Munchin and Musing 2: That One Person

by Moose

Originally Posted 12/19/24

Intro

When I came up with the prompt for this issue, I of course thought "how would I answer this prompt?". This was hard for me for a few reasons. The first being, as my girlfriend can attest to, that my memory is bad. I've not been diagnosed with anything in particular, however it just seems like I have a hard time remembering certain things. This being one of those moments where I'm sure there's been someone out there who has done a little gesture that has meant a lot to me, but what was it? When was it? What was the story behind it?

As I thought and pondered this, I was led to a second issue: I could think of 2 moments in particular. Which one was I to choose? They both were pretty different from each other, and neither would be particularly long stories. So, what I ended up deciding to do, was talk about both:

Story 1: I care

I never dated anyone until either late High School or right after Community College (I forget which). This was not by choice. I had always wanted to date someone, but could not find anyone who was interested in dating me back. When I looked around at friends in relationships, and thought about how they did it, it seemed to come down to two things. Some of my friends in relationships were much more physically attractive than I was. While I wasn't terribly overweight back then (even though I felt it), a lot of my friends who were in relationships were simply just in better shape. I also had friends who were in worse shape than I was in relationships, but those friends seemed to be funnier than me. Had better personalities than me.

So to me this left two options: either get more in shape, or get a better personality. I thought my personality was sort of fine as is - obviously there's always things to improve, but I had friends which to me meant people didn't find me completely annoying. So that left getting in shape, which is what I slowly began working on.

Throughout all of this though, I would talk to friends in relationships, or friends in general, about my desire to be in a relationship, but having terrible luck. They'd often offer words of encouragement, which was very nice of them, however there was always part of me that felt "It's nice of you to say that, but seemingly no one who's in the dating field and I'm attracted to seems to think the same".

Honestly it now reminds me of a scene from Gravity Falls, where one character (Soos) is talking about needing to find a date and how he's having issues. Grunkle Stan tells him that he doesn't feel like his chances are very good, and so he either needs to get rich or lie about being rich. Wendy pipes up and says to not listen to Stan, as Soos is a great guy with a steady job. Grunkle Stan turns to Wendy and goes "Would you date him?", to which Wendy sort of shrinks behind a magazine and goes "oh, would you... look at that".

I want to clarify here I never felt like it was up to my friends to date me, just that their words sort of translated in my head to "Yeah, I'm sure someone else will find you amazing... just not me".

One of my friends who often tried to cheer me up about this, one day she called to setup a time where we could hang out. I had recently gone on a date, had been really hopeful about it, and the person turned out to be uninterested. I was pretty bummed about this, and so my friend wanted to hang out to cheer me up. The plan was I'd go over to her house to just have dinner and chat. It was around late fall early winter if I remember correctly, because it was getting dark early.

We were trying to figure out a good time to hang out, and I suggested a time and she replied "Oh that's after dark, it's more dangerous to drive then" (Or something along those lines). I said "Oh I don't care about that, I'll be fine" to which she replied, very sternly "I care though. I care Steven".

This sort of took me aback at the time. I had never had anyone express that level of care to me before - that they didn't even want me driving at night because of how worried it made them. I don't think she knows this, but her saying that really helped carry me through some dark times. Living at home was tough for me, and I often felt like no one cared about me. When I felt like that though, I was then able to tell myself "Jess cares".

Story 2: Mountainside Meeting

One thing I like to do (Though I couldn't tell you the last time I did it) is to go hiking. It was often something I did with friends, and I usually practiced videography or photography. This time though I was going solo.

This happened while in college. I was studying to become a Math Teacher, and was going to school in Northern New York. One day I decided I wanted to hike Poke-O-Moonshine Mountain. I planned a day/ time to go and... was delayed. Getting ready took longer than expected, and I happened to end up talking to a few of my roommates for a while.

I eventually did leave though, got to the mountain, and hiked up it. It was a pretty standard hike all the way up. It did show me though just how out of shape I had gotten while in college. By the time I reached the top, I was panting and out of breath, and took to sitting on the steps of a fire tower to cool down, catch my breath, and enjoy the view.

As I was sitting there, admiring nature, I heard something coming out of the woods. I turned to look and it was a man jogging up the mountain. Once he reached the top, he just flopped down on the ground, and was heavy breathing. I don't think he noticed me until I offered him a drink of my water.

We begun talking and it turned out he was a science teacher (I believe) at one of the local grade schools. As we chatted, he offered that if I ever wanted extra time shadowing teachers, to reach out to him and he'd put me in contact with the schools math teachers.

I want to pause here to just point out how amazing it was I ran into this guy. Of course, had I left when I actually wanted to, I wouldn't have run into him. Had I been faster or slower on my ascent, I would not have met him. Had it not rained the day before, forcing the man to run on the day I met him rather than the day before like he originally planned, I would not have met him. Yet everything came together so I would meet that man at the top of that mountain.

I took him up on his offer and ended up shadowing some math teachers a time or two. It was incredible the first time I went to do it, because they had organized a schedule for my entire day for me! To rotate between teachers, learn different teaching styles, etc!

It honestly was a great time, and I'm glad I jumped on the opportunity. Unfortunately I ended up dropping out of the teaching program, due in large part to the complexity of the math program. It's just always stuck with me how unlikely that meeting was, and how everything had to perfectly align to make it happen. Life is wild sometimes.

Where to find me:

The best place to find me is on my website. You can see other posts I've made, some tech tutorials, and a bunch of other stuff!

Thanks for reading,
- Moose

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