Today is Carl’s birthday. He is twenty-seven today. Happy birthday Carl! We just got back from having dinner with his parents. Currently he’s in the other room sharpening his good knives and making me some carrot sticks for my lunch tomorrow. We’re going to my house as soon as he’s done (and I’m done typing) so I can give him his presents. Get your mind out of the gutter, you.
It’s been pretty difficult writing all these birthday entries. I know I have forgot some folks. Even the ones I haven’t forgot, I’ve mostly just jotted down a few random reminiscences about them and then concluded by saying,”But how….how…do you encapsulate a friendship as important as this one into one tiny little journal entry?” You can’t, obviously. And so that is just as true for Carl as it is for any of my other friends, except more so.
If you’re reading this, which you are, and you know me, which you probably do, you probably know much more about my history with this man than you might care to. Maybe you’ve been on the other end of the phone when I was wailing about how much I loved him and couldn’t have him. Maybe you knew us back in 1994. Maybe you were surprised to see me happy, three years ago when I said we were getting back together after a long time of being “just friends,” which came only after one of the more awful, bitter, and juvenile displays of the Ice Queen Phenomenon ever seen. Well, ever seen at the Claremont Colleges in the ’96-97 school year, anyway. So you know a little about him. Him and me together.
But if you don’t know me or him, then I have to tell you that this is a seriously good person we’re talking about here. Smart and funny and loyal and loving and challenging and fascinating. Kind of a visionary about certain things. Tall, with glasses, which I just love. Great big smile. Good at hiking, building stuff, and math.
Whenever I talk about “my type,” I don’t necessarily say, “Well, he ought to own a really bright yellow vest, and he should have puffy hair, and he should make ridiculous jokes and own the entire They Might Be Giants catalog. Oh, and he should use a lot of tech jargon in his every day speech and have a near pathological love of flax seed granola. Rrrow!
That’s the type for me!” But I’ve been with him long enough now…a little over three years, for those of you keeping track at home…that when I think “boyfriend” or “partner” I can’t think of anyone else. Isn’t that weird? Sometimes I get scared by that, but most of the time I am just sort of amazed by the fact of him in my life. He’s the love of my life, for real, the one who got away but then came back. See, he’s here right now even while I’m writing this. He’s got his laptop, and I’ve got his other laptop, and we’re both writing. If we were IMing each other I guess it would be perfect.
Well, mushiness aside, wanna know how I met Carl? Okay. Here’s the story. I was a freshman at college and was in a Bible study at a dorm at Mudd, the geek school next door. Literally next door…I used to call the place where Mudd and
Pitzer met the Freak-Geek Border. One night I was there and noticed a bit of a commotion at one end of the courtyard. Some people were covering some guy’s face with paper-mache. He was breathing through two straws stuck up his nose. It turns out that he and his friends were making a stuffed gorilla so that they could hang it from a the top of a very high tower at Pomona, one of the other Claremont schools. They were sewing together the body (I think My Friend Anna sewed it, although of course she wasn’t My Friend yet) but they couldn’t find a suitable gorilla mask, and so they looked around and decided Carl’s face would make an admirable gorilla face, and so they sat him down and put gunk on his face and there we all were. I was watching the proceeding with a small group of onlookers…at some point My Not-Yet Friend Anna told me what they were doing and even solicited a monetary contribution, which I gave in the form of my very last dollar. Later Anna, the most talented woman in the universe, wrote a pop-up book about it, so you know it’s true.
So when the papier-mache hardened, they peeled it off, and I took one look at Carl’s face, covered with newspaper bits and flour paste, and went:
“Who is that??”
That’s how we met. We still know each other today. Now, I have mentioned in this journal the Crush Of The White-Hot Intensity of a Thousand Suns that I had on this boy. Would you believe me if I told you I still have it, after eight years of various types of Relationships with him? After being friends, then smoochy friends, then exes, then We’re-Not-Speaking, then, cautiously, friends again, and then a little more than friends, and then full-on Boyfriend-And-Girlfriend? We’ve been through a lot of hard stuff in the last three years, like grad school and starting a company and unemployment and losing family and losing the company…plus all the normal stuff like insecurity and frustration and jealousy. I am head over heels mad about this boy, and I had to thank his parents profusely this evening at dinner for bringing him into the world because I am just so grateful for his presence in it. It’s mushy and even a little bit trite but it’s true nonetheless. And I think this is the part where I say, “But I can’t possibly explain this person’s effect in my life in one little journal entry, so you’ll have to believe me when I say he’s really cool and great and it’s excellent that it’s his birthday today.”
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have twenty-seven kisses to give.