The "Who are you?" meme

[erikred]

Thanks to alfvaen:

This is the problem with LJ, we all think we are so close, and we know nothing about each other. I'm going to rectify it. I want you to ask me something you think you should know about me, something that should be obvious, but you have no idea about. Ask away.

Then post this in your LJ and find out what people don't know about you.

The premise is a little shaky-- as much as I enjoy reading all of your journals, I can't pretend that I'm all that close to all of you. Heck, some of you are strangers who stalked me first. :) Anyway, ask, and I'll post. I'm crazy egotistical that way.

Comments

[erikred.livejournal.com]

It was a dark and storm night....

Well, not quite. Let's see, it was mid-April. I'd been teaching in Kochi since the end of July, so Kochi was rapidly becoming my home. I met my friend Chris (nicknamed Kiwi, after his land of origin) at a bar called Fish (as in, Drink Like a). We were on our third beers when in came our compatriot Jennifer, her boyfriend Scott, and two of his students, one of whom was Yoko. Yoko had only recently returned to Kochi after finishing her Bachelor's in English at Kansai Gaidai University, and she was working, strangely enough, in the same building where I worked. She was beautiful, charming, funny, and intelligent; unfortunately, she had a boyfriend, so despite our adventures that night (including drinking, dancing, keeping a friend out of a fight with a bar-owner, eating at an all-night ramen stand, and riding here and there on bicycles, drunk, in the rain) nothing beyond friendly camraderie happened.

Three weeks later, while drunk and swimming across a treacherous river at midnight in a rural town far to the west, Jennifer, who happened to be on my back since she was a terrible swimmer, told me that Yoko had broken up with her boyfriend. As soon as I got back to Kochi, I began extending friendly offers her way: come on over and watch videos with a group of us; coome out drinking with a bunch of us; let's do as a group. Eventually, I summoned up the courage to ask her out to a movie on her own. She agreed-- provided she could bring her friends. Sigh. So we had a very romantic date, just the, um, five of us. After proving myself trustworthy on a couple of occasions, I talked her into a less crowded date, and well, the rest is pretty much history.

We started "going out," so to speak, somewhere around May 25, 1994; we got married on July 22, 1996. Yay, us!