| 7 apr 2001 so i woke up with one of my rare extreme urges to blow some cash. i used to be a pretty aggro shopper, but i've become quite frugal these days. i guess it's from the aftermath of watching my life savings vaporize from the stock market's doldrums these days. i went to fry's electronics and checked out digital cameras. i looked at the kodak dc4800 and the sony dsc-p1. i liked them both, but of course, i was drawn more to the dsc-p1. because it's a sony, and because it's silver. can't resist my fetish, you know. the sony is really small, almost too small for my fingers, but hey... it'll make it easier to carry around all over the place. i came back and read some more reviews on cnet.com. i finally bit the bullet and bought it online. i saved about $180, but when i buy stuff, i'd really prefer to have it now. oh well. it's money saved. ----- now... stan getz is playing. i'm in a pensive and reflective mood. why? because i just transferred my freshman year journal from my mac to my pc. 1.5 MEGABYTES of text written in microsoft word. i read two entries from that year: halloween 1992, and february 19, 1993. halloween was the day after i started my journal, when i realized that my first year at stanford was too precious to leave undocumented. halloween was also the day when i started falling in love with kristie. and february 19th was the day that kristie and i finally had our first kiss. after almost four months of a tortuous courtship that practically drove us both nuts. both of us were kind of intimidated by the other, in a good way; i guess we both found each other very desirable and sort of unattainable or something. i was 17 years old at the time. so young. what struck me most about my writing was that i was so innocent. kristie was my first relationship, and it turns out that she was also the most powerful as well. i went into the existence of "us" with no knowledge of how to treat a girlfriend, with no expectations... (no wonder we had so many fights.) but it was really beautiful because it was untainted with convention. i had kind of always known that, but reading my own words about the events that unfolded just acccentuated that beauty. it was a wondrous time for me, untouched by past baggage or expectations; it was simply two people who fell madly in love with each other, finally exploding into the present as a couple with limitless potential and possibilities. two of my friends' observations: jan said that it was going to be a "powerful affair." i remember resenting the fact that she labelled it an "affair" because as far as i was concerned, she was IT. she was the one. i even told her so, when she was sitting on my bed in my gavilan dormroom. and the second observation was from david, when he said that kristie was "quite infatuated" with me. i also took some exception to that because i had fears that an infatuation, a crush, was short-lived and would burn out in time. but i think they were right on target. as bright and incendiary as we were, i don't think kristie and i adapted very well to the cooling of our passions. i think i had no idea what to do after the honeymoon phase was over... the chase was tumultuous as hell, and our first months together were also riddled with ups and downs. i sort of expected that things would keep being like that. yeah. expected. that's when expectations and lack of experience started to creep into the relationship. but this entry really isn't here for me to regret what happened afterwards. i've already written about that. and i still feel like i owe kristie a million apologies for my stupidity. this entry is about re-engaging myself with the beauty of how we started out. how we had just come back from a mardi gras party, decorated with fake plastic beads, and how we sound up spending final 5 hours of that day in gavilan lounge, flirting with each other, rubbing noses, playfully fighting. how that flirting eventually took an irreversible step over the edge into a few kisses which whisked kristie and me to an uncharted territory. at the age of 17, i was given the greatest blessing of my life so far. but while that is over now, what i find most satisfying was that i had the capacity to love someone so deeply. and i know that i still have that ability. and that makes me happy and hopefully. i'll get there again. given our roller coaster courtship and subsequent relationship, i find it oddly fitting that after the blissful blossom of our romance in the lounge, morning came. and after she went to her room to crash, i headed to the bathroom... and threw up. *grin* |