Secrets, Smoking, and Stuff

So today was very interesting. Most of the paragraphs here are not, though, so feel free to skim to the good bits. Also, the second word in the title is purely for alliteration. There are only like three sentences on it in this entire story.

It's been a week since my second motorcycle accident. On the way to school I kept the bike revved at the lights and kept my eyes on the road ahead the whole time. It worked, and I got to school without any problems.

I usually have two classes every Monday: an English class at eight and a Physics class at eleven. Today I also had a replacement Engineering Mathematics Applications class at 10:10 and a replacement Critical Thinking Skills class at two o'clock.

I arrived about half an hour early and decided to check if anyone I knew was at school yet. I didn't find anyone to talk to while I was walking down the corridor, so I wet my hair, found a mirror, and wasted some time by playing with my fringe to see if I was capable of pulling off an emo look. I was not. I kept the hair anyway, since it wouldn't take long to dry.

I met Carmeni in the hall and we talked for a while. The conversation was about the best place to sit and what I had come early to college to do. Carmeni said that my plan was ridiculous. I said it was the best way to move on. Ten minutes before class I decided to roam the hall again to see who I would run in to.

Juria was in the upper foyer with some friends waiting for her statistics class to start. I tried to figure out the statistics homework for a while, but I am just not that great with math when all the equations are upside down and the formulas are things I have never heard of. At one point someone said that statistics was cancelled that morning, and the information was confirmed a little later by three texts saying the same thing. At eight o'clock everyone started leaving for their classes, but I stayed around to hear Juria tell her story of how her birthday went and for another reason that will be mentioned a few paragraphs down.

Juria's birthday was awesome, apparently. Meeting Boys Like Girls and getting the lead singer's wristband as a present on the eve of her birthday on Friday night was just the beginning of the story. The second half happened the next day but was so mind-blowing that Juria told me to promise twice not to tell anyone what she told me, with the exception of my sister and people who she had already told, which turned out to be quite a large list. But more on that later.

By the time I was done processing what I had just heard and the magnitude of the secrets I had to keep, I was more than half an hour late for class. Once fifteen minutes had passed my attendance mark was as good as gone, so I decided to stay on a little longer and finally do what I should have done sometime during my first semester.

So I told Juria that I liked her. She told me that she already knew, and had known for about a month or so thanks to my blog and Facebook notes. I been anticipating a reaction be more along the lines of rejection and avoidance, so it was a nice surprise to see how cool she was about the whole thing. Of course she wasn't interested, but I had never imagined the outcome of that conversation as anything along those lines anyhow, so that went much better than expected, even though things are pretty much the same.

I remember surprisingly little of that conversation. It happened a little more than half a day ago and I can somehow only remember the gist of things. It's odd, since I'm pretty sure that her eighteenth birthday story was the best birthday story I had ever heard and that the talk after that was the first time I've ever told a girl face-to-face that I liked her. I guess memories don't form that great when you're only getting four hours of sleep every night.

I left the foyer when there was still half an hour left in my class. I figured showing my face was better than not appearing at all, since I could schedule a replacement class and such. The lecturer asked why I was so late and I told him I didn't have any good excuses. The class ended fifteen minutes early and he told me that I could sit for a class tomorrow to replace the one hour that I missed, and I'd still get full attendance. That was pretty awesome. What wasn't so awesome was when I checked my schedule and saw that that one hour was my only break the whole day, and so now I had back-to-back classes from eight am to five pm. Wonderful.

I went back to the foyer to see if Juria had told anyone else, since generally the more people that know a secret the less exciting it is, and the less exciting it is the easier it is to keep. A lot more people knew, but the secrets were not any less exciting or any more easy to keep. Oh well, at least I had more people that I could talk to about it if I ever got overwhelmed by the urge to blab.

Everyone's classes started again at nine thirty, so I left the upper foyer to see if any of my friends were in the hall so I could let them know that I was keeping the biggest and awesomest secret I had ever kept in my life, because what's the point of keeping an awesome secret unless everyone knows that you're keeping an awesome secret so they can be jealous of your position as a person who is privy to such information. When they (when I say they I mean mostly Carmeni and Elo) started asking what the secret was about I started to regret telling them about it, but I decided I wouldn't be breaking my promise if (1) I didn't tell them anything that wasn't already public knowledge, (2) I only told them which guesses were false so they didn't think that it was something terrible or less awesome than it was, and (3), I kept silent or refused to answer if they asked me something where the answer would be a "yes", since that would be giving away part of the secret and count as breaking the promise. They left for class before they could learn anything beyond some Taylor Swift trivia.

I called my sister right after that to tell her as much as I could before I had to get to my 10:10 EMA replacement class. Rushing the conversation on the phone was a bit pointless, though, since the class started at around 10:30. All four of us were waiting outside early, and we talked about cockroaches and the college's past as a parking garage.

Engineering Math wasn't terribly interesting. I guess the only thing worth mentioning would be that no homework was assigned to us, which meant that my half-day assignment-free streak might make it to last a few actual days. That was nice.

Before Physics started I met Denise and a few other friends. Denise wasn't happy about me telling her that I had a secret that I wasn't going to reveal to her. She said she wouldn't talk to me until I told her what it was. She did not manage to stick to that.

Physics was informative and somewhat interesting, but again there was nothing much to write about except for the lack of homework, which was nice again. Also, the class ended pretty early.

After Physics I went to go eat lunch with Joanna. I got to share her meal and get that cool coke contour glass in exchange for telling her the story up until the point where I had promised not to tell anyone anything anymore. When I was done, she didn't believe what had happened. I still got a pretty kickass sundae out of that, though, so whatever.

When lunch was finished we hung out at the computer lab before I went a-roaming in the hall again while waiting for my CTS replacement class to start. When I was bored of the hall I went to wait in the class, where I talked with a dude about the biggest secrets we had kept. He couldn't really remember anything, but he did tell me about this one friend of his who slept with a transvestite. That was good for a laugh.

The class was cool. We got to watch clips from Thank You For Not Smoking, which I have to remember to download again sometime soon. Again, there was no homework. That was a nice note to end the day's education on.

After that I hung out a bit more and managed to avoid breaking my promise not to tell anyone despite around a dozen people knowing I had a secret. That was a bit tricky, to say the least.

Word had gotten around about me telling Juria that I liked her. It was pretty cool being the subject of gossip. Carmeni's boyfriend, Nicholas, was in college, and he had heard. He told me that I did it wrong, and that the surest way to fix things was by kissing Juria the next time I see her. Nick's a cool dude, but I think I'll pass on that particular nugget of wisdom. Somehow I get the feeling that borderline sexual assault is not the best way to get a girl interested in you.

I also found out that Elo used to smoke. She told me how she started and how she managed to quit, so that information might be useful in the future. It seems like a lot more of my friends smoke or used to smoke than I originally thought. Still not tempted to try, though.

Later on a bunch of us went to one of the many Ali Maju restaurants for drinks and snacks. I had spent most of the rest of the week's allowance on a ticket to a student-organized standup comedy night on Thursday, so I didn't order anything. Joanna's mum called and told her that she was arriving soon, so Jo left before she got her order. It arrived moments after she left. Since we are not the type of people to waste perfectly good food, I got to have something to eat after all, and Zach said he would pay. So for me at least, there was such thing as a free lunch. Later we saw Jo waiting outside, so I miscalled her and she sat inside until her mum actually arrived.

After that I went home. I spent quite a while talking about my morning conversation to my sister while my brother tried to guess what the secret was.

So anyway it is now around twelve thirty and all the events described technically happened yesterday since it is the sixth today. The fifth was a long day. Today is going to be even longer. I am not really looking forward to waking up six hours from now to get ready for nine straight hours of college. Oh well.

I guess the short version of this post is I can't keep secret the fact that I have a secret, and also I told Juria I liked her and it was pleasantly liberating. So yeah, there's that.