The Us-ness Already in Progress:

Yeah, so I don’t post as much as I used to and the reasons for that are primarily related to my schedule. It’s full. I have to accept that I am a planner and something of a social coordinator, which means I am generally off being social. What’s new about that?

Right now, for the last two months anyway, I have been on a sort of never ending first date. As Jes and I had enough history together to begin to reflect on when we started dating and what those dates involved we had some trouble, we still have trouble, with the timeline. We’d met a few times before she went to Australia for the International Glass Arts Conference.

Our first longer conversations were at Cicero’s after a Third Friday event, at several Circle K BBQs, and at her going away party for Australia. She sent me a postcard from Australia and I kept up with her blog. Before she left on her trip my sister told her travel trips for Australia and I gave her a list of my favorite things to do on Oahu for her Hawaii stop on the return trip. Without really knowing it, we each had each other simmering on the back burner.

We met through our friends Chris and Vanessa and it was at Vanessa’s last birthday party that we started to feel like we were on a date – we just sort of fell into step. When she left my house late that night after a day in the wine country, part of a concert at The Highpoint, and breakfast at IHOP we hugged goodbye and she spun a little circle after she walked out the door, like she wasn’t sure what had just happened. I’d said, “Hmmm” as we hugged and she just wasn’t sure what that hmm meant. I had told an anecdote that night about being so bored that I had started swapping fish among my various tanks for entertainment. She told me to call if I was ever that bored again.

A few days later I got home from class and was wired for sound. School had been interesting and my mind was up and running from a great discussion. I called John to see if he wanted to go out and he had to call me back to check on a conflict. While I was waiting for the callback I decided to call Chris and get Jes’s number. I called her cell and found her shopping at the Kohl’s over by my sister’s house. I told her I was bored and she offered to come and get me for some Uncle Bill’s breakfast food. We spent the next several hours doing life stories over pancakes and bottomless coffee. We discovered that we both took a year off between high school and college to figure ourselves out a little better. That’s an odd thing to have in common and really just the tip of the iceberg. I loaned her a book that night and told her to call me when she was bored. She called the next morning.

Like Vanessa’s birthday, each of our subsequent dates started with one planned activity that would blend into another and then another still until when we look back it’s hard to say which date went with which events. An example would be the day we met up at The Bottle Works for a local business fair that she was tabling at, followed by getting fresh basil plants from their resident gardener, followed by junk shopping at the Bastille Day festival in Soulard, followed by going to the Broadway Oyster Bar for a meal and catching a band that we’d coincidentally seen earlier that day at The Bottle Works, followed by Howl’s Moving Castle at the Tivoli, followed by some other film on DVD.

All of those early dates, up until today and beyond have a quality of being one long endless date where we just keep finding ways to keep boredom at bay through the presence of each other. Now we’re in that shuffling stage where all our people meet each other and get used to the us-ness already in progress.