A Series of Brief Apologies to College Flings

As I have struggled in the past with legitimate apologies, this is an exercise in admitting and letting go.

So, I apologize that I insisted that we make out even though Craig was asleep in the floor next to us. I'm also sorry that I called you in the middle of a movie because I wanted to make out. I'm sure that it was completely tactless to phone you at a time when getting phoned is strictly prohibited, but I had an agenda, and it just seemed to me that calling you was the most valid option. I'm even more sorry that in trying to save social decorum that I allowed Craig to come in and watch that movie with us. I think we both knew that neither of us was interested in that movie, and considering how fast he fell asleep in the floor, he probably wasn't either. So much wasted time. So tactless.

For you, I'm sorry about Cinco de Mayo. That was really awkward wasn't it? I had my eye on you all night, and you seemed like you wanted nothing to do with me. Then our friends kept matching us up together, even if it was out of malice and boredom, but I thought it was really great! Then you got mad and left, and I explained that I just thought you were super attractive and that I wanted to kiss you. So then we made out for a little bit, and that was cool. I'm sorry that I jumped in that pool after you, mostly because I scraped up my knees pretty badly that night; someone should have told me the pool was three feet deep. I'm sorry you deleted me off Facebook in a record seven hours after the initial making out. I'm sorry that I didn't know you had a boyfriend, and I'm even more sorry that your boyfriend decided to confront me about the whole issue the night before graduation. Talk about walking into that one blind.

And to you, I'm sorry that you somehow misconstrued that pop kiss as the full blown sexual assault that you seemed to tell everyone else about. I suppose I should have seen it coming, considering that ginger mane that went relatively unkempt for most of the time that we hung out. Furthermore, I am more sorry that I had to find out that you not only told my peers, but my professor, which I just recently found out about when I had dinner with him. I apologize that he didn't like you too much, either. And lastly, I apologize for the first time that you have sex because I imagine that it will be a terrorist level red assault on your personal psyche.

For you, I'm really, really sorry that I fell asleep. Seriously, if there's one apology that might garner some kind of sincerity throughout this entire thing, it's yours. I suppose I was just tired or something, but I just passed out there, didn't I? I know that one day, we'll probably laugh about all of this, probably me sooner than you, but at the end of the day, I think we can both agree that it's probably more of a slight against my character than it is yours. If you remember, during season two of Grey's Anatomy, Cristina fell asleep when she was making sweet love to Dr. Preston Burke, and they ended up getting married! ...um, kind of. They were going to get married, then Burke left and that fantastic Ingrid Michaelson song played, and, well... maybe that wasn't the best comparison.

You were a really fantastic individual, and I came to the conclusion early that I was "the guy who won't get no love from you" or better known as a scrub to Destiny's Child, but in the moments that we were... um... intimate... I was always reconfused when you would invite me on dates with you and your boyfriend. But because I was more in love than a passionate Barbara Streisand song, I played along because that was more fun than watching more episodes of Ghost Whisperer on Friday nights. And they weren't all bad; remember that one time we all went to the club and I ended up making out with someone from Newport on the dance floor? That was pretty neat!  I'm sorry that you invited your boyfriend everywhere, and I'm sorry that he was kind of rotund. I'm not hating against rotund people; I myself was quite rotund at one point in my life.

To you, I'm sorry I started crying like that. It was a really emotional time, and I don't want to talk about it. Just know I'm super sorry.

I'm sorry that I never wanted to be in a relationship. Like, seriously. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I spent a year apologizing for that, and I suppose I'm sorry that preempted that super awkward make out sesh with an episode of Glee. It seems like TV plays a really big role in my life, and it was at that point when Glee was really motivational, and it all seemed like the right thing to do. Sometimes I think back on that evening, and I wonder if I misled you with the promise of a simple Glee episode in nothing more, but then there was the chemistry and the seemingly surface level commonalities, and one thing led to another. I apologize for not being a cuddler; I was as surprised as you. Being as emotional as I am, I really thought I would be more into that, but it really just made me sleepy, and I like sleeping by myself. But most of all, I'm sorry that you made me get rid of that Love and Other Drugs poster. I really liked Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal.

Even though we were never a fling, I'm really sorry for all those awkward advances on spring break. I'm even more sorry that you thought that bringing a six pack of Smirnoff Ice Grape was an acceptable choice for an alcoholic beverage. I'm even, even more sorry that you demonstrated what you could do with a Smirnoff Ice bottle in front of the entire room. I'm sorry that I didn't stop you from going on a walk with Hayden, and I apologize that it took so long to find you... however, let me explain. There was some guy on the steps that night, and I had to pick him up and carry him to his room because if I didn't, he was going to have the worst neck cramp in the world the next day. I'm also sorry that you were able to identify Ralph Lauren pants so well; what an embarrassing skill to have.

When We Were Young

I miss the days when we were young.

And I don't know why we tried so hard to speed through it all, blindly claiming a title of "adult" that I'm still not so sure that we understand. But we graduated college, and there was really no time taken to just enjoy what we had stumbled into: the real world, as if we hadn't been living in the real world before that. I remember sitting on the phone as we tried to figure out how we would pay our rent with the job that we had taken just to ensure that there would be money in our then-hopeless accounts. We decided that we wouldn't worry because the odds were in the Mayans favor, and we wouldn't have to live much longer past our graduation if we came up short.
In a surprise turn of events, neither ever happened. We lived on into 2013 and even in the months that the bills seemed to be beyond our control, there was something that happened that made it all work. And even though I never said anything to you about it, I know that your parents helped you out that one month when your tire blew out right on the interstate. It was still all too new of a place for anyone to come to you, so you sat on the side of the road and cried. You cried about the tire and the money and the loneliness. You cried because you wanted to go home; not just home but your bed, the one you grew up in with the wooden spindles you'd trace with your fingers as a child. I know how you felt because I felt the same way, and I called home, too.
Sure, we struggled. We never expected not to, but in the middle of all of that I wish we had taken the time to realize just how beautiful that struggle was. We were always chastised for saying that our generation was special so we took those moments as a punishment; we made them into something that was supposed to teach us a lesson without realizing that maybe after all, we were special. It had nothing to do with "our generation" or the generations before us that apparently struggled harder than we ever could have imagined, going here and there uphill both ways. It had to do with us, and the only promise that we would go on to make about our experience is that we would never try and make our children feel as small as we did. We were special because we made it. Everything else was just a bonus.
We continued through our twenties, landing jobs applicable to what we actually hoped we would do, and most of the time, it surprised us more than it surprised anyone else. Eventually, it meant less to prove ourselves to those around us and more that we actually did something that we secretly believed would never happen. In the meantime, we made fun of our friends back home that would get married, without ever willing to admit that we might be jealous. We might be doubtful. What if we had stayed back and chosen the path that seemed safest? Wouldn't it at least be a bit easier if we had someone with us along the way? There was no time to reconsider though; we made the decision we did, and you know, I wouldn't go back and change it. It made me have to look at myself in the mirror and be content with the solitude. It was just me standing there, and I had to be okay with that. We all did.
In all the hardships that we faced, the moments that came in between seem to have erased them from my memory. Of course there's still fragments, but can you say that they really mattered in comparison to the rest? People in their twenties are not supposed to go to Italy, but it was what we wanted, so we counted noodles out of a box for a while. A couple tablespoons of tomato sauce, and that was our dinner because... soon, we would be eating real Italian pasta. And I'm not sure how we pulled it off, but we did. We made it happen because we promised ourselves that we would. We wouldn't settle for the fates that had been determined for us because, deep down, we knew that we wanted more. I don't care what anyone says, we deserved more. So we took it by the throat; we choked the life out of it. All of our dreams did not come true, but isn't that why you dream so many of them? Surely, we thought, if we made a list a mile long we would be able to accomplish at least a handful.
Look at us now. You've moved into that house in the subdivision, and you got married, even though you said you never would. Kendall needs braces, and it's completely bullshit that it costs about as much for those as it did for us to leave the country. But I guess we have the kind of jobs you need to pay for stuff like that. And I'm waiting for the final manuscript to come back from the publisher, and as much as I've loved it, I miss the days that I would hungrily sit in front of the computer and write that blog. No one picked it apart; my words were only up for my scrutiny. No one was asking me to put it down and come to bed; there wasn't a dog scratching at the door to be let out. And in the darkness of a computer screen gone black, I begin to see the slight wrinkles developing on my thirty-nine year old face.

Do you know how long it's been since we met up for Italian food? I miss it. I miss being young. I just wish that someone had reminded us to stop trying to rush though. I wish that we hadn't been so stuck on the ideals of growing older. I wish we had been reminded more often that the world was at our fingertips. Maybe it still is.

Sure we're too old to be on the Olympic gymnastics team or to have someone buy us liquor because we're underage, but I sometimes wonder what we're missing by looking so closely at the past. We haven't missed it; we've just been looking in the wrong places.

Did You Fart On My Pillow?

As a resident assistant for three years, I never had to turn in a single situation revolving around alcohol, which is seemingly the most obvious offense that an RA would have to deal with. In every college party gone awry, there is some jerk who shows up with a badge and a clip board and busts the party up because "freshman Kelly" knew some of the soccer guys and she was really cute and she only drink Smirnoff... blah, blah, blah. That never happened to me. As long as I could look up at the building and not see anyone hanging completely out the window with a bottle of Jager in their hands (you have to have both because I saw plenty of people just normally hanging out the window), then I didn't really care all that much to bust people. I only had two issues that normally came up in my building: people wanting to harm themselves or poop. Out of respect and class, we'll focus on the poop (which is the only time I'll ever be able to fashion that sentence in my life).

This child would NEVER have had pink eye.

I should have known that poop would be a common factor in my college experience, as I seemed to be constantly surrounded by it from the time I got there. As an elementary school student, I was never one of those children that ended up with lice or pink eye. We shunned those students and commonly talked about how their parents must make them sleep on the ground whilst washing themselves in the same bath water over and over. There had to be something wrong with those children's home lives. If you wanted to be decently respected as an elementary school success story, you better never have lice or pink eye, and if you did, it didn't hurt if you brought your Lite Brite to school so other kids could play with it and eventually forgive you. So, naturally, I was devastated to find out as a nineteen year old college student that I had... pink eye.
When I went to the nurse, I was practically berated with a slew of uncomfortable and accusatory questions: Have you found yourself in the company of a lot of smoke? I can't remember my last Def Leppard concert, but I'm going to go with no. Do you not wash your hands after going to the bathroom and then touch your face? No, I do not wipe my butt then take my contact out. Has anyone had any sexual contact with your eye? Are you serious right now? I actually had to pause when answering this question to interpret how someone could feasibly have sexual contact with my eye, and furthermore to contemplate who in the world would attempt the ludicrous things that my mind was coming up with. After some soul searching, I had determined: no. No one had had sexual contact with my eye.
The doctor went on to explain that somehow, some kind of bacteria had crept its way into my eye and made home, kind of like when you move into a new apartment and have a "nesting ritual." This was not the allergy related type of pink eye that people could justify by coming up with a convenient reaction to grass or mold. This was the nasty kind; essentially the STD of the ocular world. I had, by some measure, been eye raped.
I wore my dark rimmed glasses to cover up the shame, but it was no use. People would ask me about my eye and what had happened. Without any warning or lying ability, I would tell them of my infectious disease and they would look at me like a nasty animal. I was the equivalent of a malnourished cat with little eye crusties on the edge of its eyelids. I was an ophthalmological pity case. Some thief in the night was responsible for this; I knew it. I was too clean, too careful for this kind of thing to happen to me. I washed my pillowcases bimonthly. I wasn't the type of person who got pink eye. I felt like the Hester Prynne of the visual world, with my puffed up eye being the letter A I would carry around to proclaim my shame to the world, and in my ignorance of how pink eye was spread, I began to wonder how much other people knew. What if they went around chattering among each other, I can't believe he let someone do that to his eye! I didn't know he was into that freaky stuff... It was too much. There had to be an answer.
So when I was talking to my freshman roommate about the whole ordeal, he said, Maybe Zak did something. I looked at him and said, What do you mean 'maybe Zak did something?' He then began to tell me, with that impossibly smug smile on his face that at one point the week before, he let a guy into our room that had something for me. Then when he was leaving the room, he said that the guy was pulling his pants up. I was livid. Who forgets to tell someone when someone was coming to leave your roommate something then leaves pulling his pants up? How is that a detail that you forget to mention to someone. Sure, I accidentally ate your last pack of Ramen; sorry I didn't mention it, or I meant to tell you that someone called your phone while you were in the bathroom, but if there's one thing I wouldn't forget to mention it's Someone came to leave you something in our room, and they left pulling up their pants.
I immediately starting asking around, trying to pick up any clues that anyone would have. Most people knew nothing, but for those who obviously did, it was like watching an excerpt out of a college version of Winter's Bone. I expected one of them to pull me aside with a Dale Dickey voice and say, I told you to listen. You should have listened. I wanted finality for this crime, but no one would offer me any information to help me solve it. Just a smile and a shrug followed by, I don't know what you're talking about. It's not like I was speaking in a foreign language or asking about international relations between Guam and Peru; I was asking if anyone knew if Zak had air shat on my pillow. No one would answer; no one cared... not like I did.
And the mystery would go on to be ultimately unsolved. Sometimes people would talk about that one guy that got pink eye from the guy who farted on his pillow, but no one would ever mention names. They're secrets were safe in the bonds of idle chit chat and gossip, and when I was around, the conversation would stop. But I know, I always know. And it's a terrible prank, nothing like putting someone's fingers in water to see if they'll pee the bed or seran wrapping a toilet seat. No, this is a dangerous game that requires antibiotics and strips the victim of their innocence and clear vision. The night after graduation, a group of us collected in the parlor of Carnegie. Zak was there as well, and I couldn't help myself. Because it was the last time most of us would see one another (and probably partly due to the half a box of wine I had drank), I had confidence I had never felt before. I asked him, in front of everyone, Zak, be real with me for a second. Did you fart on my pillow and give me pink eye? The room fell silent; we all knew exactly what I was talking about--a grudge that had never fully been let go.  As thoughtfully as he could, he looked at me and said, Dude. No. I didn't fart on your pillow. I would admit to it if I did. But the problem is, once someone flatuates on your pillow, you never really come to trust anyone again fully. Even your best friends, and to this day, I have promised myself two things: 1) I will never again leave my pillows unattended. 2) I will find who gave me pink eye, even if it takes cutting off their hands in the middle of a lake.

Gas Station Nancy

As I prepare to pack up and move to D.C. this week, I've been doing my best to try and say goodbye to the people that have come to mean the most to me. I picked up my friend in Maryville a couple nights ago, and as we were driving back, I announced, We have to stop by and see Nancy. She didn't understand, Who is Nancy? I was almost disgusted by her forgetfulness. Anna, we have to see Nancy. At the EZ Stop. Nancy with the frosted tips. Anna and I had befriended Nancy sometime last year, as we made entirely too many trips to get cigarettes after midnight. She usually works the late shift, so I was confident we would run into her during our 1:00am excursion. As we pulled up to the store, no one was behind the counter. Nothing new: Nancy is usually out smoking or literally hiding in the bathroom or back in the gas station office. As Anna perfectly imitated, she always appears out of some place random and yells out, "Oh! I was just cleaning," as if she ever had to give us a reason for being misplaced. But she really wasn't there this time; we saw the door to the Gatorade open and immediately knew it wasn't her. Nancy does a lot of things at the gas station, but the one thing she does not do is work, let alone stock the Gatorades. As I left, I began to consider the people that I befriend; most 22 year old men do not befriend 60 something year old gas station workers, especially the ones with frosted tips.

Nancy and me, the night before my graduation.

But I have all these very interesting, very odd friends that I'm not particularly sure how I ended up befriending. I have this weird ability to reach out to just about anyone I meet and find some kind of commonality. Nancy and I met over a pack of cigarettes, and eventually we found common ground on the fact that most of our extended family has been in jail for one thing or another. She told me I reminded her a lot of her son, though from the picture I saw, I would never be caught dead in a white suit, but that's beside the point; Nancy and I had something special, and even if it was originally a running joke, I find ways to connect to people in the oddest circumstances.

But it's really no surprise; I always connect with the people that others are most unlikely to connect to. I can't say it's always a productive thing, as I probably take chances on people that I shouldn't. Before we even started college, members of our class starting friending one another on Facebook. I thought it was a pretty normal thing, so I played along. Anyone that sent me a friend request was accepted, and I didn't find that to be a problem until we started living on campus.

After a couple days, I was sitting in the dining hall eating a bowl of cereal when a girl appeared behind me. I didn't see her, but I heard her, kind of in the same fashion that Helga from Hey Arnold always heard that one kid with the glasses breathing behind her. I turned around and there she was, inches away from my body. I looked up and said hello, and she responded, You're the boy that lives in my computer. It was the exact kind of moment when you want as many people to be around as possible, as the chance that the next action could end with you getting knifed or chloroformed, but alas, it was just the two of us. I didn't know what to say, so in desperation, I asked her if she wanted to sit down. That was all that was said, and she spent the rest of breakfast staring at me as I finished my bowl of cereal. And that's the trouble with befriending anyone and everyone... you have some hits and misses, and then sometimes, you have people that just stare at you the entire way through your otherwise normal breakfast.
But if there's one job that someone like myself should probably never have, it's waiting. I've had the opportunity to meet entirely too many people this summer, and when I really like them, I want to take them home with me like a dollar on the ground or a lost kitten. And the problem is that most of the people that I feel this way about are people that are most definitely not acceptable in social situations. As a couple of old ladies walked into Big Mike's this summer, Marsha looked around at me and said, Stay away from them. Those are the whores of Seymour. I glanced to confirm who I'd seen; yep, they were easily in their late 60s, probably 70s. If I didn't already love them just from seeing them, knowing they were the neighborhood whores only made me love them more. I immediately grabbed their table, hoping for some conversational diamonds in the rough. They asked me if I had graduated high school yet, which from anyone else would have been offensive. I explained that I was going to graduate school in the fall and one of them told me that I should just stay and date her, an offer that I would have gladly accepted because I love me some cougars.
Soon, they began asking me about school and where I would go. I told them that I would be moving to DC to go to Georgetown and a grim look came over both of their faces. The oldest one turned to me and practically yelled out, You know there's colored people all over the place up there. A sweet boy like you's gonna be walkin' around all sweetly up there and one of those black people's gonna come up and knock the shit out of you. Leave you right there on the street, bleedin'. I am very rarely stunned beyond words, but I didn't know what to say. The other one chimed in, It's a damn shame. You're such a nice boy. I wasn't sure if I should have been more offended that they used "colored" in context as if that's just a normal thing to say or if I should be more afraid that they've already written me off for dead. It was like I told them that I had been drawn at the reaping to go into The Hunger Games. I could just imagine them saying, He was such a nice tribute, but he's no career. I started wondering if maybe Marsha was looking out for my best interest; maybe it was best to stay away from the whores of Seymour, even if they did leave me a five dollar tip for bringing them out pie.
Regardless, I refuse to give up on my search for out of the box awkward friends because in the mass of breakfast creepers and racist old women, there's a Nancy hiding in there somewhere. And maybe it is a bad quality, going around and befriending strangers, but there's something about the obscurity of it that draws me in every time. And even when they're super racist old ladies, there's something charming in the fact that they look out for my best interest by warning me of my unofficial race-related death. If you don't talk to people, you never get the chance to get to know them, and even if you don't get to know them, you miss out on the opportunity to hear the absurd and sometimes creepy things that people say. It's weird that as I'm about to leave, Nancy is one of the people that pops into my head to tell goodbye, but aren't we supposed to have an impact in as many lives as we can? Life is too short to ignore people that you don't think you have time to get to know. If you happen to find yourself in the Maryville area and desperately in search for overpriced gas, stop in at the EZ Stop and tell Nancy I said hello; she'll know who you're talking about.

Children of the Porn

As my friend and I were having a sleepover (at 22 years old, mind you), we were flipping through the porn titles on television, picking out our favorite ones based on creativity and shock value. Neither of us were ever inclined to actually watch one, but the titles were fantastic. They all follow the same basic structure, kind of like a Mad Lib. (Adjective) (Inappropriate term for a female) (Inappropriate term for having intercourse) (on/in/under/with) (dealer's choice: choose whatever word you want), then follow it with either the number 3, 4, or 8. And after considering the gross (that's a double entendre if I've ever seen one) amount of pornography that someone can buy for a shockingly high rate of 14.99, I came to the conclusion; we have entirely too much access to pornography. When I look back on my life, though my parents made a pretty decent effort from shielding me from the mysteries of what naked bodies looked like, I determined that I've been surrounded by the stuff my entire life. It was always by some weird circumstance or random situation beyond my control; my parents wouldn't let me watch the scene of Titanic when Leo and Kate fornicated in the Model T, but I managed somehow to stumble upon some kind of raunchy something on HBO. It made no sense to me, but there it was.

Yes, Kate Winslet? Do you have a question?

My dad had a friend that used to always come up and visit us when I was younger. We always called him Shorty, and to this day, I'm not sure what his real name was, if he even had one. But one day, Shorty called me out of the house from watching Power Rangers, which royally pissed me off, and said he had to show me something out in his truck. Frustrated and unfocused, I dragged myself from out in front of the television and out toward his white Chevrolet. I looked around for my parents, but they were missing... they were never missing. My spidey sense was tingling, and I could feel something weird about to happen. As he pulled something out of his truck, he gave me what I have come to know in my mind as "the man speech," I'm about to show you something awesome. This sh-t is something you'll remember for the rest of your life. And if you like it, you can keep it." Nothing about that sounded comforting, but before I knew it there it was. A Playboy. He would instruct me what to do next,  Check out those titties, boy. That's a nice set of titties. No sir. Not in my driveway. And for the record, I did not keep it.
Growing up, we would always watch WWE/WWF/WCW... whatever it was. Sable was always my favorite and probably not for the regular boy reasons. I liked her because she was built for winning, and wasn't afraid to powerslam another woman. She had cat music, and I was pretty fond of cats. She pulled people's hair, smacked them on the face, and never cried. So imagine my surprise when she was taking up two pages of that magazine wearing nothing but... paint. In my nine years of life, I was never so disappointed in a hero. Nudity was nothing to be prided upon in my family; it was something you reserved for the shower, and you should probably feel bad for being naked in there, too. I smiled because I thought I was supposed to, but inside, it made me nervous. I wanted my parents to show up, and in my own form of Catholic guilt, I wouldn't tell them about seeing Sable... all painted and full of sin... until I was in high school.
And the pornography has followed me around ever since. It's nothing I've ever wanted, but more, just happened upon me. The night I submitted my grad school application to Vanderbilt, I had been watching Easy A, a personal favorite of mine, on Showtime. I had since ignored it to finish the fine touches on what I deemed to be a beautiful personal essay and writing sample. Right as I started to press submit, I heard a sigh from the TV; porn. Again. I don't know how it ended up there, but apparently at some point in the night, TV just throws everything sacred out the window and starts playing the nasties. I was half tempted to apologize in my essay for the surprise porn playing in the background as I submitted my application, but I decided not to. I knew I wasn't getting in; the unholiness had seeped into the essay magically. There was no hope. So, I'm not sure what steps I can take to escape this pornographic undertone that keeps haunting my life. I assume that it came from a spell that Sable cast from the page on to me at just a tender nine years old.
As hard as Shorty may have tried, I just never really understood the point of it all. I imagined that as I got older, the reasons would start to connect. I would understand pornography. But like a lot of things about adult life, there was no clear cut methodology to understanding it. It's something you're supposed to "enjoy," but watching pornography for "enjoyment" makes as much sense to me as watching someone eat a piece of lasagna and getting full. The concept weirds me out the same way today as it did standing in my driveway, averting my eyes towards Sable's face wondering, as the precocious nine year old I was, what does your father think of this?

The Trouble with Balls

Coming from a baseball family, it was hard to imagine that I wouldn't pick up a bat until well into my teens, let alone never really desire to. There were already enough Kirklands for that. When I think back upon my coming of age stories involving sports, there were a lot of tell tale signs that should have warned me to never pick up anything that involved fast-paced focus or quick physical skill. As part of my obsessive compulsive disorder, I like things that have endings, things that are finite. That's why when I get nervous in a conversation, I glance into a corner: three walls that come to a point. There was just never really a place for something as clumsy and round as a ball in my life. Playing sports was like holding one of those slippery cylinder toys people my age played with when they were younger (and you do not know what kind of a struggle it was trying to find a picture of one online). It was just something I was never good at, and honestly, it didn't bother me too much. However, imagine the surprise of my family when I started reading books at an embarrassing rate. What do we do with the child that eats a lot of Chef Boyardee in his spare time while rereading Little Women for the Accelerated Reader points? There was only one solution: recreational league soccer.
And I guess that maybe I wasn't so horrible at it, but in rec league soccer, you learn quickly that if you're the pudge on the team, you get placed at fullback. That's why I jumped on the opportunity to be goalie (or keeper, which I learned is the more professional term), when our regular goaper was struck in the temple by a stray soccer ball. My padded exterior could take the hit, and I knew that it was my time to shine. That was my strategy in sports... play the sideline until someone got maimed or possibly even killed.

This is what sports are to me. An uncontrollable force that ultimately
lead you to throwing something (the water snake) across the room.

And that's exactly why I joined the middle school men's volleyball team as... wait for it... team manager. And sure, I sat most of the time, and my responsibilities constituted me putting up and taking down the net, picking up the balls, and making sure people had their appropriate water bottle. But the day that Jake Baker twisted his ankle was probably the best day of my life. It was the middle of a tournament, and considering that there was practically no funding or interest in middle school male volleyball to begin with, there was no second string. I was the second string. As he was taken off the court, I finally got to join in the huddle. Our coach said something about us playing like p--sies, and while everyone else seemed annoyed and bothered, I was excited. Man talk. How cool is that? I didn't mind being called that because it meant that I was playing, and that's all that mattered until the first shot came to me and hit me in the face. I was removed from the court and replaced by a gimp Jake, who was determined to be more valuable at half-functionality than I was at full.
So, I kind of gave up after that. I just didn't know what to do with all the balls: footballs didn't spiral, basketballs didn't dribble, and I had no idea what kind of secret handshake constituted a successful bump in volleyball. The concepts were apparent to me, but there was something about making them physically happen that was just beyond my imagination. I didn't understand the shortage that was happening between my head and my hands or feet or sometimes my chest, torso, knees, and the occasional wrist hit.

I wish there were more single or double person sports,
like limbo or ballroom dancing.

It wasn't until college that I would try and play any kind of sport again, and that's when I enlisted in intramurals. I was informed that it was "not competitive, and just for fun!" And that was the only exclamation mark I've ever associated with intramurals in a positive light. For the one and probably only time in my life, I represented the Kirkland family in an overly, and kind of intimidatingly, intense version of softball. That's another problem that I've encountered with sports: people get way too involved and blame other people. That's why I like playing tennis for four minutes, or Wii Golf, or ballroom dancing. But all that's beside the point: let's get back to intramural softball. Our team sucked; it didn't take an ESPN commentator to figure that out. We were comprised of the people that weren't good enough to play a college sport in season, so we just kind of gathered together to try and not be horrible. So it was quite a shock to me, at the bottom of the fourth inning when our "team captain" told me that I needed to step it up, or I would be sitting on the bench for the rest of the game. That's when I responded, Or I can just leave now and save everyone the trouble. I don't care, I could be watching TV.
I never cared enough to keep playing or be harshly pep talked into trying harder. I kind of just wanted to drink a half of a flask and stand out on some grass for a while with a leather mitten on my hand, as opposed to the normal routine of drinking half a flask and standing in my room with regular mittens on my hands. After that game, I refused to show up for anymore games or practices, and when people would text me to ask where I was, I would respond, No thanks. I'm going to take a nap instead.
So maybe my unsuccessful sports streaks have to do with most of the maxims that athletes pride themselves on: practice, a positive attitude, actual ambition, hand-eye coordination, and the hope that the other players on your team don't get injured. I never wanted or had any of those qualities. All I wanted to do was listen to my French practice tapes and listen to some Ingrid Michaelson. But I did love the Capri Suns and orange slices; that's actually what probably brought me back to keep trying. And I'm sure one day, I'll find another sport that seems to be calling my name--and after I finish throwing whatever equipment comes with said sport across the field/court/etc, I'll excuse myself for a nice juice box and fruit plate.

What a Perfectly Unsatisfying Moment

As I'm on my trek back home, sitting on the MegaBus once again, I keep listening to an alternating duo between "Greyhound Bound for Nowhere" and "California King Bed" because you have the whole I'm on a bus and I'm traveling between here and there and I'm so interesting thing going on, and surely, there's some kind of hidden melodramatic moment in all of that. But, like most of the moments in my life that I purposefully try to make into a big deal, it's not. There's this woman in front of me with an airbrushed shirt that says Deonna in stereotypical airbrush cursive handwriting, and then in a surprise turn of events, Chris Metts is sitting behind me, and right when I get into super melodramatic mode, I have to re-convince my dad that the Indian woman that keeps glancing back at us is A) not going to blow up the bus, B) probably wearing a red jewel because she's Hindu, and that they have a pretty okay record when it comes to not blowing up buses, C) probably confused because she's never seen a mustache that size before. By the time I get settled back in to have my melodramatic moment, the time is gone or I'm just too tired to try again. You can imagine my frustration.
I shouldn't be surprised because I had to come to terms a long time ago that the world isn't nearly as eventful and emotional as I would like it to be, and when you try to make these moments happen yourself, it's kind of more of a wreck than it would have been before. Regardless, I make it a point to at least try. And in a way, what are we without those moments? Sure, none of them have ever worked out, but in a way, that's the beauty of it... trying to live up to what we believe is perfect in our mind. That's what happened this past Valentine's Day... and on spring break... and with my first girlfriend... maybe this happens too often.
In my first relationship, we didn't have nearly enough in common to be in a relationship; actually, there wasn't much holding us together beside the fact that we both loved to make out. So that's what we did. We made out and we argued, and that was that. So as part of our ritual, we were making out on the trampoline one day, as sixteen year olds do, and we started getting into an argument. I can't remember what it was about, but it was something absolutely pointless, I'm sure. She stormed off the trampoline, and I followed behind, trying to make the situation better when it hit me. This could be a moment. She started up the steps of my back porch that my dad had built. Apparently, when we built the porch, he didn't choose treated lumber. The difference between treated and untreated lumber is that if it's treated, it protects the integrity of the wood. The boards were beginning to warp after time, so some boards stuck up farther than the rest. My plan was to kiss her. Just kiss her mid-sentence. It would be perfect, so as I went in for the kiss right in the middle of her saying something, my foot caught a board. I knew it was all out of my hands, as my body starting falling forward. My headed collided with her chin, and if I remember correctly, that was one of just a very few times I ever heard her cuss. Moment gone. It seemed like the right idea at the time because I had seen it in movies and read about it in romance novels, but there was something terribly difficult when it came to executing it.
But it was nothing in comparison to the disaster that was this past Valentine's Day. I had never been involved with someone on Valentine's Day, and regardless of who you are, you want to be involved with someone on Valentine's Day. The closest I had previously gotten to something romantic on Valentine's Day was splitting a heart shaped pizza from Domino's with Kasi our freshman year. At the end of the evening, we watched Divine Secrets of the Ya Ya Sisterhood, drank Bloody Mary's in my room, and smelled like garlic. So even in the ruins of a doomed relationship, I was determined. The night before, we had stood on the steps of the library and decided that things were falling apart. We were nearly broken up, when we were interrupted by practically the sixth or seventh person walking up to say hello when I was jarred with the obvious: Valentine's Day is tomorrow. Don't screw this opportunity up. There's a moment to be had here. So I prolonged the break up, promising that we would continue to try, and at the time, it seemed totally feasible.

There's the actual dinner in discussion, in all its trendy
Instagram glory.

The next day, I skipped all my classes and went to the grocery store to buy mushrooms and green beans and chicken. I would make the perfect Valentine's Day dinner, and it would be enough to turn everything around. If I believe one thing about this world, it's that food has the ability to make everything better. That's why we bring casseroles to funerals. As I was making the dinner, shuffling between the filling for the stuffed mushrooms and the breading for the chicken, my friend Bridget asked me, Why are you doing this? And it was obvious: because Valentine's Day is supposed to be special. And it wasn't until after dinner that I heard I'm not a big fan of chicken, and I hate mushrooms that it hit me. I had wasted a bunch of time trying to make a perfect moment when I could have just let some kind of perfect moment come to me. Soon after, I found myself sitting in my room, toying back and forth between throwing a half eaten chicken breast and two stuffed mushrooms away. My theory was: I mean, I've kissed this person, so there's really no shame in... yeah. I ate it. But my second theory, and arguably more important, theory was: if a moment is supposed to be perfect, maybe you shouldn't have to work so hard for it. Working hard is for goals. Working hard is watching Silent Hill when you absolutely know that you hate video games, and thus, will most likely hate the movie equally as much. Working hard is for the long-term, whether or not it will eventually work in the end... not for simple moments.
And after I finished the abandoned chicken breast and mushrooms and then starting eating mashed potatoes straight from the pot, I started thinking about Bridget. Bridget, like me, seems to try way too hard to make things work. Also like me, Bridget is great at giving advice but terrible at taking it herself. But that night, as I spooned the bottom of the pot for what I'm sure finished off at least a pound of mashed potatoes in my stomach, her words hit me again: Why are you doing this? And it applied to a lot of things. Why was I trying to make this train wreck work? Why did I even make this dinner? Why are you a 22 year old man sitting in his kitchen eating mashed potatoes out of a pot originally intended for two? And most importantly... how in the hell did you learn to make mashed potatoes taste so delicious?
And at the end of the night, I sat at my desk and stared at the window overlooking Maryville for a long time and decided that there's not really time to try and create these perfect moments (unless you're on a nine hour bus ride, then you can do whatever the hell you want) because if they're supposed to be perfect, wouldn't it make sense that they would be perfectly random? Also, understanding that is half the battle... knowing that to an extent, we're totally not in control of our lives, or at least the things that involve us and other people. That's why going and seeing The Vow with Bridget and announcing that Whitney Houston had died to the Walgreens cashier was more of a romantic date than the well thought out dinner on Valentine's Day. And if you can't go through the streets, candidly informing people of the death of pop's arguably most talented voice with your significant other, then what kind of moments do you really have to live for?