27 April 2010
celebrate
I got a raise!
It's been six months, so I made my case, and it worked out in my favor. I love being part of this team, and think I'll be working for my boss for quite a while (in twentysomething speak).
Such a good feeling... putting down roots and feeling them strengthen into the earth.
04 April 2010
joyeux anniversaire
March 2009. I had had my eye on him since the previous fall. I knew he was a freshman because I had not seen him around until then, and I notice everyone. I found his profile on Facebook, but there was disappointingly little to go on, other than that he was a Capricorn, birth year unknown, and was interested in women. He was one of a handful of guys I had my eye on in that harmless, distracting way, because in the drought of life that was thesis, any pretty things provided welcome distraction. My world that spring revolved around page counts and source citations, and I lived day and night in Platt, Harvey Mudd's lounge with spacious leather sofas and soft lighting. I staked out my lair in Platt and was determined to finish my thesis in that room, even if it took all-nighters at the end to do so.
So on Sunday March 14th, the first weekend of Spring Break, my thesis components and I were comfortably splayed out in the back of the room at one of the long group tables. They are far enough away from the main area to discourage small talk, and allow a view of the entire room, so I can keep tabs on people coming and going. This Sunday, however, sightings were going to be slim. The room was completely empty at 2pm; everyone had left campus for the week. My eyes glanced up as I noticed someone - this guy - enter through the eastern doors and cross the room, not noticing me, and disappear out of my sight by the mail room. Along with the flickering of my interest suddenly flickered the entire light system in the room... on-off-on-off-on-off went the fluorescent light panels. The prankster, whomever he or she was, clearly did not realize I was writing a Very Important Paper. I let it go on a few more seconds, then called out, as nicely as possible, "Hi, do you mind leaving the lights on?" Out from the corridor a head of curls looked my way and a voice yelled, "Oh, sorry!" It was him - and a few moments later he barreled towards my table with a confidence that actually intimidated me. "Ugh, no... I have to work!" I thought, but there was no stopping him. An hour later, he left, and I was already intrigued with this curious fellow... that even though he was a freshman, he was actually 20 (only thirteen months younger than me), that he always knew he would take a year off after high school, that he was going to major in math, that he was in an improv theater troupe back home in the Bay Area, where he had lived his whole life, on the Oakland-Berkeley border in the Bay Area, and that he had an expansive knowledge of random YouTube videos. After school resumed, we had a few more flirtatious conversations in Platt, always intellectually fueled. He seemed to know so much, about so many different things. I was intrigued by his passion, by his zest and excitement for knowledge, while I was surrounded by burned-out seniors running on reserves as we tried to get through the last two months of our college career. And he was so enthusiastic about math! While I barely passed calculus, I could almost see his brain working as he thought about something, then grinned, eyes sparkling, prepared to impart his opinion. And I was turned on by his confidence; at one point during a conversation he moved from his chair to my sofa to draw a graph, sitting so close to me I could smell the scent of his skin, a mixture of Old Spice and soap. One night, at the very end of March, I left Platt at midnight after a long evening of work. As I was crossing the quad I noticed a figure heading towards me. He had curly hair and a swagger in his step, and Kevin emerged out of the shadows, meeting me at the edge of the grass. He looked at me, I touched the trim of his jacket, and that was that.
The last two months of college were glorious. The California spring opened flowers and hearts, and we spent seemingly every afternoon in my room, the windows wide open, linen curtains blowing up in the breeze, light splashed on the floor. Time passed. Hunger would finally beckon us out of my dorm around dusk. We watched Planet Earth in bed. I drove us into the city late in the evening to walk on the beach in Santa Monica. He took me underground to the academic complex accessible only to Mudders, I showed him the hidden nooks on Scripps' campus. We stayed up talking until dawn and went to the beach again. We projected movies onto the big screen in Galileo Hall at two in the morning. We learned to sleep together in my tiny bed for one. We did homework together in Platt, curled up together on the sofa, and made heads turn, heads that were undoubtedly thinking,
Those two? Together...?" After one month I realized with shock that I was falling in love with him. Terrified that he would be terrified, I kept it secret until I couldn't anymore, until I knew he knew and felt the same way.
The end of the semester in mid-May brought an end to our blissful and unsustainable way of life. He went back to Oakland for the summer, my family came and I graduated from college. I had committed in early March to intern at Mono Lake for a second summer, and in the two weeks I had to kill between graduation and June, I drove up to Oakland. I rang the bell, and he opened the door to reveal a trail of rose petals, candles and Dove chocolates in perfect pyramidal formation. They were my introduction to the summer. In those two weeks, we stayed up until five in the morning, and slept until three in the afternoon. (After four days I landed in the Emergency Room with a UTI.) He showed me his neighborhood, which incidentally was the same one I had briefly explored the summer before, when we were still strangers and all my friends happened to be living in Berkeley for a few months. His neighborhood cut deeper into the heart, though. He showed me his favorite places, Diesel Books and Crepevine and Pendragon, and I introduced him to the divine hot chocolate at Bittersweet. Summer in Oakland with Kevin seemed like the perfect thing, and I didn't want it to end.
Soon, though, it was time for me to drive to Lee Vining for the summer. I was overwhelmed with anxiety, uncertainty, and trepidation about the future, our future, my future now I no longer had college to hold me in. In a flurry of emotion, just as I was leaving his house, I ended things between us, and thinking I was making a long-term beneficial decision I drove off empty and alone. I had to fill up the car with gas, and as I stood at the gas station, the one by the Vons we went to at midnight to get me cranberry juice for my UTI, the one in which we couldn't keep our hands off each other as we roamed the aisles for late-night snacks, I did not feel good, not even settled, even a little bit. But it was a fling, right? An end-of-year spring fling, to be nipped in the bud before the vines grew too thick and strong to be cut. That was the responsible thing to do. I got into the car and drove south along College, passing his street to get to the freeway ramp. As I sat at the intersection, his house to my left, the mountains straight ahead, I was paralyzed. I was tired of thinking. Suddenly a car pulled up behind me and I was forced to make a decision, and I turned left. Standing on his doorstep, I rang the bell and he stood before me. I couldn't read his face. Neither of us said anything, and finally I sighed and said, "... but we're so good together!". He wrapped his arms around me and my tears poured into his chest. I was still just as uncertain of the future, but I knew being with him made me happy, and that was something worth keeping, regardless of circumstances.
On May 31st I drove to Lee Vining and began a wild summer of extremes, of working five days at the Committee on the eastern edge of California, bored out of my mind, then driving four hours to the western edge of the state and spending the weekend with Kevin in the Bay Area, then driving the four hours back. I drove four-hundred miles roundtrip almost every weekend. Nine months later, I could do that drive in my sleep and still get there: first, the winding 120 west through Yosemite National Park (avoid the bears and deers) descending from 10,000 to 2,000 feet in half an hour, the curvy 108 West winding through the west side of the Sierras, through little farming towns and tall brown grasses to Manteca, onto the 580, the first four-lane freeway of the drive, which shuttles you through Tracy, Livermore, Dublin and finally into the Bay Area. Finally, slip onto the 24 for a few minutes and you're there, on his street.
I was the only one of us with a car, so the onus to travel fell on me. You adjust to anything after a while, and the travelling provided structure to my week. The extremity of the situation quickly morphed into my reality for the time being, and the drive became so familiar it was almost like seeing an old friend every few days. The second time around my internship at MLC felt stale, but the one thing it succeeded in was convincing me I don't want to work in the environmental field. And so June, July and August came and went, five days here, two days there, punctuated by a few events. In June I caught a hellish bout of strep throat while visiting Kevin, forcing me to stay in Oakland, miss five days of work, sit in the ER with a face mask on in order to get a prescription for Vicodin, and eat soup for a week. He took such good care of me.
In July, Independence Day marked my family visiting and staying at the cabin and I had long ago requested that week off work. For the first time since strep (which doesn't count) I had more than two days to spend with Kevin. We booked a room in a cute hotel in San Francisco and spent a few days being tourists in his city. We went to Mission Beach (my first toe dip in the Pacific Ocean in the Bay Area), rented bicycles in Golden Gate Park, explored the hippie paradise of Haight Ashbury, marveled at the swords and sculptures of the Asian Art Museum, and after a long day, took the bus back to the Vertigo on Sutter Street and our king sized bed. We watched movies on the flat screen television and ate pizza in bed at two in the morning. And another weekend, when I flew into San Francisco Airport after a spontaneous trip home, he was waiting for me at the BART station with roses.
In August, I was delighted by a change in my usual weekend routine. The usual was that every Tuesday afternoon (my weekends were Mon/Tues), I packed up my little car outside his house with my duffel bag, duvet and pillow and drove off alone for five days of tourists, environmentalists, canoes and bare feet, but one weekend at the beginning of that month, Kevin got into the car with me. I had a traveling partner for the only time that summer! He came out to the Eastern Sierras and spent my work week hanging out in Lee Vining. He met my Mono Lake friends, visited my office and the house I lived in, and saw the lake and cabin I spent summers at as a child. After a summer of one-sided traveling, it was lovely for me to have him see my other world. For two nights, we booked a room in the adorable little El Mono Motel and it was then that he introduced me and I got addicted to True Blood. For the rest of the month, we flew through Seasons 1 and 2 together on the phone in the evenings, pressing Play at the exact same time and gasping/screaming/sighing together at the appropriate moments. He was my rock that summer, holding me when I needed him, reassuring me when everything felt hopeless, encouraging me to be my best, and telling me everything was going to be okay when I was certain it wouldn't.
And he was my rock in the fall, when I lived with him at Mudd with his roommate Calvin for all of September and part of October, and job searched almost fully in vain. He was my biggest supporter then, and it was a stressful time: I felt like an inconvenience and a bother, and also a groundless, wavering person, because I didn't know what I wanted, other than gainful employment somewhere. When I magically found a job in mid-October just days before I was about to drive home for good, his smile and hug engulfed me. My parents came out to help me move in to an apartment in Echo Park, and he and my Dad carried the heavy furniture up the stairs, and we all ate dinner together for the first time that night. During the stress of the fall, with a new job, apartment, responsibilities and bills, he was there for me. For New Years I flew to Oakland, interrupting a family trip to Las Vegas to be with him for his birthday and for the celebration of the arriving year. Sometimes I have to sacrifice. We make it work. The tables have turned and now he is more often than not the person traveling to visit the other. Most Wednesday evenings/Thursday mornings, and every Friday evening he takes the 45-minute ride into or out of Union Station. (The drive is only half an hour in minimal traffic, so I take him back on Sundays, and in this small way can stay connected to Claremont, a place I love for what it is.) We spend each weekend reveling in each other's company, something that living thirty miles apart helps keep fresh in our minds. We do not take the other for granted, and work hard to be together. Ours is a relationship of inconvenience and necessity. It would be far easier to date people nearer to us, but we have something amazing and life bends around it. It's been over a year since we stood together on the edge of the grass at midnight. Now, we're firmly in the center.