Writing Stats:Sunday, August 10, 2003@01:23 p.m.

Relationships. What can make or break them, and what’s the key aspect that makes things click? While there are many things, this week I’m going to talk about the timing aspect.

Kara, back in the pre-Jed days, was once visited by the ghost of Christmas present…in the form of an upstairs neighbor named Luke. Luke liked Kara, Kara liked Luke, but Kara was fresh off the dumped heap from Zeke and thus, the two were destined for “Friends with benefits” status. At least, they were destined to be friends with benefits once. After that, they just /Joked/ about it. Bad timing Kara and Luke

My friend Jake (see, I told you you’d be introduced sooner or later) has on occasion, liked someone and been prepared to ask them out only to find out that they were now seeing someone. Bad timing Jake.

Nick has no timing whatsoever, he simply likes someone and talks about it non-stop, never really getting up the courage to do it. Hell, with his snazzy new haircut he /should/ do it. I have a feeling if he /would/ just do it he might be pleasantly surprised. Bad timing Nick.

The most habitual offender of bad timing, someone who should probably be led away in chains and taken to the “Bad Timing” prison where he’s forced to sit chained to a bar stool talking to an old man who won’t stop droning on and on about “the one that got away” is…drum roll please…ME!

I come from a family of “write an angry letter of protest but never really express your true feelings.” I myself fall somewhere in between my family and Nick. Sometimes I’ll let the opportunity pass me by and sometimes I won’t. Usually I jump the gun. With all these filters in place, no flour really sifts into the recipe when I cook. That is, until last summer.

I met Megan a year prior to last summer (Imagine, an article about time and timing where I make the actual dates relatively obscure and arduous to decipher. Let alone the fact that I just used “arduous” and “decipher” in the same sentence.) We were in the closest thing to Office Space I ever care to be in…”Writing: Fiction and Poetry”. Dave in a poetry class would be like Anna Nicole Smith in a philosophy class. We’d sit in our respective seats going “Umm, this is nice and all, but I’m really /bored/”. Why I say this class was like office space however, was because of one of our fellow students. He would start every opinion he made in class with “Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah.” It seriously sounded like he was going to continue with “We’re going to need you to come in on Sunday too. Yeah.” Megan sat near this guy, but not generally next to him, and she struck me immediately as beautiful, nice, and crazy…Crazy because she worked for Goodrich Quality theaters as well in Battle Creek. Whenever Matt would say “Yeah…” we would laugh and Megan would roll her eyes.

And so the giggle corner was born. Megan never really joined, but myself, James, Erica, and Sneah all shared a collective “yuk yuk yuk” everytime Matt opened his mouth. We’d grade each others papers with “A+ BEST THING I’VE EVER READ” when it would come to peer opinion times, and it didn’t take long for us to turn against the teacher as well. Everything anyone in class wrote that made her feel any kind of emotion other than “I AM TEACHER WOMAN” was generally dubbed “mmmm…too too much.” And resulted in the disappointed parent stare. You know the one. “You could have tried SO much harder than you did but thanks to the modern marvel ‘peer grading’ you passed so I can’t take away the car or your music. Damn.”

She would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for us kids and that damned dog. Okay, there was no dog. But by the end of the semester, the “Office Space” corner was dubbed “too too much” and in general danger of losing points off our 4.0’s because of our attitudes. Somehow we convinced her that rather than having a final, since we’ve been talking about Office Space all semester, that we should watch it the final day. We didn’t think it actually worked until she strolled into class five minutes late on the final day towing a VCR and Television.

We were all relieved that we would not spend the extra class time listening to people share their thoughts and feelings about the class. It ended, and the giggle corner parted ways never to take another class together again.

I ran into Megan every month or two after that Her theater would need something from our theater, vice versa. It wasn’t until the /next/ winter semester however, when I saw her on a weekly basis.

We both had a 3 hour break between classes. I took the bus and didn’t want to ride it home only to jump back on it as soon as I got there, and she of course, lived in Battle Creek. So, every Tuesday she and I met for lunch at the Bronco Mall. Ahhh the things I miss about Western. Bernhard center was one of my usual haunts, unfortunately I didn’t have a laptop at the time otherwise it would have been even better, but Tuesdays at least, my free time was filled.

We’d talk about everything, and this was right around the time things were going on with Melanie. Megan sat and listened, and as the days wore on, I realized I really liked this girl, she was a truly good person, and a very good and loyal friend.

Which is why I didn’t protest too much when she announced she was coming to see “Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya sisterhood at my theater since hers didn’t get it. Would I like to come along?

Why not, and that’s how Dave’s Rhythm of “Timing” came into play. We went Putt-Putt golfing afterwards. I still have the scorecard because I’m a packrat who can’t throw anything that holds some meaning away…although with the move coming up, some things will have to go. The faded orange Putt-Putt scorecard however, will remain. We then talked for about thirty minutes in my parking lot before timing came into play again – I had had a 44 oz soda at the theater and another at the mini-golf place, so my bladder was telling me that this was /not/ the time to be having a conversation longer than five minutes. Five turned to ten, ten to twenty and suddenly my bladder put my body on red alert. “THIS BLADDER WILL SELF DESTRUCT IN TEN SECONDS.”

I said a hasty goodbye but not before inviting her to my party the next weekend. She came with bells on, and a friend who couldn’t wait to get to the bar since my party didn’t start kicking it until around 10 p.m. and they had arrived at 8. All my friends were waiting to meet this mystery woman that had been occupying my thoughts as of late, and so they were mildly disappointed that Megan and her friend left ten minutes before the first wave of 15 people arrived.

The party…it will go down as my best birthday ever. It was a three ring circus of activity. I had saved for months to give myself and my friends a good time. We had a keg, and a refrigerator full of everything but food. There was no room for anything else by the time I had finished stocking it with alcohol. We had people I didn’t know show up, we had druggies show up, we had an 8 hour BLAST and remarkably…no cops! The only reason I didn’t throw one THIS summer is because I’m afraid it just won’t top the last one.

The very next week a friend from work was having a party of his own, so I sent Megan an invite, and we were off. By the end of the night we were seeing each other. I myself have had nothing but bad relationships, and even those were far and few between, so my “asking of the out” was along the lines of a fifth grader. “Will you go out with me check yes or no”

Megan seemed to like it and before long we were hanging out every day. I goofed however. Not knowing lines and boundaries, I started calling her something she wasn’t, which left me with puzzled stares and eventually, a breakup. We can call everything what we want, but Megan was still battling ghosts of a previous breakup, and I was battling the fact that I wasn’t accustomed to all this attention and didn’t really know what the rules of dating were. What it all boiled down to was timing. I could very easily have moved much more slowly and re-read the old Rhythm of Life entries and figured it out. I jumped the gun. Timing is a bitch.

Which is amazing considering how long I’ve been writing these things. I guess it’s just easier to take someone else’s advice than it is to take your own.

We didn’t talk for about 3 weeks. We both blamed it on the fact that we were “busy”, using a different kind of timing as an excuse. When we did get back into contact it was as friends, and that was okay…that was great in fact because of what happened next.

There was a time when I loved my friends just because they were cool people to hang out with and do things with. August 25th 2002-April 21-2003 was a 7 month period of time that separated the men from the boys. We’ve all had bad years, before but this was something I was unprepared to face.

August 25th 2002 my father was rushed to the hospital because the thing he was being treated for was getting worse. It didn’t take the doctors long to decipher the new data they had. My father was diagnosed quickly with cancer and given 3 months to live.

Everything disappeared, my bright future as a wonderful educator, my last semester of college, my internship experience in the winter, all of it didn’t matter anymore, and I sank into the first of many funks, and it was Kara, Jake, Nick, and Megan who all in their own ways did everything they could think of to get me out of it. Kara, Jake, Nick, and…hmmm…we’ll call him Mark met every Wednesday at Bilbo’s for beers, we hung out all the time, and got our costumes ready for Eccentric Night at Bells in December. I went home whenever I got a chance, and I talked to Megan on the phone quite a bit. Since I know you all read this, this is my official “Thank You” for everything this past year.

December turned to January, January turned to February and Dad was still hanging on. He had outlived the initial guess of the doctors, and had managed to keep all the “end of days” symptoms out of him this whole time, but he was always tired, and his skin was beginning to turn yellow. I was interning and didn’t have time to hang out with people as much, but the fact that I was busy helped enormously. Megan volunteered (hehehe, after I asked her nicely) to come to the school and be a Judge for my Destination Imagination team. We started hanging out more and more often, but suddenly she showed up to Kalamazoo 10 one night to get some stuff for West Columbia 7 in a completely different mood than I had seen her in before. She was quiet and distant, and I could tell something was wrong.

I hammered into her until she finally told me what it was. I’ve always been a stickler about second chances. If someone screws you over once, they’re going to do it again so why give them the opportunity. She had however, taken this to mean that there was no chance we’d be getting back together again, and she didn’t like that at all. It’s when I first explained to her how timing was against us this time as well as last time.

It was March when we had this conversation and dad was going downhill fast. I didn’t expect him to live out each passing week from the reports I’d get from mom and my brother, but he hung on and on, getting weaker and sicker as each week passed. So lets just take a look at what was going on with Dave on this cold March night. Dying father, Internship 6 weeks from completion, impending Graduation and real world entry, coupled with loss of sleep and gain of stress. Could I have added a person to this picture? Yes I could. Would it have been right to do so? No it wouldn’t. I didn’t like talking about things with my friends because whenever we’d hang out I wanted to have a good time, and I wanted /them/ to have a good time as well, so I kept everything bottled up. To add a person to the picture at this point would be someone diving in after me while I was drowning instead of throwing a life raft and treating my injuries once I was on the boat. Once they were in the water, I would pull them down with me and I didn’t want that.

I explained it to Megan and she understood and told me she’d be there for me through it all.

And like a trooper, she was. Dad died the Monday before graduation. I missed the entire last week of school with the exception of Friday. The Funeral was on Thursday and Megan was there. She went above and beyond by driving up from Battle Creek to Lansing where the funeral was, then following us out to Lowell for the actual burial. She held my hand, let me sob on her shoulder and did everything right. I graduated from Western Michigan University on Saturday, and my friends took me out for a right good party. Megan came along, and it was good.

But two weeks later I said no when she wanted to start slowly moving into things again. It was unfair of me to do after everything she had done for me, but the timing still just wasn’t there.

Megan is dating someone else now. It was hard for her to tell me, and it was hard for me to write back that I understood why. Timing however would be against us again in a month anyway, as she enters into her own internship. I know from experience how trying the Internship truly is and juggling your responsibilities there and a person is hard. There’s a possibility that my job search may have ended but I’m not going to jinx it just yet. For a relationship between the two of us to work, to make it past those early delicate stages, we can’t both be balancing it.

If things are meant to be the timing might be right this December when she’s done and I’ve won the respect of my classes and don’t have to work quite as hard. Perhaps next summer during my three month vacation she’ll gain employment with Battle Creek Public Schools, or even in Kalamazoo. We’ll meet for coffee or lunch, and that spark that we’ve always had will reignite again, like the one that fires up the engine of my old Chevy truck. After everything I’ve put the damned thing through, I wouldn’t blame it if I turned the key and nothing happened, but like a trooper that spark is always there. That’s how it is between Megan and I.

That’s the key when it comes to timing. If things are meant to be, they’ll happen. If we’re destined for something more than friendship it’ll still be there later on. I refuse to become the old guy working for “Bad Timing Prison.” If we’re destined for friendship only, then I won’t have to be the old guy working for “Bad Timing Prison.” Timing is key in a relationship, and only time will tell where this one goes.