Fine. I'll give you a freaking personal one.

So my 40 pages are due tomorrow, and I am very happy to say that (at this moment), 29 are completly finished and fully edited.... I'm just trying to figure out how to end the thing. See, through this whole memoir process, I was kind of freaked out about the page length... what story could I tell for that long? Now that I've worked it to death, I've realized that I have a lot more than 40 pages (trust me, I look through at least 20 additional pages that I don't want to throw away every couple of hours). So maybe, juuust maybe, this is just some sort of beginning to something bigger. Maybe I'll work on completing it after this class ends... who knows?

I need to finish that guy up, like right now, but I've been planning on posting this story all week: it's pretty light-hearted, but it is something more personal than I'd ever consider blogging about.

So here it is. How I met my first best friend at UMass. . . (anyone else been on nostalgia overload lately? I'm not fully there, but I can feel it coming... hfhflsfjsl).


I remember sitting in my Intro to Logic class (I thought Philosophy 110 would involve discussion not formulas). I am looking particularly cute this day because I had no classes prior to one o’clock on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This gave me time to sleep in, take a shower, and eat lunch. Life was good on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I sat in the 100-seat lecture room, always at least ten minutes early because being late for anything drives me insane. A guy sat down next to me, and I felt that he had to talk to me. I just knew. But, he wouldn’t even look at me! For an hour and fifteen minutes, we sat next to each other, not listening to the same lecture, and he couldn’t even give me a smile.


I walked into my next class, Intro to Personal Communication (possibly taught by the lamest professor in the world). I am sitting next to my new friend, Derek, when he walks in! The guy from my Logic class!


I tap Derek, “You see that kid right there?”


Derek looks at the kid walking across a row of the 400-seat lecture hall. “Yeah.” He seems uninterested.


“Well I hate him!”


This perks him up a bit. “Really?”


Not even a why? Just a really? I explain to him that I sat next to him, no, that he sat next to me in the class before this one, and he didn’t even look at me! Derek laughs, but I stay half-serious before falling into a class coma.


Two days later, Thursday, that kid sits next to me again! Ten minutes before class. I’m not looking too bad today either. Ten minutes before class I ask him: “So are you going to at least talk to me today?” His genuine shock is something I’ll never forget.


“Oh, uh, yeah…” he says.


Our conversation stayed on the surface: names, hometowns, dormitories (he actually lived in the same area as I). Dan and I became great friends during our first semester freshman year, and he is still one of my bests at the university four years later. We tell the story because it makes us giggle; our lives would have been drastically different if it wasn’t for that day (especially considering we shared a room for a semester). But it is only now that I question myself: where did I get that confidence? How was I so ballsy to think that this stranger needed to talk to me? Intuition? ESP?