I remember the first day that Jen and I met – it was on a Tuesday – September 26th 1995. I was 27 and she was 23. It was the first day of graduate school for both of us, and I sat down (naturally!) next to the cutest girl at the orientation meeting. It didn’t take very long to realize she had no romantic interest in me, particularly when I would ask her out and she would say, “I have no romantic interest in you”. But eventually I won her over with my manly good looks, my tremendous charisma, my masterful guitar playing, and my overwhelming sense of modesty. Also, I helped her with her statistics homework.
We started living together two years later, when we moved from Washington State to Pennsylvania, where I’d been accepted into a PhD program at Penn State. We crammed all our junk into her 10 year old blue Volvo sedan we called Uduff (after his license plate, UTF 101) and tent-camped our way cross-country.
I’d had to sign a yearlong apartment lease sight unseen before leaving Bellingham (the rental market is tight in State College, PA; at least it was in 1997). Before signing, I’d asked my faculty advisor to check it out for me, which he graciously agreed to do, assuring me that the place was just fine. Unfortunately, gracious though he was, the guy apparently suffers from near blindness and anosmia, because that apartment was the darkest, coldest, dampest, smelling-of-mildew-and-cat-pee apartment either of us had ever lived in. We got there and Jen cried for hours. We had arrived to our dingy little apartment, 3000 miles from home in a town where we knew no one, living on my $8000 per year graduate assistantship, and she was unemployed.
Who could imagine a better way to start a relationship?
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