This line, from the movie My Blue Heaven, was used as an example of how structured Barney Coopersmith's life was. While I don't consider my life to be all that structured, and I definitely do NOT get my haircut even every two months, since I came to UIUC, there has been some bizarre significance associated with the eleventh day of a given month. This page details some of what I mean.
Sunday, 11 September 1994
I'm not sure what was going on on the first 11th I was on campus. The previous day, I had attended my first-ever NCAA Division I football game, at Memorial Stadium in Champaign. The final was Illinois 31, Missouri 00. Classes were still going well at this point for me in my first collegiate semester. I had been missing my keys since the first of the month, though--this was the day someone I went to high school with sent me a message telling me where they were.
Tuesday, 11 October 1994
The day before was the PSYCH 100 midterm. Things started going downhill for me academically starting today. I finally got e-mail from Mara after 10 days of silence. She sent me to the Undergrad Library to do some research on Attention Deficit Disorder. The next three pieces of e-mail I sent her with regard to ADD commenced the most vicious argument Mara and I have ever had. It is somewhat fortunate that we couldn't face each other during the fight--it was conducted via e-mail.
Friday, 11 November 1994
On the date which should have been my parents' 22nd wedding anniversary (but was instead the first Veterans' Day since they were married in 1972 that they weren't married), my most important friendship at this University restarted. Running on too little sleep due to a party in my room the night before, I was a little overconcentrating on a MATH 198 problem after class. For the first time since the exam handback on 19 October, Angela made it to Ken's class. She followed me back to PAR after class and hung out in my room for a while. Then we bumped into Dan Sachs at Penn Station around 7:00, and around 9:00 Dan's friend Matt joined us. Around 10:30 the four of us trekked up to Dan's room (directly above mine) and watched Red Dwarf until 4:00 am. Angela and I were on the top bunk, with Matt and Dan on the bottom. [How things would change in such a short time.] Angela finally made it back to ISR at 8:00 the next morning (she MUDded in PAR's computer lab from 4:30 until 7:30), and I got another 2 hours sleep before meeting my father to go to Memorial Stadium for the fateful Penn State game, where not only did Illinois blow a 21-00 first-quarter lead, but my high school's head math team coach was killed in a plane crash shortly following the game.
Sunday, 11 December 1994
"Aanh! Aanh! It's snowing. It's your fault!" The only snow I saw in Urbana in all of 1994 fell in the late morning hours of 11 January. Angela had spent all night watching me play canasta with Raymond and Paul after my roommate went to the hospital with back problems. She learned well, although in her later games against me, her record is less than stellar--the cards just don't fall her way much. She left PAR around 9:30--in the snow--that morning. I was still missing my ID (as well as two weeks' worth of meals); I would both find it and get it replaced the next day, the day of the PSYCH 100 final. I actually think I made it to one PSYCH 100 class since 11 November.
Wednesday, 11 January 1995
On this day, I didn't know what was going on. I wouldn't know, in fact, until the following Tuesday. The day before, Angela was in my room for a while. My roommate had just gotten his black light, and she wore my Seattle shirt. (She looked very good in my Seattle shirt; I have since resigned myself not to wear it as the memory of her wearing it makes me look ugly in it, and in fact I no longer have the shirt.) She left my room at 8:30 to attempt to retrieve a book she had loaned to Dan's friend Matt before semester break. She came back at 11:00 to return my shirt. Today she spent most of the day in PAR with Matt. Thursday Angela and I went to Zumdahl's class, then I waited for her in her MATH 120 class, then we went to Mats's lecture at 2:00. We then went back to her room, where I heard (for still the only time in my life) the Dennis Leary CD. At 6:30, we went to dinner, then we came back to PAR to see if I had a letter regarding course scheduling errors. Angela, Matt, Dan, and Mark Fuhs then went out for coffee--I was NOT invited, although Friday morning Dan said I should have gone. By this time, though, everything had been settled, and suddenly Angela had severed her relationship with the guy in Oregon and started going out with Matt. She managed to avoid me the entire weekend while she was in PAR until she bumped into me in the computer lab Monday evening. The next day everything slowly became clear, despite Angela's decision to not tell me anything directly. And thus was launched Era of Mass Confusion IV.
Saturday, 11 February 1995
I actually don't have anything specific for this 11th, amazingly enough. It marked the 29th day of Angela's residence in 201 Blaisdell, but I don't know specifically what was going on for me. I will likely modify this entry at a later time. (Who am I kidding?)
Saturday, 11 March 1995
11 March was quite a day. After seeing the folks at Urbana High School for the last time, I went to the Assembly Hall to watch the Shelbyville-Rock Island Alleman and Rockford Lutheran-Aurora Christian games. Upon my return, I found out that Angela had called me seven times. I set the VCR recording Letterman (Marek ould be on), and Angela called for the eighth time. I went to retrieve her at McDonald's, and we returned to PAR. Around 4:30 we went to Wardall, as Angela still had to pack; at 7:30 I came back to Blaisdell as I still had to pack. My father picked us up around 9:20 and drove us to Chicago Heights, where I took over and drove to Naperville, mostly way too fast (the land speed record for my car of 98 mph was set on I-55 that day with Angela in the car). We ate lunch at my house, then got cash at my bank and stopped at Borders in Naperville to buy Angela a book. She wound up buying me one as well, Stranger In A Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein. We then got to O'Hare at 3:33 for a 4:00 flight (again I drove too fast: top speed 96 mph on the Tri-State). After dropping Angela off, I went home and slept.
Tuesday, 11 April 1994
The second hour exam for CS 101. Also (thus far) the point of highest tension in my dealings with Matt and Angela. Angela and I went to the ISR computer lab around 4:00, where Matt met us around 6:00. Angela was a little panicky by this point, and she wound up being a little late for her 7:00 exam. I hung out with Matt for the next hour or so in the Union, then we went back to get her from her exam. The three of us went to Burger King and Baskin-Robbins, where Angela and Matt each ate. I began slowly to get more and more irritated with the two of them as time went by. Eventually we landed at the video store, where they were playing the film Grease. I seized the opportunity, finally as fed up as I felt I could deal with, and ran back to PAR, where I hid from them in my closet for the next four hours. The incident marked a large change in my relationships with both Angela and Matt as well as with each individually.
Thursday, 11 May 1994
This was the day I left Urbana. I wasn't ready to leave Thursday morning, though. After a fair degree of prodding, I did go out to lunch with Angela. It wasn't until I finally said good-bye to her on the third floor of Chemannex that I felt mentally ready to leave. I slammed my way out of Chemannex, and I didn't go back there for a long time (see chemannex.html). Then I got back to my room, and my parents watched my tape of Forrest Gump while I packed.
11 May marked my departure from my first year here at UIUC. "What have we learned, Charlie Brown?" is what came to mind (not specifically the half-hour cartoon dealing with the invasion of Normandie in 1944, just the general question) as I wrote all this back on 04 May, a week earlier This is what I said: I'm not sure what I have learned this year. I learned a lot more outside the classroom than in it, and I learned a lot more about myself than I ever expected to. The people I have met here, five of them in particular (all of whom have lived in my dorm at one time or another this semester), have made me look at myself in several new lights. Much of the time, I have not liked, or at least not been comfortable with, what I have seen. I am still far from truly grasping most of what I have learned about me: about my values, about my feelings, about my emotions. I am, to a large extent, not who I thought I was nine months ago. I still have never had a girlfriend, but according to one of those five people, I have had something better--I have a very good friend. I actually have two people who are my very good friends--people I love as much and would rush to the defense or aid of as readily as I would like to think I would my own sister, if I had a sister. It has been an (at times) annoying conclusion to come to that I love these two people as much as I do, as it does not fit in with my former perceptions of myself (even though I knew one of the two female people in question before I came to UIUC).
So what does the future hold for me? On ne sait jamais. I am fairly certain that all five of the people who have most shaped my life this semester I will see likely a lot of again next year. As for my two closest friends, I only wish that they remain as close to me as they are now.
Well, as it turned out, Fall '95 saw me seeing quite a bit of my roommate, a little bit of Angela, and as near to nothing as makes no odds of the other three. I still have never so much as been on a date, but this doesn't bother me. I foresee myself ten years from now living alone with my cat and still being friends with only three of the people I know now. That's not really fair to a couple people not in those three, but that's what I think. As for the people who were my two closest friends in May, one of them is still my closest friend, despite the fact that I have not had a face-to-face conversation with her since...well, since May. As for the other one, she drifts. Every so often I get to talk to her, and for a while (a week or two) I remember who she is, what kind of person she is, and just how I feel about her. But then she goes away again. I'll say more on these two people in the peopletrace files. This is a hidden file anyway, so you are a snoop if you are reading it.
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