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2005-12-30 - 4:47 p.m.

Last night I met up with a girl I hadn�t seen in over 16 years. She found me on Friendster (of course) and emailed. She lives here in Chicago now and is a public school teacher. I was so excited to see her, I could barely stand before it (I don�t mean this as a bad thing). We met at the hipster coffee place on my corner.

We were friends in the summers of 1988 and 1989 at CTY nerd-camp. She�s a year older than me. I guess most of my friends from that time were and it�s funny how vast a one-year age difference can seem at that point. Although she seems not to be anymore, she was pretty spacey sometimes back then, which I found rather charming. She was from West Virginia, which I found pretty exotic.

And she was in my �harem�. She was in fact a member of my �primary harem� of three core girls, as opposed to my �secondary harem� of some dozen extended friends. I was kind of a jerk as a kid and referred to my female friends (jokingly, but still) as my harem. In my own defense, I didn�t think of them (and certainly didn�t treat them) as romantic playthings. They were all terrific individuals I was secretly in awe of.

Looking back, I think I threw around the term �harem� to refer to them as sort of a defense mechanism. I was 14 and just starting to realize how absolutely amazing girls were to me. And I was surrounded by all these brilliant ones. I feared that I wasn�t on their level, couldn�t even come close to their degree of coolness. Calling them my harem was maybe my pathetic attempt to assert myself and compensate.

The ironic thing is that they took such good care of me anyway. I was a freakin� chaotic train wreck at that age, emotionally and practically. I guess I turned to other people to keep me stable. Mostly to girls like the one I saw last night. I don�t really have an excuse for not being able to take care of myself. Oh, I could blame it on youth and immaturity. But lots of other 14-year olds manage to deal with themselves okay.

Uhm. Sorry? I hope I�ve gotten a little better. I�m afraid I rely on Nya a little too much to take care of practical day-to-day stuff, but at least here I can say that my spirit is willing but my flesh is weak. Well, not weak so much as massively uncoordinated; try cleaning your house or making lunch when your entire right side is gimpy. I think I have the emotional side down better though. Accumulating years of experience (and even being able to think things through by writing them down here) helps a lot.

So we sat in the coffee place for hours and tried to catch up on sixteen years. Her hair is shorter, but mostly she looks the same. (Except of course that she�s not 16 anymore.) After college at U. Michigan, she moved to the most appealing nearby big city (Chicago certainly trumps Detroit, sorry). She took a marketing job at A.C. Nielsen (the ratings people) for a few years before becoming a teacher.

Today she teaches math to high schoolers and feels horrified by how ineffective the educational system is for a lot of them. Why isn�t there a better way of showing the kids who don�t want to be in school how they can apply what they�re learning to the real world? Why is taking a work apprenticeship at that age generally seen as a sign of academic failure, or at best as a step necessitated by economic hardship, than a legitimate alternative to four years of high school?

We traded gossip and rumors about friends from the program. Who had kids. Who was a businesswoman or a lawyer. She was amazed that I was still good friends with Jake after all this time. I told her the story of how Nya and I remet and how J. (also from CTY) had become part I of my top 5 ex-girlfriends project.

When the caf� closed, we went to my apartment to light Hanukkah candles together, She has to be one of very few Jews from Huntington, WV (so of course we�re connected by mind link). I think I may have ranted to her a bit much about the true meaning of Hanukkah, but then Nya came back from her rehearsal (she was cast in a sketch comedy show with Corn Productions which is playing on New Year�s Eve, so please come if you�re in the area) with wine.

We both felt incredibly overtired by 1 and were reminded once again that we aren�t as young as we used to be. She went home and Nya and I went to bed. As I was falling asleep I realized that, although I had promised to get her a good date, I don�t have many male friends here to set her up with. So I�ll pimp her out here. Drop me a line if you�re a straight single male in Chicagoland who�d like to go out with a beautiful, amazing young schoolteacher who can salsa and swing and drink you under the table�

� 2005 Geoff Gladstone

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