2004-05-08 - 11:35 p.m.
HAPPY MOM'S DAY
I know it's not till tomorrow, but whatever. I don't like Mother's Day, I never know what to get for my mom. She's got lots of stuff already. I know "it's the thought that counts" and all that, but I think she stopped saying that when I was 6. Now she expects things.
I was just gonna send flowers, but as it turns out I'm gonna go home tomorrow. I wasn't expecting to, it was kind of a miscommunication with me and my sweetums. She always expected that we'd go home and I didn't and we never brought it up until yesterday. So we're going home in the morning, which means I'll have to get up early and drive. Not to mention that I had to work all day today so that somebody could cover for me tomorrow. But I digress.
I'll guess maybe I'll take my mom out to breakfast or something, if she's even awake yet. Anyway. I still gotta answer these last questions, so let's get going.
"Why did I come to school here?"
Well. The easy answer would be because they accepted me, but I don't think that will get me all the points for this answer. Let me tell you a story.
Remember when I was talking about football a few posts ago? If not, go read it again. I used to play football. Actually, forget about football for right now. Let me mention my family.
I have family out in the New York/New Jersey area, whom I visit every few years or so. Charity and I are going there after our wedding for a couple days before our honeymoon starts, although technically I guess it counts as the start of the honeymoon, so that we can see some of the relatives that won't be able to come here to see us get hitched. She has family there, too. Lots of family. They're all mobbed up, I'm pretty sure.
Some of my family lives in New Jersey and a few of my uncles and my grandfather all went to this nice little private school. My grandparents used to live just a few houses away from the campus of the school, so I'd always see it when I stayed at their place. And I'd always hear the little suggestions that I should consider going to school there, since I'd be the third generation of our family to attend. I guess that generation thing is important somehow. Not to me, but to somebody.
My grandparents have since moved into a retirement community, which sucks because I don't get to stay in that house by the school anymore. It was a neat house. I miss it.
Anyway, I always thought that the school was heavy into soccer. My uncles all played soccer there and there were soccer fields everywhere you looked. But I guess at some point they got into football.
In 1994, the summer before I started high school, I was set to go East and visit people. My grandfather ended up talking with the football coach of the school, who also lived right there near the campus. And my gramps is like "my grandson from Kansas is coming to visit, he plays football" and the coach was like "OMG really, let's set up a meeting".
It only gets weirder from here, but the fact that the coach had any interest in me at all has always seemed strange. I was only in junior high at this point, meaning that I'd accomplished nothing that would make any school want to recruit me for any reason. I suppose I'd understand it if I was some big 300 pound Midwestern farm boy, but I wasn't.
The only thing I could think of was that some other guy from Kansas had moved out to that area, maybe to that specific school, and he was a phenom or something. Who knows. But they sure were interested.
So by the time I got to Jersey, it had changed from "let's meet the football coach" to "let's have you apply at the school". So I met with the coach and he was a really nice guy. He drove me all around the athletic areas in a golf cart and tried selling me on the school. Typical stuff.
Here's where it starts getting odd. After that, I had to go meet with one of the Deans for the application process. I had to meet with him and then I had to write a stupid essay on something. About a time that I had to make a moral decision, if memory serves.
But jeez oh man, was the Dean bizarre. He seemed so excited about the mere possibility that I might go to school there that, frankly, it was a little creepy. Then during the interview, I guess to try relating to me, he started talking about Playboy Magazines and naked girls and stuff like that. It was WEIRD.
Then after the meeting, he told me that he'd set up a tour of the campus so that someone could show me all the classrooms and the dorms and all of that. And this girl walks in. She was surely a senior, meaning she was like 5 years older than me. She was wearing a cheerleader's outfit, and she happened to possess many of the qualities prized by the superficial male. By which I mean her boobs were big.
So the Dean tells me that she's going to lead me on the tour, just me and her. And while the girl was walking out of the room, he nudged me and was giving me this look like "Huh? Huh? Look what I got for you! Pretty nice, huh?" To this day, I still don’t know what to say about that.
The tour was actually fine, the girl was very nice. If she was aware that the Dean had pimped her out to me, she never mentioned it. Once we were done (with the tour, pervert), I left and that was that.
Then about a week after I got back home after the trip, someone from the school called my house and told one of my parents that I'd been accepted and that the school needed my transcripts by a certain date if I was going to transfer there in the Fall. So I had to make up my mind about what I was going to do, and obviously I chose to stay here.
But I didn't tell the school about my decision. I figured they'd get the hint and forget about me. About a month before the deadline, though, I got a HAND WRITTEN letter from the Dean who'd interviewed me, talking about how much they hoped I'd had a nice visit to the school and that they hoped I would choose to continue my scholastic career there.
Then about 3 weeks before the deadline, someone from the school called and left a message. So my parents were like "you should probably tell them," so I wrote a letter thanking them and all of that, but saying that I'd decided to stay at home.
WELL. About a week before the deadline, I got another letter from the Dean. Let's not forget what had happened so far. Golf carts with the coach. Playboy magazines. Cheerleader with big sweater bunnies. Hand written letter!
I open this one and it says (typed) "DEAR APPLICANT", not even my name, and went on to curtly remind me that the deadline for my transcripts was one week away. Dear Applicant! Typed! Curt! Boy, did their tune change in a hurry.
It was an odd situation from start to finish. But the way they didn't even care in the slightest about me once I turned them down kinda left a bad taste in my mouth. SO. Remember when I said to forget about football? Well, forget that, and remember it again.
By the time I was ready to pick a college, I'd gotten scholarship offers and everything, and I went on trips and had meetings and all of that stuff. But around January of my last year of high school, I made the decision that I wasn't going to play football in college. My knees hurt constantly, and I would have had to have a few surgeries just to be ready for my freshman year, and it was just a big mess. I didn't want to do it anymore.
So I had to contact the schools who'd offered me scholarships and let them know. I couldn't write a letter this time, sadly, I had to tell them like a man. And most of the coaches were polite, but they surely forgot all about me as soon as the conversations ended.
But when I called here and spoke with Coach Snyder, he was polite like the others. But then, at the point where everyone else hung up, he went ahead and set up a tour for me at the school anyway. Even though I wouldn't be playing for him, even though we'd probably never speak again (we haven't), he still wanted me to come visit the campus (I hadn't yet). And he didn't even transfer me off to somebody, he handled it himself.
So I ended up coming here. Based on my talk with the coach, I figured the people here must be real nice and that it'd be a pretty good place to go to school. Man, I was WAY off on that one.
This was a long post! I gotta go.
