Two not entirely unrelated items

The first item to which I refer in the title is the story of my first date.

The second is pager code. Last night on a whim I decided to learn pager code provided that Robbie would do the same. He agreed, and by now we're practically experts. Any one who wants to be cool should also learn pager code. My understanding is that pager code was invented to make something like text messaging possible with pagers. It's a list of numbers that represent letters. The only complicated part (once you've learned your alphabet) is that letters aren't separated within words, and there's some overlap. For example, 11111111 could be wwu, wuiu, wuvu, iwwi, vuuv, iiiiiiii, viwu, etc. And 177177 could be illnt, njm, itlmj, etc. I've also noticed that so far, we've kind of ignored punctuation. 8117 865156774, 969312 5003 15 11164 700 5007.

This is what happened on my first date:

This is what happened before my first date:

This girl (for this blog I'll call her "Maryn") came up to me during lunch at my high school one day in October 2002. She asked if I wanted to go with her to Masquerade (which was traditionally a girl's choice dance). I maybe acted a little taken back, because I was, but said sure. She asked if I wouldn't like to think it over for a day before I made any commitments. So I said sure. And the next day she asked if I'd thought it over, and I guess I sort of had, but really there wasn't much about which to think, and so arrangements were made for the date.

This is what happened on my first date:

I remember that I was wearing dark brown pants and a green shirt, because my sister told me I looked like a tree. I don't think she meant it as a compliment, but maybe subconsciously she was thinking about that poem "I think that I shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree." And Maryn picked me up, and didn't mention trees. We were with one other couple, and were to meet up with a larger group at another girl's home. We got there, and no one was around, so Maryn found the back door was unlocked and let us in. This was a slightly uncomfortable situation, sitting around in this home that we'd entered questionably, but it got much worse when the parents of the girl for whom we were waiting showed up. They seemed rather surprised to see us, but were kind enough to let us explain that we were waiting for their daughter who was already nearly an hour late. Finally, and I'm not sure how because this was before cellular telephones were in such widespread use, we got in contact with the missing girl and discovered that she'd forgotten that they were supposed to meet us and had already gone off and begun the major activities of the evening. It was Masquerade, so for costumes we were supposed to go buy random stuff from DI. They'd already finished this, we hurried and got some ridiculous stuff, then went to dinner at someone else's home - they'd ordered pizzas, but because we were more than an hour late, there were about three slices left for the four of us. Maryn excused herself and I chatted with a friend, explaining when he asked about my costume that I didn't realize we were supposed to dress up. (I was wearing a quasi-terrible knit Halloween vest and some semi-ugly pants.) And when I went outside to find my date, I discovered that she was recovering from a crying spell, being comforted by another girl. I guess things were going poorly enough that she felt bad. I tried (but not effectively) to help her feel better. This was probably the most difficult moment of the evening for me, because I felt really sorry for her, but didn't know what to do.

The low point of the evening for her was yet to come, however. We were driving somewhere (I'm not sure where) and following behind the girl who had earlier abandoned us. We had to make a left turn onto SR 198 between Spanish Fork and Salem, and as the lead vehicle pulled out, Maryn took advantage of the small break in traffic to follow closely. But the first car (a Bronco) stalled and we rear-ended them. Luckily, the bronco's trailer hitch hit the center of our license plate, and folded the plate in half, but there was no other contact between the vehicles. Maryn's dad hadn't wanted to let her drive, and had made her promise to be careful, so she was terrified of the consequences of this incident. We went to another girl's home, and her brother used a hammer to try and flatten out the license plate so it wouldn't look so bad.

The dance itself was kind of boring - none of us really felt like dancing after all that. I don't know that I've ever really felt like dancing. So we sat around for a little while, danced a couple songs because it seemed imperative, and then we took off. We got Frostys from Wendy's, and went home. I had a fantastic time, I really couldn't stop laughing, though I tried to because I felt bad for Maryn, but really, it was kind of hilarious.

Now I'll repeat that story, but in pager code:

657116774, 1 1110177.

See how much more concise that is? And way too cool.