It had been far, far too long, so I met two of my best friends in the whole world for donuts today. As always, it was a good time. Donuts+friends=yay!
I feel bad that I missed Rowan's birthday, though. I didn't actually forget it, I just thought he wasn't around for me to call him. Which maybe is a worse error, I don't know.
Rowan's birthday is kind of how we came to be friends, in fact, many years ago now. When I was in grade 10 we were in the same Chemisty class, though he was on the other side of the class from me, which might as well have been the other side of the ocean, so I never actually met him. But our teacher would always call out his full name, first and last, in a very distinctive way. So he had a sort of notoriety to me in my mind. The next semester we wound up sitting next to each other in our Math class. I had been wandering the halls a little earlier (I forget why, exactly, though I do recall it was for the purposes of being up to no good) and came across a bulletin board that listed everyone who had a birthday for that month in our school. I'm sure this would constitute a grievous violation of privacy laws today, but those were simpler times. Anyways the enigmatic Rowan was on that list, so when I saw him in Math class I said "Hi Rowan, happy birthday."
And he said, "My birthday's not for a few weeks." But I greeted him every day like that, and he reminded me everyday that it wasn't his birthday. Turns out the actual anniversary of his birth took place on a weekend so I missed it. But we have been friends ever since, even though I think I kind of weirded him out at first. It was good to see him again.
I don't recall the day I actually met Jason, we just sort of fell into being friends. But that was the same year, grade 10. In fact, we were in the same chemistry class as well, only we actually knew each other. One day he was sick and missed class. That happened to be the day we learned how to do stoichiometry. We had a small assignment that we had to do every day and hand in for points. Jay was entitled to get an exemption since he was sick that day, but I told him how easy stoich was and that I would show him how to do it and that way he could get extra marks and save his miss-an-assigment card for later.
I wound up getting 1 out of 10 on the assignment, and Jay got zero. Oops. I still don't really know how to do stoichiometry- it seemd so simple- just switch the little numbers around, but turns out there was more to it than that. I wound up failing Chem 104 in university, too. And Jason doesn't let me teach him how to do things anymore. But you know something? It's been fourteen years since then, and I have yet to have occasion to stoichiometrize something, so really, who cares?