So, turns out I can't get the pictures off my computer to post them, and I had not yet uploaded them to FLickr, so the awesome "A Day in the Life" post I've been working on is going to have to wait. I know, I know, I'm a tease. It's ok though, because it was turning into WAY too much for one post anyway.
Instead, you get a Jeremy post! Ahhh! I know, there are a few of you who are jumping up and down. For those of you who aren't, better than nothing, right? We have to keep it on the DL...he's going to be super annoyed if he sees this. Which he will, but whatevs. Sorry, J! I needed material, and there you were...suck it up.
He's lucky, though, that I could only find a couple of pictures from high school on Flickr and that they're not embarrassing. I have so, so many more, and they're so, so much worse.
But I'm getting ahead of myself. I met Jeremy on the bus to band camp the summer before my senior year of high school.
OK, are you done laughing?
He was a very bad drummer boy, which meant I liked him immediately. That's how I rolled back in the day. My friends told me he was a player and that I should stay away, but he had my interest the moment he leaped onto the bus and told me I was in his seat and I better move. So Romantic! One night after lights out we heard the girls in the bunks below us whispering about how cute he was. Two different girls thought he was into them, and at least one of them had already told him she loved him, but I knew, judging from the fact that he threw me into the lake without fail every single day, that he actually liked me.
Of course, I had to play it cool, and I basically ignored him for most of the week.Apparently it worked, because on the bus ride home from band camp, he gave me a shoulder massage, and word traveled through the six other buses magically, like wildfire, and as we shuffled off the bus late that night, one of the girls he was talking to was standing there, flaming mad, and just like that, he asked her for his drumline jacket back. Harsh.
I think we were together after that, although I do seem to remember sitting in my convertible in the school parking lot one day after band practice, and him somehow awkwardly kneeling outside the door and asking if I would "go out with him." Of course, I totally said yes, and we started a total controversy in the band because I was one of the good girls and he was a stone cold player. Or something. I don't remember, except that our friends were all beyond annoyed and hated being forced to hang out together. So that was fun.
Here is a picture of us the fall of our senior year. Excuse the fact that we both have an insane case of red eye.
We hung out all the time with my friends, and we'd talk on the phone for hours at a time. He acted like a five year old most of the time, although he did earn points when he told me that all he needed to be happy was a picnic blanket, the stars, atomic fireballs, and me. I was totally into him, so of course he dumped me about a week later, when he told me that Love was like falling off a cliff, or something. I'm not sure what that was supposed to mean.
Of course I was devastated, but I rallied a few months later and started dating his best friend to make him jealous. Yes, I was that girl.
Only his best friend ended up being pretty awesome himself and we dated for several months during which time Jeremy and I became close, very dysfunctional friends. Here we all are at our high school graduation:
That's Ben (the one who came to visit Evany during his bachelor party), me, Zac (Jeremy's best friend) and J. We all, along with some other friends, hung out together pretty much every second of the day. We spent most weekends at Zac's parents lakehouse, and I'm relatively sure I was responsible for that terrible dye job Ben is sporting.
Sometime later, Jeremy decided to join the Marines. He left for boot camp, and while he was there, we wrote lots of letters back and forth. We tossed around the idea of dating again, and there were a few occassions where we tried it out, but we were never all that successful. He was living across the country, and I was way, way too high maintenance for that. We dated, he would visit, I'd break up with him, he'd break up with me, it was a soap opera. Together we created a ton of baggage for one another so that everyone who tried to date one of us pretty much waved the white flag immediately. Fun! Except...not.
Then September 11th rolled around, and all of our lives changed. You can read about my thoughts on that here: We wrote letters during his first deployment, some of which I still find laying around in random places. He'd write letters about what car he was going to buy when he got back, what huge parties there would be. At some point we had begun to make the transition from melodrama to real friends, although it was bumpy. Somewhere along there I met John, and soon after his second deployment he ran into the girl who would become his wife who had also gone to high school with us.
They ended up splitting up, (but on a happy note, she's since met and married someone who seems to make her insanely happy, and they have one of the coolest blended families I've seen. We meet up at the zoo with all the kiddies every summer we visit home, and I'm glad to say we're friends. Hi, L!) and he's since moved down to southern Florida and we get to hang out semi regularly. It's the first time we've lived within 4 hours of one another since we were about 18, so it's been great.
But we're just friends. Sorry to disappoint some of you, but we get along much, much, muchmuchmuch better as friends. Although he does say I never like the names of the girls he dates. Which makes no sense to me. Now that I think of it though, he does date girls with some unfortunate names.
Oops. Now he's really going to be mad at me. Oh well, nothing new.
So that's the Jeremy story, and it had pictures, although there weren't kid pictures. Happy now? If not, take it up with my broken, useless computer.
