Foam Me Once...

Freshman year, throughout my college career, and long after I received my diploma, I essentially maintained the same core crew of friends, a group who lived in my  dorm and all of whom I met on that fateful first day while I hung my *NSYNC posters above my extra-long twin-sized bed and organized my Saucony sneakers by color. One member of my group is a boy named Pat. He lived in the room across from mine, and despite my misgivings after our initial nerdily competitive conversation about what our SAT scores had been, we became close, and remain so till today. Pat had a roommate of undetermined Hispanic origin who slept beneath a Che Guevara flag, eventually succumbed to peer pressure and join the fraternity of which all my male friends were brothers, and today lives in South Korea, which is sad because it’s so far away, and also hilarious, as Pat has a well-known and congenital passion for tiny Asian girls: he now basically resides in his own personal Disney World.

After a first semester where all my friends proclaimed loud and clear they had zero desire for a boyfriend or girlfriend, second semester rolled around and Wammo! Somehow everyone was coupled up except for me and Pat. We didn’t quite know how it happened, and at first thought not much would change: our friends’ newly acquired significant others were mostly in our clique anyway, so wouldn’t it just be more of the same? But in the whopping ten years since my Freshman year (ugh, could I sound like more of a fossil?), I have learned that regardless of age, upon the acquisition of a mate, everyone immediately morphs into a sort of fun-detesting, boring loser type of Power Ranger. I still have no idea why this is: just because you have a boyfriend or girlfriend, why does that mean you now need to pretend you’re always tired? Or that going out isn’t your “thing” anymore? Or that we’re “too old” for this “sort or stuff,” whatever that means? This mutual exclusivity of fun and boy/girlfriends first reared its tedious head that second semester when Pat and I would be ready to go out and come to find that our friends were instead engrossed in a game of cards on someone’s linty dorm room carpet. We quickly learned there was no point in holding out hope that they would get ready “Right after this hand!” and soon stopped asking them to go out with us entirely. 

Each semester, one of our school’s fraternities threw the always-popular foam party. In the spring, when Pat and I arrived in our bathing suits, cans of the venerable Beast Ice in hand, we immediately knew we’d made a mistake: apparently everyone else at school had decided to stay at home with our other friends, too, as there were only about fifteen other unsavory and unsanitary coeds in attendance. In the fall, when we’d gone to the same event, the basement rooms had been packed wall-to-wall with us stupid freshman, sweaty and foam-covered, like some excessively eccentric scene out of a bubble bath commercial. Shrugging our shoulders in the now virtually empty basement, we brought our beers to the dance floor and milled around the corners like we were at a middle school dance. The party got slightly more fun as the crowd increased, but I was still raring to call it a night several hours earlier than usual.

I tend to exaggerate just a tad in these blog posts, but the following scenario, I promise, actually occurred precisely as I am about to describe it (and lives on to this day in the general lore amongst my friends). At one point during the party I went to get a beer and when I returned, I kid you not, this is exactly the scene I witnessed: Pat had been standing on the edge of the dance floor when he spied a girl, Ellie. He extended his arm and pointed to her, much as you might when in grade school and trying to pass blame on the someone else for kicking sand into the eyes of the kid no one liked. After he pointed at her, Pat rotated his hand and wiggled his index finger, beckoning her to come hither. I burst out laughing, but was silenced immediately because not only did she obediently follow the direction of his finger, like some sort of bizarre slutty magnet, she then wrapped her arms around him, and within about .03 second they were making out. My mouth hung open. How does that happen in real life? Who falls for something like that? Pat and Ellie sucked each other’s mouths dry out for the better part of an hour, while I looked on in disbelief, alone, with lavender scented foam clinging to my shoulders and fraternity floor sludge caked between my toes.

The next day I told everyone, and I mean everyone, about what I had seen go down and no one could believe Pat had snagged a girl like that. “She must not go to school here,” we’d hypothesized, as just down the street from us was a handful of other colleges all known to be the general breeding ground for the comparatively, um, less than intelligent. But soon it became clear that Ellie was actually a student at our school, and within days she was also Pat’s girlfriend. I couldn’t believe it. In fact, when I think about that night right now, I still can’t believe it. I mean, OK, maybe Pat could snag a girl just for a night that way, with that wriggle of a finger, but as a real girlfriend? Who perpetuated as such for several months? No. Way.

It became clear almost immediately, however, that Pat and Ellie were really meant to be. He found her comically kooky as she knitted during all her classes, (which turned out to be totally mesmerizing as I found myself walking between classes, daydreaming about just when she might actually finish that chenille afghan she’d been working on), wore vintage dresses and Amish hairstyles, and, like Pat, enjoyed using excessively big words just for the fun of it. Sadly, Pat and Ellie broke up over the summer, and even though their relationship had started out in the strangest of ways, I couldn’t help but think they really had been perfect for one another: one day, while a group of a dozen of us had waited for everyone to be ready to go to lunch, Ellie turned to Pat and said, “You are so...diabolical!” before nuzzling his nose and gripping his belt loops. They then laughed manically--and seriously--together for several minutes. So if that, dear followers, isn’t enough to make love last, then I honestly have no idea what is and am doomed to spend the rest of my days happily alone and, well, undiabolical.

(No picture this week since apparently my Freshman year was so long ago, no one even had digital cameras then. I'm basically a Styracosaurus. Ugh.)