it's 3:53 am...

...and i haven't been asleep yet. okay, i'm sure i've dozed here and there, but noah's been up three times and isaac got up at midnight and just now fell back asleep. and i can't stop thinking about lost and everything else in the history of man, so i thought i'd get some thoughts out on the blog. completely normal thing to do at 3:53 am.

do you remember dating before you got married? for some reason i cannot stop thinking about all my weird dates from my single days. i was never really a date-er. i expected to date a lot when i turned 16 because, well, i finally could, if only someone would ask. but nobody did. so there are a few dates that really stand out in my mind.

i remember my first college date. i never dated in high school (i went to my senior prom with my best-friend's little brother's best friend, he was a sophomore from another school!) so i was really looking forward to dating at byu. buuuut i didn't date. seriously, like, never. but somehow my friend jolene talked this guy blane into asking me out. blane was one of the few returned missionaries in the dorms that summer, and he was incredibly good-looking. he was kind of interesting, he'd served his mission in chile(?) and wore this weird hat from there all the time. he had cool black horn-rimmed glasses that he wore sometimes and was really buff. is that a useable word? buff? the year after this he actually became a byu cheerleader. weird. anyway, he was seriously out of my league, but somehow he asked me out. we went to johnny b's (comedy club), the classic byu date. the best part was he sat with his arm around my chair. nobody had ever done that before. i thought it was so neat. then we went to mcdonald's to get ice cream cones (!), and went to a park at wymount. he made me sit in the car so he could come around and open my door. he offered to let me drive his car. he pushed me on the swing and sat by me on the picnic table. he was generally so nice to me. i was shocked. it was so fun! we never went out again but it was a date i'll never forget, isn't that weird?

another one that stands out in my mind was in the winter of my freshman year. my friends val and jessica had moved down to helaman halls for fall/winter but i stayed in DT. it didn't work out there, i didn't get along very well with my new roommate, so when val had to go home winter semester for knee surgery i moved in with jessica. jess used to hang out in the McKay building (math) doing homework and some guy apparently watched her and one day asked if she'd like to go out (total stranger). she agreed if it was a group thing. the night of the date came and his group apparently flaked, so he asked if she had a friend who could go out with his friend. of course she did, i was her roommate after all, with no plans on saturday night, so we set it up that we would go to the bagpipe concert in the wilk. they picked us up and the dude could not remember my name. he seriously asked about 14 times between the dorms and the car. then we get to the wilk and the guy ends up having to pay full price for the tickets because he's a uvsc student, not a byu student. he's very bothered about this. the wilk is packed, no four seats together, so jess headed off with her date to sit down, i went with mine. he didn't speak to or look at me the entire first half of the concert (a full hour and a half of bagpipes). at intermission, he stood up without a word or a glance and walked away. i decided to follow him because he was my ride. turns out he was looking for his friend. me and jess were hoping to leave because, well, bagpipes are cool and all, but after an hour and a half i just couldn't take it anymore. not happening. these guys paid for the tickets, we were staying. it was excruciating. three full hours of bagpipes. now, i like bagpipes as much as the next guy, but after three hours i could have wrung somebody's neck, and my date still couldn't remember my name and was sitting closest, so it wasn't looking good for him. when the ordeal was finally over, we walked to the car. jessica's date goes, "so do you guys like ice cream?" and while we do, we couldn't fathom one more second in the company of these dudes. so we said we were tired and needed to go to bed, they dropped us off, and that was the end of it. or so we thought. we had recently met some very fun people through our friend andrea and we really wanted to hang out with them (jarom, scott, duncan to name a few) so we went inside for a minute, then decided to head back out in jess's pimpmobile (a sweet ford thunderbird) to find our friends. it was about midnight, and we stopped to get gas. you'll never believe who was at the gas station in the car right in front of us: the dudes from our date. yep, the ones we had just told we were too tired to get ice cream with. and there we were, out and about, not tired at all! whoops! we laughed for days about it. that date will go down in history as one of my worst/most favorite dates ever.

the summer after my freshman year i went home and this guy named eric started asking me out all the time. our first date we went swing dancing. he was a super-sweaty type of guy and i do not like sweat, especially other peoples sweat, so that was not a pleasant experience. not to mention he didn't know how to get there, hadn't brought his wallet, and didn't speak to me almost the entire night. sooo awkward. and he kept asking me out after that! it was bizarre.

my brother's childhood friend sam asked me out a few times that summer (or was it the next?) too. our first date we got sub sandwiches and drove up to sandia crest (it's like an hour drive up winding rodes) to eat and watch the sunset. he said that he thought we could either go to a movie and watch something man had made, or we could watch the sunset, something God had made.

as you can see, my dating history is slim but interesting. every time i think about it i think i am so grateful that dave and i never actually dated. my apartment started hanging out with his apartment and we all got to be pretty good friends, and at some point dave stopped liking all my other roommates and started liking me, and we hung out some more! my roommate christina went with us on our first "date" to china lily and it was so fun. i think getting to know each other in a group was much less intimidating than the dating thing (which actually goes against what the church is recommending these days, at least for marrying-age people). of course we did eventually go out just the two of us but it was fun for me in the first stages of our relationship to just be around lots of people. thank goodness i don't have to date anymore. my friend maci is my age and recently divorced and talks about dating and meeting guys at dances and i can't help but feel so relieved that i don't have to do that ever again!

what about you? do you have any weird/funny dates that cross your mind at 3:53 am?