Sarah is bored and I feel like stickin’ it to the corporate man, so we decided to do something fun on a Friday and write Dueling Blogs! [Insert banjo riff here.]
Today’s Topic: How We First Met
(Click here to see Sarah’s take on things.)
Beyond a few friends and some extra curricular activities, high school for me had been a relatively unpleasant experience. I thought college would be four years of the same drudgery. Needless to say, I didn’t look forward to the start of my freshman year.
My college was (and still is) a very good, very teeny school in Pennsylvania. When you close your eyes and picture what “college” should look like, you’ll see this place. When I arrived on campus to begin my first year, the sun was shining and bright flowers bloomed all over the limestone-studded, beautifully manicured campus. God, I was miserable.
Freshman Orientation
Freshman get to campus approximately 3-4 days before all the other students and have, what is not-so-creatively referred to as, “Freshman Orientation.” During this time, before the rest of the student body gets there, freshman have a chance to acclimate themselves to the surroundings, learn about the school and play more than your share of “Get to Know You” games. It was during one of these miserable games that I first saw Sarah.
She struck me as very confident. I was also terribly envious of her gorgeous head of red hair.
We had to go around in a circle and say where we’re from and tell a little bit about ourselves. It was pretty tame until the circle came around to Sarah.
“Hi, I’m Sarah! I’m from (Name of Hometown)…”
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that the name of her hometown is a slang word for female genitals.
Yep. That girl will be hard to forget.
The Bathroom Incident
Sarah and I didn’t really get along that well.
It wasn’t that we disliked each other, it was that we ran in different crowds. I was slow to start on the party scene. (Believe me, I made up for this in later years.) She went out all the time, sometimes with this weird girl on our floor who would have sex – almost nightly -- to Pink Floyd’s “The Wall.”
The problem was that, since we were both active in drama, we kept bumping into each other -- everywhere. Most often this would be at The Arts House, a kind of fraternity house for all the artsy people on campus.
As freshman girls, we were showered with attention and offered free-flowing cups of the Arts House drink of choice – Mad Dog and Sprite. (For those unfamiliar, Mad Dog is the kind of thing whinos swig out of paper bags.) Over the course of the next few weeks, the same guy - a step aerobics doing, comedy improv performing economics major - began to show an interest in the both of us.
I was decidedly smitten. Sarah was all ho-hum. [She had a boyfriend back in (Female Genitals).]
So, when I found out about the two timin’ man, I decided to channel my Jersey roots, put on my snarl face and challenge Sarah to a girl-on-girl Smackdown!
Her roommate told me she was in the bathroom, so I went in and saw her standing at the sink.
I readied myself for the big confrontation.
Me: (Gathering up my courage) So, did you go out with (Name of Guy)?
Sarah: Yeah, I guess.
Me: I did too.
Sarah: (Surprised) Mmm…Okay…?
Me: Well, I don’t like that.
Sarah: Okay.
Me: (Gushing) Cool. I’m glad we had this talk.
Sarah: Oh, okay, that’s good.
Me: Talk to you later. Bye!
Sarah: Uh.Bye.
From there, we just kind of started to bond. We liked singing show tunes at the top of our lungs. We both skipped aerobics class all the time. (To date, it’s the only class I ever failed. Did I mention I also managed to do it two times in a row?) We loved chowing down on thin-crust pizza and gossiping about our adventures the night before.
A few years ago, I told Sarah that it was the bathroom incident that changed our friendship.
Her response?
“Um…okay. (Pause) TJ, what the hell are you talking about?”
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