I'm the ex-girlfriend...
"You and your museum of lovers
The precious collection you’ve housed in your covers...
So why do we choose the boys that are naughty?
I don’t fit in so why do you want me?
And I know I can’t tame you…but I just keep trying...
So I pacify problems with kisses and cuddles
Diligently doubtful through all kinds of trouble
Then I find myself choking on all my contradictions..."
I am a Systems Engineer for a major company. In my spare time, I like to hang out with friends. I'm pretty much up for anything, just so long as I will have fun.
I am a major bookworm, and I am embarassed to say, but I love the Harry Potter series, I even went to a couple of book events for it.
I am very passionate about music and I play a few instruments (Euphonium, Flute, Piano, Violin). As from everyone who is passionate about music, I definitely have my opinions about everything I hear...sometimes I can be worse than Simon Cowell.
I met Travis the summer of 1992 in a High School Summer School class called Life Science. We were the only two Junior High kids taking the class (both of us were only 11 yrs old, going into the 7th grade), because we were a couple of smarty pantses and our mommies thought it would be good for us to exercise our minds and challenge ourselves to a High School Science class. As the natural order of things happen, we hit it off as friends, because we were the only youngins in our class and the teacher thought it would be swell to partner the little kids together as lab partners.
All summer we paid attention in class, disected all sorts of fun animals, and during our nutrition break, we went to the cafeteria and ate a snack together. I think that was the summer that I was in the Keyboarding (typing, this was before PCs were big) class as well. Even at age 11, I was trying to knock off some of those useless HS units, so I could take all the science and math classes that I really wanted to take. After class I would walk him to his house and my mom would pick me up near his house, because it was a zoo to actually drive into the school parking lot and find me.
Well, our classmates noticed how we were such good friends that they put the bug in his ear that we should be boyfriend and girlfriend. I didn't have a problem with that, because I liked him and was thinking this already, I was just too nervous to say anything. So, Travis asked me out on a date to see a movie. I didn't know what to think, except I was excited about it and I was having serious thoughts about getting the nerve to hold his hand. Luckily, he made the first move to that and it was pretty much smooth sailing the rest of the summer. Everything would have been great except I wasn't sure on how I was going to get my mom to take me to the movies on a date. Well it turns out Travis had it all set, got the movie tickets and got his dad to drive him to the theater, except I never told my mom, so I just stood him up, but at the time I didn't really know that that was what I was doing and that it wasn't a really nice thing to do.
Well, poor Travis called me and asked what happened, said he had to see the movie with his dad. He was kinda bent out of shape about it and I told him that my mom wouldn't let me go, which was the first and last time I ever lied to a boy. Travis seemed ok with this response, so we continued talking on the phone a lot, that was until one day I never called him back. Yeah, pretty crappy, but remember, I was 11 going on 12, I was young and nervous about the whole thing and didn't know what to do. I got bored of him and instead of breaking up with him I ignored him. He kept calling every month or so and my mom would tell me that it was not nice to not call people back. In which I would tell her that I did call him back, another bold face lie that she saw through. So, I guess it was just that I was not ready to date boys yet and felt uncomfortable doing so.
My lesson learned from this quasi-relationship was that if it doesn't feel right, break it off. Also, if you can't tell your parents about how you feel about your significant other, then maybe you shouldn't be with them, because you don't really care enough about them to put your foot down. I learned the latter lesson atleast twice in my life so far.
I think this is a good point that I can start taking a relationship Karma tally. So, here are the Karma stats:
Stats on Travis
Stood him up on a date
-5
Lied to him about it
-2
Never called him back instead of giving him a proper break up.
-8
KARMA TALLY TOTAL
-15
I promise you that as I got older I was much better to my boyfriends, I was only mean and bad in the beggining because I had no clue as how to handle it or go about relationships that went past friendships with boys.
Unlike my previous entry, this entry is not about a boyfriend and defeats the purpose of a boyfriend journal, but it is about my very first friend, Shane, nonetheless, I think is important to include him in here as a male friend, because it explains a lot about me. My first friend I ever had was a boy, so I think that it is quite natural that I get along better with men than I do with women. I understand their language, because I grew up with it. He was 2 or 3 when I was born, so I looked up to him like a brother and greatly admired him. Shane's mom used to babysit me for my mom and they were our nextdoor neighbors, so Shane and I got to be great friends.
He also had two brothers Brian and Brett. Brian was always into his own thing, cause he was quite a bit older than us at the time and was into his music, hence the pic of Abbey Road, don't worry I'm getting there. Brett was the nerdy middle child who cried very easily. Since Shane was the baby of his family, he could needlessly taunt him without getting into too much trouble and he always enlisted me as his first mate in tormenting his older brother. So, I used to torment Brett too, eventhough I did not know what I was doing or why Brett would cry when I said mean things, because I was too young to understand that I was insulting him with what Shane told me to tell him. We were definitely a pair of troublemakers when it came to tormenting Brett. It seemed that Brett always wanted to play with us, but we could care less about it and our main goal was to make him cry. Soon enough I had my own little brother to join in on the tormenting of Brett, but I was well past the age of six by this time and knew I was tormenting Brett.
Most of our time was spent pretending we were on the Matterhorn at Disneyland and playing make believe all over the expansive backyards that Norco houses tend to have. I have lots of happy memories of make believe with him. He made me love Disneyland and the rides there before I even really knew what it was or understood what it was.
Quite often we watched The Neverending Story and I grew to love it as much as Shane did, hence the insignia by his name. To this day, if it is on, I watch it to remember my childhood with him. They made 3 Neverending Story movies, I've seen them all. To this day, whenever I see him, we giggle about the fact that they have a new kid who plays Bastian in each movie and that he changes hair color in these movies. For some reason, we always end up talking about those movies and I'm not really sure why, but hey it is quite funny. It seems like they come out with a new movie every 10 years or so.
When I was in preschool, he was in Elementary school and his school was adjacent to my school, consequentially so were our playgrounds. So, everyday when I was at preschool during recess he also had recess and we would see eachother through the fence and wave and talk kid stuff of course. I never was nervous or worried while I was at preschool and I think that was because I had my older friend on the other side of the fence to talk to and see, kind of like a kid's moral support. Unfortunately, when I went to Kindergarten I didn't get to see him through the chainlink fence anymore, because I got put in that Catholic school, St. Edward's, in the next town instead of Norco El like my neighborhood friends did.
As I got older, we ended up moving out of that neighborhood, this happened by the time I was 8. I still got to see Shane quite a bit, that was until they moved to San Diego, now it seems like we only get down to see them every three or four years. Again as time moved on he caught the music bug just like his brothers and they were always into The Beatles, that's why Abbey Road is up.
The funny thing is that eventhough Shane and I lived in very different places after I turned 10 and he was around 13, and eventhough we don't really see eachother except for every few years or so, to this day we have striking similarities in taste. He is a grad student in Mathmatics, I am a grad student in Electrical Engineering (which is a lot of math). We are both very passionate about music and have similar music tastes, because thanks to my mom, I also love The Beatles and I also love Shane and his brothers' music. I think I forgot to mention that he and his brothers made a band together and they have written songs and recorded them, something I have always wanted to do, but never really had the opportunity to do. We both can be on the eccentric side about our little obsessions and such. We are cat lovers to the core, not many men are cat lovers, but thanks to his mom, we are both crazy about our cats, he actually volunteered for a cat house for a while. Our taste in humor is on the twisted side and yes we still love that movie The Neverending Story.
So, when people often wonder whether we are a product of our environment from our early childhood, I often don't have to wonder, because I know we are. Shane and I are living proof of that and we are very much the reason we are the people who we are. I would say that he had a great influence on me as a child.
Jeffrey was my Kindergarten boyfriend. Everyone has one and no one ever forgets their name. We were the best of friends up until 2nd grade when he moved away. I have not seen him since, I take that back, I did when I was 11, I saw him at a local pizza parlor, but was too shy to say hi.
He was the perfect guy, for a 5 year old, he was just as into Punky Brewster as I was and we pretended that I was Punky and he was Glomer and we would run around the playground playing this way. For Valentine's Day in 1st grade, we both gave eachother an Alvin and the Chipmunks Valentine that coincidentially said the exact same thing and we both attached the same flavor heart lollipops to the little cards. That was the sweetest thing I have had happen to me regarding a guy. It is pretty much all downhill from there, not all of it, but it was much more complicated from there on out.
The best lesson learned from this early childhood friendship, if one can be learned, is that men and women, boys and girls should be equal partners. Neither I nor Jeffrey were superior or inferior to one another and we treated each other as equals and loving friends. There are things that can be learned from children and childhood.
