Mike+Erin

Did you have a nice holiday? Mine was good, but Mike went and got sick on Friday, so he spent most of the weekend coughing and blowing his nose and not talking at all. And it was highly lonely being in the house with somebody I couldn't talk to or even come within a foot of. Except for at night, when he made all sorts of noise in his sleep because he couldn't breathe properly. Then it was like having lots of people or bears in the bed. Not lonely at all! He is now on the mend, thank heavens, so we've got high hopes for this coming weekend. We're aiming to have double the fun, just to spite all those germs. Incidentally if you know where I can rent a bouncy castle in the midlands for next to no dollars, please give me a call.

This weekend June shared the story of how she and Marvin met and fell in love. Though in no way will it rival the humor and poignance of her storytelling, I thought I would share Mike's and my met-and-fell-in-love story too. We're one of those couples where he remembers all the details of our early dating life, whereas I was generally too busy worrying about how not to seem stupid to bother with what restaurant we were at or what movie was playing or what day it was. So if I get anything wrong, babe, know that it is out of love and an intense desire not to lose you forever to Kathryn or Mary or Ashley or Elisabeth. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

We both went to a tiny college in South Carolina and took a bunch of business, economics, and English classes. But we only had one class together. And that class was creative writing. Everyone had to write 3 stories over the course of the semester, and we'd spend each class critiquing everyone's stories and reading various other stories and discussing writing in general. Most of the stories written by the students in the class were rather terrible, and mine were no exception. Just awful, truly. So embarrassing to think back to what I wrote. I do not do well under pressure, but I always waited until the day before they were due to start writing. So did Mike, actually, but with the opposite result. Everybody loved his stories and thought he was hilarious. One of his stories was a parody of CLASSIC LITERATURE, people. It was clever. I remember the first day of class, we all had to go around and say something about ourselves, and he said he was taking the GMAT the following week. A couple weeks later I asked him how it went, and he said that security at the test center was like Fort Knox. At the time I had no idea that Fort Knox is where they keep all the gold, so I laughed despite not fully understanding the joke. But that was really the only interaction we had, because the rest of the time the cute girls in class would talk to him and laugh at all his hilarious and clever stories, all Mike do you want to go to lunch with us at KFC and that shirt is so cool and can I maybe have your babies? So about that time I determined that I didn't stand a chance.

About 3 weeks into class, I facebook friend-ed him, and a few weeks later he sent me a facebook message to remind me that Conan O'Brien was finally coming back with live shows, because he had seen that Conan was listed in my favorite "tv shows." I sent him one back to say thanks and talk about Imogen Heap, who was in both of our "music" lists. Then we talked about Scrubs, and I mentioned that Emily and I had the first season on dvd. So he came by my dorm room one day to borrow the dvds, and he stayed and talked for an hour. Then he left to go eat dinner, and I went to eat dinner, and I think we both wondered why we weren't eating dinner together. A few days later he asked me to go with him to Dempsey's, a pizza buffet in town, and I said "Can my roommates come too?" in part because the food at our dining hall is THAT bad, and in part because I didn't think he was actually asking me on a date. I figured maybe I could be the friend he cracked jokes with in class, to impress the other girls. But my roommate was like, um, maybe it should just be you and him, so then it was. He came to pick me up in his tiny blue car, and he was wearing a blue t-shirt and camo shorts and he barely ate because he was sick (which I did not know until after the fact) and he talked about how one time he and his sister had to wash off their cat with a garden hose because it got covered in paint. And then he had to go to a lecture for our school's silly Cultural Enrichment Program, and because I had already racked up enough CEPs for the semester, I didn't go with him. Was I dumb or what? But he persisted and finally I came to my senses. So then we got married!

Does that about cover it? I feel like I'm forgetting something.