Around my birthday it always amazes me how many people have befriended me over my journey of 27 years, 7 schools, 3 states, and 2 degrees. They usually have trouble remembering where I am most of the time, but thanks to the joys of 21st century communication, can still hunt me down and remind me that they care. I have received a plethora of myspace and facebook messages, as well as an cacophony of text messages. If I haven’t returned yours yet please don’t be offended, I’ll get back to everyone soon, I promise. I had one exchange of texts yesterday afternoon that really must be shared to explain the lengths to which I will go in order to avoid a possibly embarrassing situation … only to create another.
I’d been receiving texts all day long from various friends and family; all quite easily recognizable due to my OCD address book which has been labeled and categorized within an inch of its textual life. So you can imagine my dismay to receive a text that was not associated with a city/school of reference OR a first and surname, but simply a phone number with an unknown area code and the traditional “Happy Birthday!” in the body of the message. I was stunned. My system had failed me. No, it had to be a friend that just got a new phone and hadn’t sent me anything from the new number yet, of course. Well, I can siphon the truth out of them covertly without the awkward 10 text exchange of manners describing the reason s/he was talking on the phone while standing in the fountain at the mall and all of the ins and outs of why this came about. So my deft reply reads, “Thank you!! How are you? What’s new?” I thought there had to be a clue that would return betraying their identity, but I was only partially right. My Mystery Texter was incredibly terse in his/her reply only offering, “Finals ugh!” Ugh is right! I’ve been to 7 schools in 3 states and know approximately half the student age population of the United States! THIS WAS NOT HELPFUL! Regaining my composure, I attempted to delve further into my worthy opponent’s day to day life. “What classes? Who with?” Surely the courses’ subject matter would pin-point the college considering that I had declared a different major for every undergraduate institution, and the secondary inquiry as to the professor’s name would parse out the two different graduate schools. Triumphantly, I press ’send’ and lay my phone down to go about my day, satisfied with my superior sense of deduction. Returning to my phone a few leisurely minutes later, I discover a disturbing twist in the plot. The list returned to me is, “Algebra 2, Spanish, English, biology and history.” WHAT! Impossible, how did someone in High School get a hold of my phone number?! Did I give it out? Did someone track it down purposefully? Could it be a stalker that had chosen my birthday as the day s/he would make her/himself known to me and either join my life forever or steal my identity and rob me blind making me pay for the emotional injustice s/he had endured? I know, I get carried away with things occasionally, don’t worry about it, lets just get back on track shall we? It did not look good for our hero. Suddenly the hunter was now the hunted. I was sent into a whirlwind of confusion. Unable to immediately regroup from this disastrously uncouth re-write to the brilliant birthday tale I was constructing, I abandoned the thread of communication all together, choosing to momentarily adopt the U.S. Foreign Policy Model of, “If I don’t talk to you, you don’t exist, and I win.” Hours later, during a moment of weakness coaxed to the surface by a tag-team effort of birthday booze and other people’s money, I divulged the conundrum to my lovely and intelligent girlfriend in the hope that her memory was not as pickled as mine currently was. As I complete the list of courses and rattle off the first few numbers belonging to that fiendish riddler who had triumphed over our good natured hero, I hear an unexpected sound on the other end of my now tainted telephone: laughter. “What is it? What’s so funny? Do you know who it is?” I braced myself for the ego shattering blow that I was sure would, ironically, come rifling through the very phone which had begun this debauchery and strike me dead for masquerading as a Master of anything, let alone … Art. As I sat down and prepared an environment appropriate for the dramatic Mystic Riveresque pull-away pieta shot of my father (played by Sean Penn) anguishing over the discovery of his son’s body, I was stopped dead in my tracks. “That’s my little sister!” she cried. REDEMPTION!!! I had not proffered the number after all and therefore could not possibly be held accountable for the cataloging of this third-party exchange of information. Surprisingly escaping the endeavor with only a bump on the shin of my proverbial ego, due to the absurdity of my hasty stalker tangent, I laughed and shook my head only managing to say, “Well, at least it’ll make a good blog.”
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