Before I get rolling on today’s topic, I’d like to report that I am no longer unemployed. It seems certain statements made in my last post, while laden with sarcasm, turned out to be strangely prophetic. I’d only been in Wilmington for one day when my cell phone rang with an unidentified Wilmington number. It had to be one of the 32 places I’d put in applications, and I knew that whatever job I was about to be offered, I would have to accept. Luckily for me, the voice on the other end of the line was the manager at a sushi place right down the street from our new apartment. With what probably seemed like excessive enthusiasm, I took the job, hung up and thanked my lucky stars someone had actually hired me.
I then got calls from 5 other restuarants, also offering me work.
So apparently there was never anything to worry about, but I’m happy to say that after a couple day’s training, I think sushi and I were meant to be.
Moving along, though… I was flipping through Facebook this afternoon when I came across a little artifact that had been sitting on my profile for precisely one year. It was a Graffiti note that I’d drawn – painstakingly, nervously. So nervously in fact that, as I recall, this final draft was actually a third or fourth attempt.
I’m not an artist.
I draw stick figures and smiley faces. I have no perception of proportion, no hand-eye coordination. But I’d decided to draw this particular invitation, thinking it fitting because it was the recipient’s fault that I had the program at all.
I was a Myspace girl. He was a Facebook boy.
We’d met at a photography studio I was managing. He was a lowly intern, and although I found him intriguing, I put up a wall of professionalism and ignored him mercilessly. But at the end of his internship, I was about to leave my position at the studio as well. All of the employees met one night for one last bash, and he and I were the last two standing along with my boss and his girlfriend – who got into a fistfight. There was a cut eye (hers) and broken nose (his) involved, and the intern and I were dragged into the argument. After an hour or so of high drama, both the boss and his girlfriend left the scene separately, and the intern and I turned to each other in bewilderment.
We sat at a patio table, unclear of what exactly had just happened. “I’m glad you were here,” I said, just as the proverbial ugly lights cast their glare out onto the patio, and the barback began stacking the chairs around us. “Can I give you a ride home?” I asked, and he did not decline.
On the way to my car, we passed a playground. “Swing?” he asked.
“What?” I turned to catch his meaning, but he was already up and over the fence.
“Coming?” he offered a hand over the low fence to help me over, and I, without a thought, followed. The intern lead me to the swingset, where twin swings swayed in the warm night breeze. And there we sat, occasionally rocking back and forth, and talked about everything and nothing at all. For how long, I don’t know, because it’s times like these when time means nothing.
I did eventually arrive home at 5:30 in the morning. My alarm would blare in an hour to wake me up to go work at the outdoor market in downtown Columbus. That evening, I would sit, a little delirious from lack of sleep, and devise a way- a meaningful, clever way- to ask the intern on a date. Not because I was a particularly bold girl, or dated often, or liked making the first move, but because I was relentlessly aware that I could not let this particular guy pass me by. Hence the nervous rendering of the Facebook graffiti.
The point is, there were at least a half a million times while I formed lines and shaded with my mouse with that little art program (never quite to my satisfaction) that I found myself second guessing and playing the “what if” game, questioning whether what I was up to was completely silly and would be viewed by its recipient as, well, lame. For one of the first times in my life, however, it occurred to me that what I was doing was being myself. I found my little plan both amusing and thoughtful. So, if some guy found it otherwise, well, he wouldn’t exactly be prepared for the girl behind it. Having decided then that I had nothing to lose, I clicked the “send” button, and off my graffiti went.
As you’ve probably surmised, the answer was a resounding “Yes.” Jeff and I met at a favorite cafe to share a bottle of wine. And the rest, as they say, is history.
I did, however, make him ask for the second date.
~a
It’s a mad world we live in, indeed, when we learn of a friend’s death not from a late-night phone call, or urgent e-mail, but from a Facebook invite to a memorial service that we accidentally come across one week too late.
I’ve been doing a little experiment this week: I’ve decided to speak my mind.
Curiouser & Curiouser 