How We Met: The Real Story Part 1

So if you saw my other post you might have been like wait? Did they really meet at band camp? Well, I hope that doesn't need answering.

Before starting this I said to myself how do you make a high school love story not sound lame? You don't. That's the beauty of it.

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It was March (pretty sure about this) 2005 (definitely sure about this). I was sitting at my computer in my room, under the stairs (I had a loft--this isn't important) I was on my computer when *da-ding* "Will you accept a message from Tom'sScreenName? AIM chat in all it's glory. I accepted--who doesn't accept random chats from people you don't know?

His first words: "I know this seems so sketch, but..."

We had a mutual friend, he saw a picture of me, and got my screenname.  We're sounding pretty cool right about now, eh? Don't worry, we were a whopping 16 (me) and 17 (him) years old. This is what you did at 16 and 17 pre-Facebook. I chalk it up to the stellar hair I used to have (way) pre-baby. You can say you had good hair and not sound like a total ______ if you don't have the good hair anymore, right? You don't know what you've got til it's gone, you pave paradise and....where was I?

So we started talking and decided to meet on a blind date. I had no idea what he looked like, who he was, etc (before you get all panic-y, don't worry, my mom made a few calls to make sure he wasn't, what she called "an axe murderer"). Actually, everyone seemed to know who he was except me. My two best friends knew who he was because of basketball, said I'd seen him before, but I had no idea who they were talking about. I didn't go to basketball games to actually watch basketball. They're for socializing, duh.

Apparently, just a few weeks before this fateful AIM chat there was this big basketball game that I went to and he was playing (for the other team). I say "apparently" because my body was in attendance, but my mind absolutely was not. You see, I had just been diagnosed with whiplash (no car accident, no nothing, just random horrible neck pain and a whiplash diagnosis). So I was on muscle relaxers, and friends, Benadryl knocks me out for two days straight so these tiny yellow muscle relaxers had me in the palm of their hand. I have brief memories of the crowd standing to cheer and me, firmly planted on the bleachers drooling, and in a staring contest with the back of whomever's head was right in front of me. I looked basically like this, only sitting on bleachers:

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The day of our blind date had arrived. I was upstairs getting ready with my blow dryer on full-blast so I never heard him pull up. He walked up to the door and...

Don't you just love when there's a Part 2 and you have to wait? Personally, I hate it, but this is just too long. Sorry. To make it a little more bearable, I'll just let you know that the next one will be filled with awesome pictures of what feels like a million years ago (OK, 7 1/2, but still).