10 Years ago Today

(Well 10 years ago yesterday actually, cause I forgot to hit publish)

On July 29th 1998 I was talking to a friend online. She asked me if I'd like to go hang out with her and some of her friends. I had no plans that night so I said sure, but I had to work. I was kind of a dork and really not good with girls back then so I had no idea that she was asking me to hang out cause she liked me.

I got done with my shift as a, cashier at Cub Foods, and walked out to my car. I saw this girl standing by a car...blond hair with a streak died blue that hung down on either side of her face, wearing an Unwritten Law hoodie. All I could think was "wow". I wasn't really into the whole Punk scene at the time...I had started to listen to some Punk music (well a very little actually and mostly popular stuff like Green Day, Rancid and The Offspring ) and was just getting familiar with what it was all about, but I knew there was something special about this girl. I just had to meet her. Then to my surprise as I walked closer, the friend I was going to meet turned out the be standing along side the same car.

She introduced Jamie to me along with a couple of other friends that were there. I was so happy that I was going to get to hang out with this beautiful girl. As I said I was a bit of a dork and really bad around girls so it wasn't until well into the night that I finally admitted to Jamie that I liked her.

We went and dropped my car off at my house, and I just rode with them for the rest of the night. I have a terrible memory, but one thing I'll never forget is spending the whole time trying to figure out how I was going to talk to Jamie. I remember asking her who Unwritten Law was, and when she said it was Punk band that she really liked, that just got me more interested. Beyond that I was having trouble getting up the courage to talk to her more.

Later we decided to go cruising that night. Apparently that group was too cool to cruise Main so we headed to Appleton to cruise College Ave. instead. I was already growing out of the cruising main phase, but it was a chance to spend some more time with Jamie so I jumped at the opportunity. We had too many people there to take one car so I made sure that I was in the same car as Jamie.

We listened to a lot of random different music. All the girls were taking turns controlling the radio. There was the dance music radio channel, that sucked. There was the Classic Rock channel, that was not terrible. There was the hard rock channel, getting better. There was the weird Nine Inch Nails sound a like band, I think they were called Stabbing Westward. Then there was this crazy music like nothing I had ever. To this day I don't even know how to explain the band other than maybe as a funk ska band. It was Jamie's choice to pop in that CD, so it gave me a chance to ask her what in the heck we were listening too...it was The Little Blue Crunchy Things ( http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=user.viewprofile&friendid=78629623 ). The song was called Wasp( http://pownce.com/edvedafi/notes/2954110/ ). What a fascinating taste in music...more drive to learn more about this girl. On the way back to the Party ( which was the original plan for the night ) Jamie got to play some music again and this time she put in Unwritten Law. They were more of a typical punk band. Good but not quite as intriguing as LBCT.

( Note: I do not approve of underage drinking, and if you are a parent of somebody else that would be upset that we might have done some underage drinking please substitute all instances of Apple Pucker, Beer, drinks, and Captain and Coke with your favorite soda in the following paragraphs )
We got back to the party and all I wanted to do was get to talk to Jamie a little bit more. But first somebody asked if I wanted a beer. I couldn't say no so I went inside to get one. I ended up talking to a few people in there, and wondering where Jamie had went. So I grabbed a Captain and Coke and went looking for her. It took a little while but eventually I found her. It wasn't that big of a party and not at that big of a house, so I got a little worried that maybe she was trying to avoid me ( I did come to find out later that she was actually looking for me ). At this point I had a couple of drinks in me so I was able to talk to her, but being the dork that I was, it was still hard. I had no idea what to when I actually did find her. So when she asked me if I liked Apple Pucker I was excited because, yeah who doesn't like Apple Pucker, and it meant that she was going to talk to me. We made our way out onto the porch, where we sat and talked the rest of the night and shared the bottle of Apple Pucker. I can't for the life of me remember what we talked about that night. It took us a long time to drink that whole bottle of pucker so we must have talked a lot. I just remember being so excited that a beautiful girl would actually want to talk to me that it didn't really matter what we talked about.

I just kept thinking the whole time we drank the bottle, "boy I hope she's not all drunk and just talking to me because she is drunk." But then the next day she paged me ( yeah I was one of those kids that thought pagers were cool ). I called her back right away, and the rest is history.