Salmon and Souvlaki

A couple weeks ago, I imported all my old e-mails from both of my old Hotmail accounts (which I’ve had since 1999.)  Or more accurately, I should say that Gmail did it for me and even labeled the e-mails with the name of the folder that they were in, in my old account.  Gmail is brilliant.  I love it.  Nik promised me that my life would be 5% better with Gmail and he was right.

Anyway, now I can search my old e-mails easily so I was able to find this e-mail which still cracks me up.  In the fall of 1998, I spent a semester in DC at the American Studies Program.  I had an internship at the Heritage Foundation and we took classes in domestic and foreign policy.  It was truly a life-changing semester for me.  For one thing, I doubt I would have been brave enough to move to Baltimore if I hadn’t already spent that semester in DC.  I also ended up rooming with three other girls, who I am still close friends with today.

That semester, unusually, the program had 21 girls and 21 guys.  (Typically, the enrollment skews towards females.)  All of us came from small Christian colleges, where the women inevitably outnumbered the men.  My class at Houghton was 76% female.  So it was a little weird to be so evenly matched.  It turned out to be a lot of fun, actually, to have a lot of friends who were guys.    One night, early on in the semester, the four of us girls in Apartment 4 thought it would be fun to match up each girl with each guy.  We made the list (amidst many giggles), claiming our particular crushes for our own and then hiding the list under the tapes in Danielle’s tape case holder, hoping no one would ever find it.  We also made a grave pact that we would never tell anyone what we had written.

Well, fast-forward a few months to March 1999.  A few of us were able to make it back to DC one weekend and we had a mini-reunion.  At that reunion, we all got talking about who had liked who, and Danielle (one of my roommates) and I broke the pact and spilled the beans.  Between all of us there (guys and girls), we figured out the following web of “who liked who”.  The following is from the e-mail that I sent to the other girls in Apartment Four, confessing that we’d broken the grave pact but telling them all the “good dirt” that we’d found out about who liked who! Even though it’s been 11 1/2 years since this happened, I’m only using initials to protect the innocent!  It turns out pretty much everyone there was boy/girl crazy and had a crush on someone. Unfortunately, no one seemed to have had their crush returned.  (To make things more confusing, there were multiple people with names starting with C and M (both male and female). )

It turns out that (ready for this?) C liked N who liked S, who liked D, who liked T, who liked C. Also, M liked C and me (but what order we don’t know) but M also liked C and so did T and T (C – you are the WOMAN!!!!!!!!). K and T also liked C but M was always telling C this and insisting that C and I were perfect for each other but we didn’t really find out if C liked anybody. T also liked T but he really liked H. And as we all know, J liked C. And evidently, N admitted that he and L were more than friends. Meanwhile, J and M are no longer [a couple], and G still likes M.

Got that? It certainly makes more sense when you know the people and you have their full names but regardless, hilarious and ridiculous. We were, after all, college juniors and seniors, not in middle school!