remember.  I looked up at her, trying to put the name Lindsay Vandenberg to this face, and it felt weird, because she was still Lizzie to me.

“Greg?” Lindsay asked.  “Are you okay?”

“Yeah,” I said.  “I was just thinking about something.  No big deal.  But I’ll send you my story.”

“Great!  I look forward to reading it!”  Lindsay looked at her watch.  “I need to get going, I have class, but I’ll talk to you soon, okay?”

“Yeah!  Have a great day!”

“You too!”

I never found out if Lindsay knew that I thought her name was Lizzie for seven months.  She was never in my inner social circle, and we did not stay in touch after we graduated, but we always said hi to each other on campus.

For some reason, I have always disliked using people’s names out loud.  It just feels uncomfortable to me, and I do not know why.  But this odd quirk may have worked to my advantage on that day, because it was entirely possible that I had never actually called Lindsay Lizzie outside of my own head.  When I saw her, I was much more likely to just say “Hi” instead of “Hi, Lizzie.”  But even if I had ever accidentally called her Lizzie, there was not much that I could do about it now.  Besides, while my realization that Lindsay’s name was not Lizzie felt awkward and embarrassing, much of that embarrassment was in my own head.  If it was unlikely that she ever heard me call her Lizzie, she would have no way of knowing that I did not know her real name for so long.

Most guys have had their share of awkward moments around girls; and, of course, this statement applied to other combinations of genders and orientations as well.  I always felt particularly prone to awkward moments, mostly because I had never had a girlfriend, and I seemed to lack successful non-awkward experience with girls.  Over the years, I would have many more experiences of getting someone’s name wrong, or saying something that was misinterpreted.  But I have seen enough over the years now to know that I certainly was not alone in this.  And many others have had awkward moments that primarily happened in their own heads, unnoticed by those around them.  I just had to accept the fact that I was not perfect, and the right people in my life would accept me, flaws and all.

September 9, 1995. The night I did something crazy and spontaneous. (#50)

~ Greg Dennison ~ 33 Comments

In my life so far, I have had a long history of not being popular with the ladies. No one taught me anything about dating and relationships growing up, and my teen years were a string of awkward failed crushes. Rachelle Benedetti, whom I never understood why I liked her in the first place. Kim Jensen, an outgoing popular cheerleader in a few of my classes, but she dated older football players, not guys like me. Melissa Holmes, a good friend who did not like me back that way. Jennifer Henson, a popular girl who started treating me like a good friend when we were seniors, but then moved away without saying goodbye. Annie Gambrell, a younger girl I met through a class project we did together, but she had a boyfriend. And last year there was Megan McCauley, my first older friend in college; she was really nice, but I felt intimidated just by the fact that she was a year older, and currently I did not know how to interpret the fact that she had not emailed me back for the last three weeks.

After waking up and doing absolutely nothing productive for several hours, I walked to the mailboxes. Maybe I had a letter from a girl, I thought. And I did have a letter from a girl. I actually had gotten a letter from a girl yesterday, the first letter I received since moving into this apartment a week ago. It was from Sarah Winters, who lived downstairs from me in the dorm last year. I opened the mailbox and saw another letter from a girl… except today, the girl in question was my grandma. It was always nice to hear from her, but I wanted to interact with girls my age.

From the mailboxes, I could see the pool. A girl was lying face down on a pool chair. She had brown hair, put up in a bun, and perfectly shaped legs. She appeared to be wearing nothing but black bikini bottoms. I looked closer and noticed that she was wearing a bikini top, but she had untied it in the back, presumably to avoid having a tan line. The strings hung down over the side of the pool chair, exposing the side of a fairly large and round breast.

After staring for about thirty seconds, I walked back to my apartment, trying to think of a way I could look at the sexy girl by the pool and maybe get her to notice me. Back inside, I read Grandma’s letter, but I was only half paying attention because my mind was formulating a plan.

I picked up the book I had been reading, part 4 of Stephen King’s The Green Mile, and took it outside with me. The pool was open to everyone; why couldn’t I sit and read by the pool? I found an empty pool chair, on the other side of the pool from the girl, and began reading. Stephen King originally wrote this book as a serial, in six parts each around 100 pages long, published about a month apart. Mom had gotten me parts 1 through 5 for my birthday last month, before part 6 had been published. I would get part 6 at the campus bookstore when I finished part 5, or order it in advance if it had not been released yet.

It was a hot day, and after about ten minutes, I was sweating uncomfortably. Do people really sit by the pool like this? That can’t be right, I thought. I noticed a spot a few feet from me that was in the shadow of a nearby tree. I moved the chair into the shadow; it made noise as I moved it. I looked at the girl, hoping that what I was doing looked natural and ordinary and that the noise would not attract attention. She did not react, and I sat back down and continued reading.

After about another ten minutes, the girl reattached the string in the back of her bikini top. She put on shorts and a tank top over her bikini, slid her feet into flip-flops, gathered her belongings, and began walking toward me. I looked back down at my book, trying not to stare, then looked up as she walked past me. I smiled at her. “Hi,” I said.

“You know you’re lying in the shade,” she replied.

“Yeah,” I said as the weight of her words sank into my brain. She was right. Normal people do not lie in the shade. I was pretty sure I blew it with this girl, and just made myself look like a pervert, or at best a weirdo.

After the girl was gone, I took my book back to my apartment, leaving the pool chair in the shade.  I was too embarrassed to move it back and make any more noise that might get me noticed. I lay on the bed, dejected and discouraged. I was bored. Moving back to Jeromeville early was not as exciting as it had been in my head all summer, mostly because most of my friends had not moved back yet. Since I had just gotten a letter from Sarah, I knew that she would be moving back on September 17, a week from tomorrow, but then leaving right away on a retreat with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship until Friday the 22nd. Several of my friends were involved with Jeromeville Christian Fellowship, so I suspected most of them would be back on the 22nd as well.  The first day of class was Thursday the 28th.

I continued reading The Green Mile lying on my bed. When I finished part 4, I put a frozen pot pie in the oven and spent the rest of the night wasting time on the computer. I wrote emails, I played SimCity 2000, I checked my Usenet groups, and I got on IRC chat, in that order. I had been spending a lot of time on IRC lately, and I had even met two girls my age who lived nearby: Colleen, who attended University of the Bay, and Allison, who was a student right here at University of Jeromeville. Around quarter to nine, I saw Allison enter the channel I was already in, and I messaged her.

gjd76: hey
darksparkles: hi
gjd76: what’s up
darksparkles: not much
gjd76: me either. i’m bored. i got a letter from my grandma, that was the highlight of my day
darksparkles: aww how sweet

I decided not to tell her about making a fool of myself in front of the girl at the pool. No one needed to know about that.

gjd76: i moved back to jeromeville early because i was bored at my parents’ house. now i’m bored here, but at least i’m on my own
darksparkles: i know what you mean. my roommate isn’t moving in until right before fall quarter starts. so i have the place to myself until then. i like it though
gjd76: that’s good
darksparkles: i’m a little scared to have a roommate again. i hated my roommate in the dorm last year
gjd76: ugh, roommate drama
darksparkles: but she moved out at the end of winter quarter and i had the room to myself the rest of the year
gjd76: they can do that? and just leave the room empty?
darksparkles: i guess
gjd76: how do you know your roommate from this year?
darksparkles: she lived down the hall from me. she was one of the few people in my building that i talked to, although we weren’t really close friends
gjd76: aww… hopefully living together works out
darksparkles: i hope so too

An outlandishly spontaneous idea popped into my head.  In real life, if I want to say something that makes me nervous, in which I am apprehensive about the other person’s possible reaction, I usually blurt it out loudly, so as not to hesitate or second-guess myself. I typed the next sentence very quickly and pressed Enter, the typing equivalent of blurting something out. It was a crazy idea, but boredom and loneliness can occasionally drive me to desperation.

gjd76: you want to meet in person?
darksparkles: huh? you mean like now?
gjd76: yeah. we can stay outside or in public if you’re worried about being alone with some guy from the internet
darksparkles: sure, there’s a picnic table by the pool in my apartment complex, i’ll meet you there
gjd76: where is that? we both live in north jeromeville, right?
darksparkles: yeah, redwood grove apartments on alvarez, there’s only one way into the parking lot, and the pool is right there, you’ll see it. you know where that is?
gjd76: yes i do. i’ll be there in about 10 minutes. i’m wearing jeans and a green shirt
darksparkles: i’m wearing a black shirt and jeans with holes in them
gjd76: ok, see you in a few minutes

Allison had told me the last time we talked that she lived in north Jeromeville. I did not realize until now that she was only a quarter mile away. I could have gotten there much faster than the 10 minutes I told her, but before I left I brushed my teeth and used the bathroom, and I changed out of my shorts into the jeans I told her I was wearing.  It was not warm enough this late at night to be outside in shorts for a long time. I also scribbled a note on a sheet of paper and placed it on my desk:

9/9/95 9:28pm

In case I don’t come back alive, and the police need leads, I’m going to meet a girl from the Internet named Allison. We’re meeting by the pool at Redwood Square apartments; she told me she lives there. I don’t know her last name, but her IRC name is darksparkles and her account ID is stu050637@mail.jeromeville.edu

 

It was a nice night outside, not too warm but not cold either. My short-sleeve shirt and jeans felt physically comfortable as I started to feel nervous about this situation which I had suddenly put myself in. I had only talked to Allison two other times. I had a rough description of what she looked like, and I had the impression that she was quiet and kept to herself a lot, but other than that I had no idea who to expect. I was pretty sure from our previous conversations that we had never had a class together, and we would not have run into each other at the dining hall since she lived in a different dorm area with its own dining facilities.

I walked into the parking lot of the Redwood Grove Apartments. I could see the pool about a hundred feet back from the sidewalk, and as I approached the pool more closely, I noticed a girl sitting at a table inside the pool area. She turned her head and saw me, and she got up and opened the gate.

“Allison?” I asked.

“Yes,” she replied. “Greg?”

“Yes. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Nice to meet you too,” she said, smiling halfway and leading me back to the table where she had been sitting. She was shorter than me, about five foot five, and thin. Her black shirt had the name of something I had never heard of, maybe a band, maybe a brand of clothing, I did not know. It was a unisex shirt, fitting loosely on her body. Her skin was pale, and her hair appeared to be dyed black, although I could not tell for sure with the lack of natural light and the only illumination coming from a few outdoor light posts. I got the impression that she did not smile much in general, so the awkward half-smile with which she had greeted me was probably the best she could do.

“So what’s up?” she asked, speaking quietly.

“I’ve never done this before.”

“Done what?”

“Met someone off the Internet.”

“Oh. I did once last year.”

“Oh yeah? Was it also someone from Jeromeville?”

“No. He flew out here from Oklahoma.”

“Really.”

“Yeah. He said he really liked me and wanted to be with me. But when he got here, he wasn’t really the nice guy he acted like online. He was kind of a jerk.”

“That’s too bad.”

“Yeah. He made me give him a blow job the first night he was here. I didn’t want to.”

“That’s messed up,” I said. I was not expecting such a graphic description.

“He tasted nasty,” Allison continued. I just nodded, not really sure how to reply to that.  “So you’ve just been sitting around all day since you moved back here?”

“Mostly. I’ve been riding around on my bike, and reading a lot too.”

“You like riding your bike?”

“Yeah. I’m not really competitive or athletic or anything. I just like exploring.”

“I don’t even have a bike,” Allison explained. I thought that was unusual, with Jeromeville being a Bicycle Friendly City and having one of the highest rates of bicycle ownership in the United States. “I take the bus to campus.”

“I’ll probably do that on rainy days. You said you’re taking a class this summer session?”

“Yeah. An English class. One more week.”

“How is it so far?”

“It’s easy.”

“That’s good.” After a few seconds of silence, I asked, “So how has your weekend been?”

“Good. I didn’t really do much.”

“Me either,” I replied.

We made small talk for a while. She told me about this underground band she liked and something she had to read for class. I told her about the bookstore job and what my summer back home in Plumdale had been like. She told me that she liked to draw and paint, and I told her about Skeeter’s watercolor set and the paintings we made in the common room in the dorm last year.

After a while, Allison said, “I should probably go back inside. It’s getting late.”

“Okay,” I replied. “Thanks for hanging out. It was nice meeting you.”

“Yeah. You too.”

“I’ll talk to you soon?”

“Sure. Good night.”

“Good night,” I answered. I walked out of the gate, back toward the street. I had a feeling that I left a bad impression on Allison, and that we probably would not be seeing much of each other in the future. However, this did not feel like a blown opportunity, like sitting by the pool earlier today had been. Allison just was not my type. We were not interested in the same things, and with us both being so quiet, neither of us was able to get the other to open up much. I often pictured my ideal girlfriend being more talkative and outgoing than me, for that reason.

I got home a few minutes later; I had been gone for about an hour. I turned on the computer and thought about getting back on IRC chat, but something about that felt wrong, particularly if I were to see Allison online again so soon after seeing her in person. Instead, I played SimCity 2000, and went to bed around midnight.

I did talk to Allison a few more times on IRC. I did not want to be rude and stop talking to her altogether just because I did not think she was my type. But we never saw each other in person again, and I stopped seeing her on IRC around the time fall quarter started. As I drifted off to sleep that night, I kept replaying in my mind everything that had happened tonight. I felt sad that things had not gone better with Allison, but I had probably done nothing wrong. Maybe it was more of a feeling of disappointment, in the sense that I had wished Allison had been different and that we would have clicked better. But there was nothing I could do about that. It was perfectly normal for a guy and a girl not to click. At least I tried.