Part 2

So NOW my husband has become interested in reading my blog...

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That fall I looked forward to a year by myself, exploring the options, dating, or not! I was determined to find out what *I* liked.

It was my year to take Physical Chemistry, which was either going to rescue me as a Chemistry major or be my deciding factor to dump this major too since I loathed Organic Chemistry. I sat in about the third row in the deep pit of a lecture auditorium so I was strategically placed at my professor's eye level.

I was one of "those" students, the ones that always sat in the front.

I was raised that if I wasn't 15 minutes early, I was late. (Imagine how horrifying this is when you are 14 and there is a junior high dance to attend??)

This 9am class was my first of the day and I always arrived early before the doors were opened. A chemical engineer I didn't know always arrived early too. He had an 8am biochemistry class prior to this one and so he was always pretty punctual. We would politely acknowledge each other, but never really say a whole lot as we stood outside the JILA tower auditorium. He was immediately recognizable with his port wine stain on one side of his face. I had noted he was also in my Greek Mythology class and so we would make small talk about that class. Within minutes the people I knew from other classes would arrive, my conversations would switch elsewhere with my friends. The professor would come and open the door and we would file in.

The geek-boy friends I knew sat directly behind me. And nearly everyday, I sat next to the chemical engineer who told me his family was from Anchorage, Alaska. We would smile at each other and one day he asked me out. We dated off and on that year. Then he quit calling which was fine since I got tired of not being good enough or pretty enough or always sticking my foot in my mouth. We did maintain a polite friendship though. He continued sitting beside me... though now I wonder why? Was he copying off me in exams?

The following year when school was getting ready to start and football tickets were on sale I thought maybe I hadn't given him enough of a chance. I decided I was ready for a relationship, and well, he was good looking and nice enough.

I called him and since I knew he would be getting football tickets asked him if he would get mine too. (I had never gotten football tickets before, but thought it was a good excuse to touch base with him again.) He agreed and even rode his bike to my apartment to get my check and information from me. I thought things may be off and running with him again. I was hopeful at least after a year of being single and random dates.

The next Monday morning he gave me my football tickets. One set of general admission student tickets.

Umm what? General admission?

Oh, I thought you could get reserved seating, I mentioned to him.

He informed me that had I wanted reserved I would have had to go and pick out for myself where I wanted to sit. Apparently sitting next to him wasn't going to happen.

I was done.

Classes started my senior year in 1993. I was unsure what life held in front of me as I had just decided I didn't want to go to medical school. I surely didn't have the abilities to do grad school and here I was nearly finished with a degree in chemistry (I had loved Physical Chem by the way).

It was the first day of Physical Chemistry Lab and our TA, Scott, told us to partner up. I looked around dismayed to see my usual lab partners with each other.

You know that slight panic when you realize you are left out? I look over and saw the guy - the chemical engineer - from my PChem 1 class... the one with the port wine stain, who always stood outside the auditorium doors with me, not the one I used to sit by thank goodness.

We kind of nodded at each other, shrugged at each other and wa-la, we were lab partners.

Part 1

Fourteen years ago I started dating my husband to be. I look back now and think about that kid I used to flirt with, how I spelled his last name wrong on our first lab report and he corrected me. How I now spell that same last name for people who are tripped up by the one surprising letter in my otherwise simple last name.

I was a senior in high school bound and determined to leave Colorado for college. I wanted out and wanted to see something new. Despite the advice of my advisor and my mom, I applied only to out of state colleges, UC San Jose, UC Irvine and UC San Francisco. (I could have really used help in picking schools... Irvine is acceptable, of course, but the others? What was I thinking - other than Northern California sounded cool.)

At the last minute I decided I didn't want to leave Colorado.

I panicked and went to my advisor who made two phone calls. One to the admissions department at CU (50 miles down the road) and one to CSU - the college across the street from my high school. CU would give me a place in their music department and I could change majors after that.

What? Sure, 9 years of piano lessons as a kid, but I was not a musician. (I didn't understand colleges so well at 18.) They told me I didn't have to take music classes... but I went with the other option, Colorado State. I was in and good to go in the fall.

Fall arrived.

I dumped my high school boyfriend (who was a year behind me) early that first semester for a guy about 6 years older who I met at my job. We were both at school at CSU and he lived with his parents off campus. Coincidentally I had gone to high school with his little brother too.

Looking back I am not sure what I saw in him. He taught me a lot and I do admit that we had a good time together and he taught me about enjoying good food, he thought he knew a thing or two about wine and started me on the road to enjoying the beverage. He also pushed me over that first hurdle to becoming not so picky anymore. But a romantic relationship wasn't what I needed at that time. I needed to learn how to be by myself. I knew this in the back of my head, but it was a scary thing. So I ignored it.

(But I did like his family a lot! I still wonder how they are.)

One day he told me that he had been thinking... he said he was 24 years old and didn't want to live in his parent's basement and go to school there anymore. He wanted a better business school and was planning to go to CU.

I was upset he had just made the decision without asking me what I wanted. After a long discussion with him, thinking by myself and a talk with my mom I decided I too would switch to CU after my first year. I am not a person that takes change lightly. I knew that CU was where I really wanted to be, it was a better school for my major and a "cooler" town than the one I grew up in (which town isn't cooler than the one you grew up in?) and my mom encouraged me to go there, to expand my horizons, but I was still scared. (And I was going to move to California the year before??)

We up and moved. We had a townhouse together, two bedrooms I insisted and he was fine with that. (What kind of college relationship has two bedrooms where you actually stay in the seperate rooms?) I should have known this relationship wasn't for me when we were setting out to decide what we wanted for a place to live. Hindsite is 20-20.

About four months later, it was over. We resumed being friends, which was what we always should have been. And since neither of us could afford to move, or keep the townhouse by ourselves, we existed peacefully until our first years at CU were over. That spring my mom came down to help me find a one bedroom apartment and I set out to be single for one year. I was determined to find out who I was and to focus on school.

To be continued...