Jenn And I
Back in October 1999 I was starting
to miss the social part of university life, so I decided to throw an Oktoberfest
party and invite all my friends. I served beer, bratwurst and pretzels, and
I even brought out some polka music. Despite that, it was a great success,
and a good time was had by all. So I decided to follow it up with a few more
parties: Februaryfest for my birthday, and Julyfest for Canada day, with all
canadian food, movies and music. All the invitations to these events were
emailed to my friends, and since I was single and looking at the time, the
postscripts for those invitations generally said something along the lines
of "the more the merrier, so feel free to forward this invitation to anyone
not on the list, particularly if they are of the female persuasion."
The next Oktoberfest was when two of my friends decided to take me up on that suggestion. They brought along not one, but two girls, one dressed all in purple (hair inclusive) and one wearing a big red cloak. While purple hair is interesting, it was the girl in the cloak that caught my attention, but not in the way you expect. Since I knew that one of my friends who brought her was involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism (people who dress up like lords and ladies, say "thee" and "thou", and hit each other with foam swords), and she was wearing the cloak, I assumed that she was the worst kind of member, those who can't leave their make-believe behind and don't quite have a firm grip on reality. While I do enjoy roleplaying, Star Wars and other forms of escapism, I find people who can't enjoy the real world very disturbing. So, with that prejudice established, I decided that my two friends who had brought these girls weren't allowed to bring girls anymore, and got on with the beer drinking and barbecuing that is the core of any function I plan.
One thing that my friends and I, or maybe it's just me and everyone humors me, like to do around new people is teach them the mushroom dance, a four part line dance which was pioneered by my friend Kavin. This party was no exception, and the girl who had entered wearing the cloak (she'd taken it off by now, as it was getting warm in the house) took to the dance like a baby to a cheese grater. In fact she enjoyed dancing so much that afterwards she spent most of the evening dancing alone in the living room, which I thought was decidedly odd.
When everything was winding down, and I was feeling good and mellow from a well planned event brought off successfully, the strange girl came up to me and very drunkenly announced that she had lost her socks, and apologized profusely to me for having done such a thing. The people she came with hauled her off home, and I went downstairs to discover her green socks "lost" on a purple couch. I threw the socks on the floor in my room, intending to give them back to the strange girl through those that had brought her out. Standing in the kitchen with the last of the stragglers I (in my own drunken way) marveled at what a geek that girl had been, holy cow, I thought only guys got that bad, etc.
Over the course of the winter I was given one or two opportunities to return her socks, but I was so put off by my first impression that I stayed home still hoping to just return the socks through some friends. I remained on the prowl, mostly online, but nothing worked out for me.
Februaryfest rolled around, and I was still looking. Before the party started, I got together with a small group of friends and I went to an Irish themed pub-restaurant, and the topic of "how to pick up women" came up in conversation. The general consensus was "play it cool", but I'm naturally a very eager person, and cool was something I've never been very good at, so the advice seemed rather useless.
That year some friends of mine who were renting a house together offered to let me throw the party at their place, an offer that I liked very much. I had been given a cigar by a friend of my Mothers who had received it from a co-worker just back from Cuba, and I brought three 750mL bottles of beer (including Fin du Monde, 9%alc/vol) with a 750mL stein, so I was set. I arrived at my friends' house and came up the stairs into the kitchen, when who do I see but Jenn, the crazy girl with the missing socks, who promptly hugs me and says "You still have my socks!" I stashed my beer in the fridge and made a hasty retreat.
The evening went well, I drank my large, strong beers, and smoked my foreign cigar, and I began to notice something. There were a lot of guys making drunken passes at Jenn by hugging her, but whenever I walked by, she would push away from them and hug me instead. At first I tolerated it, protesting that she was between me and my beer, but eventually it dawned on me: because I wasn't particularly interested in this girl, I could at long last play it cool. Then I thought of how many times I'd been rejected by people I'd been interested in because they got a bad first impression of me, so I decided to give Jenn a second chance to make that first impression. I remembered that she had enjoyed dancing at my last party, so I got some music going and taught her how to two-step. Some smarmy individual came by and asked to cut in and I said "Sure, go right ahead!", and I took the opportunity to refill my glass and hang out for a bit, thinking that this individual didn't stand a chance against me. Sure enough, the next time I walked through the kitchen, there was Jenn, dashing over to hug me. This time she kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed her back, and she took my hand and led me to a couch, where we conversed, kissing during the lulls in the conversation.
It was from the brief conversations we had on the couch that I learned a few things. First of all, she wasn't a member of the SCA, she just liked wearing that cloak, which I thought was reasonable enough. (In fact, I later learned that she had a unique and interesting fashion sense that I think of like this: picture a triangle, at one end is renaissance court dress, another is 70's punk, and the third is modern granola girl. Jenn's style is somewhere in the center of that triangle. Weird, yes, but not too weird for me considering my passion for loud Hawaiian shirts.) I also learned that she had been pretty smashed at Oktoberfest, and danced most of the evening because while she loves going out dancing, she'd been too busy with work to get out and do it. We briefly discussed topics like work, interests, future plans, and I came to realize that her and I were actually very similar, so we exchanged phone numbers.
An interesting aside, or at least I think of it of one of the highlights of the evening, was a loud, drunken individual who saw me on the couch with Jenn and exclaimed that I was his hero, because I smoked big cigars, drank big beers, and I got the girl. Indeed, that was my night.
Two days later I was getting ready for work. I was planning on calling Jenn right before I left so that if the conversation got awkward I would have an excuse to get off the phone. I was just in the process of brushing my teeth when the phone rang, and there she was, calling me. We made plans for the next weekend to meet at a restaurant in Vancouver for dinner. I wanted to do something nice, so I washed her socks, which had a pattern of white stars on the bottom for traction. I had been painting the numbers on some dice with glow in the dark paint, so I decided to paint the stars on her socks so that they'd glow in the dark. Our date rolled around and I got all dressed up and took the skytrain to Vancouver. When I got to the restaurant, I made an inquiry and found that she wasn't there yet, so I got a table and waited. I waited for about half an hour and gave her a call, but there was no answer at her place. I called her again half an hour later, again with no answer, so I decided I had been stood up and ordered some dinner. I had a couple beers and walked around the seawall, took a skytrain home and locked myself in my room with the leftover beer from Februaryfest.
Later on in the week I touched bases with Jenn and found out that she'd had two deaths in the family and had come down with a cold, and I figured that I got the better end of the deal with having been stood up. So we made arrangements to meet in the afternoon on the sea wall the next weekend (where I wouldn't have to buy a meal if something came up again). The next weekend came and I hopped back on the skytrain and went downtown. It was raining out and I didn't have an umbrella, so I stopped at The Bay and picked one up. I wound up running into Jenn at the bus stop before I got to the seawall, so we got on a bus together and headed out. She didn't bring an umbrella either, so that gave me an excuse to put my arm around her as we shared mine. (Incedentally, to this day we have only used that umbrella when we are together. We've each taken it out on our own, but it has yet to rain when only one of us has it.) We had the seawall to ourselves because of the weather and talked about everything as we made our way around. At one point Jenn wanted to walk out on a tidal flat, so she took off, and I looked down to watch my step as I went out to join her. When I looked up again she had fallen down from hurrying off and I felt a pang of sympathy, seeing as I would have died of embarrassment, so I helped her up and wiped some mud off her face and we continued our walk. We decided to get out of the wind, so we stopped for hot chocolate and pastries at a little cafe in Stanley Park, and we both pulled out our wallets to cover the bill. She said "I can get it," and my response was "OK, I'll buy dinner." (The significance here is that we both like to be self-sufficient, so I had just won this little contest by arranging to pay more.) After that we took a walk downtown, and we wound up having dinner at the sister restaurant of the one we had originally had a date for. We had been out for six hours without a lull in the conversation, and the only reason we ended the evening was because it was St. David's day and she had made arrangements to bring her welsh grill over to her mother's house that evening.
And the rest is history. Oddly enough, it turned out that for both of us it was our first date ever. We'd both had previous relationships, but none of them had started from dating. It's been two years since our first date, and she's waited for me while I was away for school and work, and if she has to go away for work experience with her schooling, I'll be waiting for her. She means the world to me.
The next Oktoberfest was when two of my friends decided to take me up on that suggestion. They brought along not one, but two girls, one dressed all in purple (hair inclusive) and one wearing a big red cloak. While purple hair is interesting, it was the girl in the cloak that caught my attention, but not in the way you expect. Since I knew that one of my friends who brought her was involved in the Society for Creative Anachronism (people who dress up like lords and ladies, say "thee" and "thou", and hit each other with foam swords), and she was wearing the cloak, I assumed that she was the worst kind of member, those who can't leave their make-believe behind and don't quite have a firm grip on reality. While I do enjoy roleplaying, Star Wars and other forms of escapism, I find people who can't enjoy the real world very disturbing. So, with that prejudice established, I decided that my two friends who had brought these girls weren't allowed to bring girls anymore, and got on with the beer drinking and barbecuing that is the core of any function I plan.
One thing that my friends and I, or maybe it's just me and everyone humors me, like to do around new people is teach them the mushroom dance, a four part line dance which was pioneered by my friend Kavin. This party was no exception, and the girl who had entered wearing the cloak (she'd taken it off by now, as it was getting warm in the house) took to the dance like a baby to a cheese grater. In fact she enjoyed dancing so much that afterwards she spent most of the evening dancing alone in the living room, which I thought was decidedly odd.
When everything was winding down, and I was feeling good and mellow from a well planned event brought off successfully, the strange girl came up to me and very drunkenly announced that she had lost her socks, and apologized profusely to me for having done such a thing. The people she came with hauled her off home, and I went downstairs to discover her green socks "lost" on a purple couch. I threw the socks on the floor in my room, intending to give them back to the strange girl through those that had brought her out. Standing in the kitchen with the last of the stragglers I (in my own drunken way) marveled at what a geek that girl had been, holy cow, I thought only guys got that bad, etc.
Over the course of the winter I was given one or two opportunities to return her socks, but I was so put off by my first impression that I stayed home still hoping to just return the socks through some friends. I remained on the prowl, mostly online, but nothing worked out for me.
Februaryfest rolled around, and I was still looking. Before the party started, I got together with a small group of friends and I went to an Irish themed pub-restaurant, and the topic of "how to pick up women" came up in conversation. The general consensus was "play it cool", but I'm naturally a very eager person, and cool was something I've never been very good at, so the advice seemed rather useless.
That year some friends of mine who were renting a house together offered to let me throw the party at their place, an offer that I liked very much. I had been given a cigar by a friend of my Mothers who had received it from a co-worker just back from Cuba, and I brought three 750mL bottles of beer (including Fin du Monde, 9%alc/vol) with a 750mL stein, so I was set. I arrived at my friends' house and came up the stairs into the kitchen, when who do I see but Jenn, the crazy girl with the missing socks, who promptly hugs me and says "You still have my socks!" I stashed my beer in the fridge and made a hasty retreat.
The evening went well, I drank my large, strong beers, and smoked my foreign cigar, and I began to notice something. There were a lot of guys making drunken passes at Jenn by hugging her, but whenever I walked by, she would push away from them and hug me instead. At first I tolerated it, protesting that she was between me and my beer, but eventually it dawned on me: because I wasn't particularly interested in this girl, I could at long last play it cool. Then I thought of how many times I'd been rejected by people I'd been interested in because they got a bad first impression of me, so I decided to give Jenn a second chance to make that first impression. I remembered that she had enjoyed dancing at my last party, so I got some music going and taught her how to two-step. Some smarmy individual came by and asked to cut in and I said "Sure, go right ahead!", and I took the opportunity to refill my glass and hang out for a bit, thinking that this individual didn't stand a chance against me. Sure enough, the next time I walked through the kitchen, there was Jenn, dashing over to hug me. This time she kissed me on the cheek, so I kissed her back, and she took my hand and led me to a couch, where we conversed, kissing during the lulls in the conversation.
It was from the brief conversations we had on the couch that I learned a few things. First of all, she wasn't a member of the SCA, she just liked wearing that cloak, which I thought was reasonable enough. (In fact, I later learned that she had a unique and interesting fashion sense that I think of like this: picture a triangle, at one end is renaissance court dress, another is 70's punk, and the third is modern granola girl. Jenn's style is somewhere in the center of that triangle. Weird, yes, but not too weird for me considering my passion for loud Hawaiian shirts.) I also learned that she had been pretty smashed at Oktoberfest, and danced most of the evening because while she loves going out dancing, she'd been too busy with work to get out and do it. We briefly discussed topics like work, interests, future plans, and I came to realize that her and I were actually very similar, so we exchanged phone numbers.
An interesting aside, or at least I think of it of one of the highlights of the evening, was a loud, drunken individual who saw me on the couch with Jenn and exclaimed that I was his hero, because I smoked big cigars, drank big beers, and I got the girl. Indeed, that was my night.
Two days later I was getting ready for work. I was planning on calling Jenn right before I left so that if the conversation got awkward I would have an excuse to get off the phone. I was just in the process of brushing my teeth when the phone rang, and there she was, calling me. We made plans for the next weekend to meet at a restaurant in Vancouver for dinner. I wanted to do something nice, so I washed her socks, which had a pattern of white stars on the bottom for traction. I had been painting the numbers on some dice with glow in the dark paint, so I decided to paint the stars on her socks so that they'd glow in the dark. Our date rolled around and I got all dressed up and took the skytrain to Vancouver. When I got to the restaurant, I made an inquiry and found that she wasn't there yet, so I got a table and waited. I waited for about half an hour and gave her a call, but there was no answer at her place. I called her again half an hour later, again with no answer, so I decided I had been stood up and ordered some dinner. I had a couple beers and walked around the seawall, took a skytrain home and locked myself in my room with the leftover beer from Februaryfest.
Later on in the week I touched bases with Jenn and found out that she'd had two deaths in the family and had come down with a cold, and I figured that I got the better end of the deal with having been stood up. So we made arrangements to meet in the afternoon on the sea wall the next weekend (where I wouldn't have to buy a meal if something came up again). The next weekend came and I hopped back on the skytrain and went downtown. It was raining out and I didn't have an umbrella, so I stopped at The Bay and picked one up. I wound up running into Jenn at the bus stop before I got to the seawall, so we got on a bus together and headed out. She didn't bring an umbrella either, so that gave me an excuse to put my arm around her as we shared mine. (Incedentally, to this day we have only used that umbrella when we are together. We've each taken it out on our own, but it has yet to rain when only one of us has it.) We had the seawall to ourselves because of the weather and talked about everything as we made our way around. At one point Jenn wanted to walk out on a tidal flat, so she took off, and I looked down to watch my step as I went out to join her. When I looked up again she had fallen down from hurrying off and I felt a pang of sympathy, seeing as I would have died of embarrassment, so I helped her up and wiped some mud off her face and we continued our walk. We decided to get out of the wind, so we stopped for hot chocolate and pastries at a little cafe in Stanley Park, and we both pulled out our wallets to cover the bill. She said "I can get it," and my response was "OK, I'll buy dinner." (The significance here is that we both like to be self-sufficient, so I had just won this little contest by arranging to pay more.) After that we took a walk downtown, and we wound up having dinner at the sister restaurant of the one we had originally had a date for. We had been out for six hours without a lull in the conversation, and the only reason we ended the evening was because it was St. David's day and she had made arrangements to bring her welsh grill over to her mother's house that evening.
And the rest is history. Oddly enough, it turned out that for both of us it was our first date ever. We'd both had previous relationships, but none of them had started from dating. It's been two years since our first date, and she's waited for me while I was away for school and work, and if she has to go away for work experience with her schooling, I'll be waiting for her. She means the world to me.