20 years and 2000 miles away

So, I'm working on this analysis of binge drinking. (A great thing to be doing since you get to say things like "I'm going back to my office to continue the binge drinking thing.") And in the process of massive stratified crosstabs, I get lost. Am I interested in the row percentages or the column percentages? It's actually unbelievably easy to get lost like this. You find yourself trying to figure out if you want to know the proportion of binge drinkers who own handguns or the proportion of handgun owners who binge drink and not being sure which one is which. It's a zero sum game. The more you think about it, the more confused you become.



It's time to do something brainless; reset that section of my mind so that I can actually look at these tables and make sense of them. I actually used to sleep when I got stuck with math/calculus/statistics problems in college and grad school. I'd wake up with a clear head and sometimes even the solution. But they frown upon sleeping at work. Onto the next best thing ~ playing "I wonder where so and so is" with Google.com.

That day's contestant was a guy I knew in high school, someone I would describe as a pseudo-friend, but someone who lived on a completely different social plane in high school. After establishing that he is not the professional cricket player in New Zealand or the nationally ranked high school golfer in Tennessee who both share his name, I find him back in my home state. But there's something familiar about the organization he's been working for ~ the name of the town, the zip code and P.O. Box number.

Back when I had just finished college, I got this postcard (c/o my parents' address) with a odd and cryptic message, a single initial and a 9 digit zip code. I got as far as identifying the town with that zip code. (The postcard itself was an antique card from a zoo in another part of the country.)

Now, here was that town. Here was someone with that same first initial. He had been part of the initial possibilities list, but was written off because I couldn't imagine why he would send me anything. The postcard, since I was so annoyed by not being able to figure it out, was still in a drawer somewhere, so I dug it out when I got home. Same nine digit zip code. I'd solved the puzzle ~ ten plus years later.

But here's the jab. The fact that someone who I didn't think even thought of me in high school took the time to send me a cryptic note five years later? Talk about making you rethink your own perceptions of high school and yourself at that time.

First an admission, I had a serious crush on this guy for at least 2 or 3 years of high school. He was one of those people who had a preternatural level of self esteem and a total coolness about him. Add to that the fact that he was very intelligent, funny (wickedly witty, in fact) and someone with whom I really enjoyed talking. He had substance and was actually knowledgeable about things that mattered, unlike the rest of my self-absorbed classmates.

I, on the other hand, was circling the drain in the high school hierarchy. I was too smart, too opinionated, and too absorbed in things that were beyond the scope of what a high school girl should be thinking about. And I actually thought for myself, completely unacceptable in a world full of peer pressure. I had my own group of friends, many wonderful people with whom I am still close, but we were geeks and somehow, I never imagined that I was as important to other people as they were to me. I considered myself relatively expendable in my own social life.

I hated high school. It was no accident that I went to a college that no one from my high school had ever attended before. It was a survival instinct. Once in college I was introduced to a completely different version of myself. I hadn't changed, but the people around me no longer associated me with 12 years of history. Suddenly I was attractive and desirable, two things I had never been before. I hit this weird stride where nearly any guy I showed interest in was drawn to me. And not just people I met in college. When I ran into guys who I had known when I was in high school, but who were not from my high school, they were suddenly showing interest. It was like an alternate reality. It gave me confidence and helped me to rethink my own idea of myself.

Now, after solving the mystery of the postcard, I was looking at my high school existence from a completely different slant. The interactions I had with this guy were suddenly developing new meaning. Maybe I was the "Jenn" he had left something to in his senior will. Maybe he was more involved in our many conversations and running jokes and pranks than I had realized. Maybe the fact that he had come to visit me at a summer prep school meant something. I was putting together time lines. Coincidences were no longer coincident. He and another friend had shown up at that summer school right after I had an enormous falling out with someone I considered to be one of my best friends, a falling out that permanently ended the friendship. That friend was also good friends with the younger sister of one of his friends. Was he aware of what had happened and checking to see that I was okay? When we ran into each other a year after he had graduated at a common friends graduation party and he was happy to see me and we spent an unnaturally long time talking to one another, (the substance of that conversation completely escapes me...), should I have been paying more attention? My assumption had always been that I existed only in the periphery of his life.

What now? I'm tracking him down, of course, if for no other reason than to disclose the fact that I figured out his little message and to convey how irritating and intriguing it had been to me over the last decade. And of course to find out what exactly was going on 20 years and 2000 miles ago.