i get to the restaurant, early, and wait in the car. as i begin to feel sick to my stomach i wonder if inhaling two dozen cookies in the last twenty-four hours was such a good idea. this isn't an exaggeration, if anything it's a slight underestimate. i decide to mark this day on the calendar as the day my diabetes develops. i wonder if it's shallow that i want to show jules my new phone and wonder how i'd even be able to work it into the conversation without seeming shallow. as we slide into the booth jules begins with, "so i got this new phone this week and i'm not sure if i'm crazy about it." we have our in.
there's talk of our mutual love of the soup. i have a strange crush on joel mchale (must be the sarcasm), and lou is amazing. the dreamgirls trailer was perfection. laughing, hard time breathing, tears running down my face, perfection.
we talk about the impending destruction of our grade school. i tell jules that i really want a brick from the building once they knock it down. she tells me that she and T went there this week for a tour. it was just how she remembered it to be. i make a mental note to go for a visit in the next few weeks.
the conversation turns to high school talk and the laundry list of things that we still have a hard time believing that we got away with. i thank her for helping me pass AP calculus. she says that she's pretty sure she doesn't fully even know what calculus is to this day. we laugh about all the tears she shed during our regular tests. she would freak out, start crying, raise her hand and tell our teacher that she studied for the test for hours and she was pretty sure that a particular problem wasn't found in our book. our poor teacher would come over to her, put his arm around her and attempt to calm her down. it never helped. he then would proceed to the board and work out the entire problem for us, and we'd all copy in down on the test. she asks me why she was the one who always had to do stuff like that. i tell her it was because she'd look at us and say, "let me handle this," and we would. she tells me that she still does that, so she believes that she said something like that. "how were you not laughing?" she asks. "believe me it was hard. i'm pretty sure our class was the reason why he retired. we broke the poor man." i tell her.
next we talk about our physics teacher and how we tortured that poor man as well. "i'm pretty sure i was his favorite," she says. "let's see... you wrote our tests, then took them with us, then graded our tests. you sat at the front of the room, at a desk beside his, facing the rest of us. yes, i'm pretty sure that's a given." i explain. i tell her that i loved how she convinced him to let us make cheat sheets with formulas on them to keep with us during our tests. how could we not pass?
i tell her that i remember living in fear every day that we'd get busted during our independent study french class in the media storage closet of the library. we would do french for five minutes and spend the rest of the time watching days of our lives. the principal kept telling us we would have to take a comprehensive test at the end of the year and we freaked. they never did, how did we ever pass that? i remember filling out my entire notebook the night before the day we had to turn them in.
"if the other kids would have known what we got away with..." she starts. "they would have hated us even more," i laugh. "we could have burned the school down and they would have looked the other way, they loved us that much," i say. "being the 'smart kids' had its benefits, she says. "i remember walking around in the halls a lot," i say thinking back.
i feel like i mislead jules when it came to seeing
the science of sleep. she had no idea what it was going in and needless to say she wasn't impressed. at all. i read a little about it, but had no idea it was as strange as it ended up being. i wanted to see it, but it never opened around here. when it opened at the second run theater i knew i couldn't pass it up. now i kind of wished that we would have. some parts were touching. gael was as adorable as ever, but it kind of fell flat. i feel like i didn't fully understand it and that doesn't usually happen to me. i usually wind up explaining some of the movies to everyone else. but lunch was good, so it wasn't a total wash. however coming back home and inhaling more cookies might not have been the wisest decision. i feel like my skin is vibrating from all of the sugar and i'm having a hard time sitting still for more than two minutes at a time. christmas is still a week away and i've already ate enough cookies to feed a large family in a third world country. for a year.
