The story continues – Karen (part 4)

Attending college as an engineering major is a pretty much standardized procedure. You spend your freshman and sophomore years taking the prerequisite courses needed to actually enroll into the actual engineering courses in your junior and senior years. It is also a good idea, if you are attending a university rather than a trades college, to try to take care of most of the "universal education" courses as early as you can so that they won't get in the way when you finally start taking the actual engineering courses. These courses include the stuff like arts, English, social studies and the like. You really don't want to have a large paper due on the impact that Salvador Dali had to the art world at the same time that you need to be working on designing an assembly automation device for your applied engineering electronics class. Pretty much every engineering student already knows this and the procedure ends up being the same for most of them...

Another pretty much universal truth about being an engineering student is that you will be in school for more than four years. Sure, most universities will have a four year schedule for an engineering degree; but this is relying on the student taking some very full semesters (a lot of credit hours) and does not really account for any outside influences that are most definitely going to come into play (a job or a social life, for instance...). My four year degree actually took me 5 ½ years.

So, basically, you start school taking very large classes with a rather even distribution of males to females - your more traditionally envisioned college courses with the very large lecture halls and a smaller lab or study group that you need to attend perhaps once a week. If you're an engineering major, however, these lecture classes basically continue to shrink as you progress to the more specific aspects of your major. You take a biology class in your freshman year that has 200 students in the lecture and a graduate level assembly coding course that has a total of 13 students when you are a senior. Of these 13 students, maybe 1 or 2 will be a female. That's just the way it seems to be; at least that was what I experienced in the early 90's.

It was in one of these smaller, more specific classes that I met Karen. I think it was a Boolean algebra class, but I'm not really sure anymore ... that was a long time ago... Anyway, it was a class full of primarily guys - mostly Indian guys, in fact - however I noticed this woman in the class that intrigued me. I seem to remember that I had seen her around before, but couldn't recall where. Heck, it might have been her sister, actually. You see Karen had an identical twin sister, Sharon. They were actually both attending WSU at the same time as well. Of course I didn't know this at the time but found out later. All I knew now was that there was a woman in this class that I was very interested in meeting. Heck, I even remember telling Woodstock back at the frat house that I saw my future wife in that class that day. This, of course, wasn't true; but it does more solidify the impact that just the sight of Karen had on me.

You see, to me, Karen was beautiful. She wasn't that ultra-thin, idealized, super model beauty that our American culture has standardized as the water mark for beauty; however in my eyes she was ideal. And she was in a higher level computer engineering class which meant that she definitely wasn't one of those ditsy chicks. No, she was very intelligent. I needed to somehow get this woman in my life...

The only problem, of course, was that this is basically an area that I am very weak. Throughout my life, up to this point, I had had very few girlfriends - only one 'true' girlfriend, Conny. The rest were all just silly little flings that had a life expectancy of maybe a couple months. In every one of these flings, I was never the initiator. Even with Conny I needed to pretty much have a multitude of signals present indicating that she was interested in me before I was brave enough to ask her out to our homecoming dance; and when I did that I got so flustered that I even remember missing the turn to her street and had to turn around in the Melvindale Ice Arena parking lot to finish driving her home - long story ... perhaps some other time... How was I going to be able to actually meet Karen? Oh well, when your social skills are infantile, you need to resort to rather infantile means...

One day as I arrived at this Boolean algebra class I noticed that Karen had arrived before me and had already taken a seat. The seat next to her was vacant so I decided to take it. Did I speak with her? I really don't remember; but I probably attempted some very clumsy small talk before the lecture began. The thing I do remember doing was passing her a note during the lecture that said something like, "Do you have a boyfriend?" I think she passed back the note with only one word added - "Yes". Oh well, this didn't surprise me. I then added the word "Bummer" and passed the note back to her. As I said, infantile...

Strangely enough, even after this incredibly awkward note exchanging incident, Karen and I actually became friends during that semester. It was true that she did have a boyfriend and I later learned that he was actually a fiancé. This, of course, didn't mean that Karen couldn't be friends with another guy and, luckily for me, she chose to let me be a friend.

The cool thing was that Karen and I were both studying for the same degree and we were almost at identical phases of our schooling when we met. This made it possible for us to sign up for several classes together and I once again had the shoulder to lean on that I lost when Eric dropped out of engineering. We even got to be lab partners on at least one senior project where we needed to build a calculator. I was happy because I really did enjoy spending time with Karen and this, of course, made that possible.

I got along great with Karen - even if she already had a fiancé. It was a shame that I wouldn't be able to make what I had told Woodstock earlier actually happen, but I honestly think that if we had met at a different time things may have ended up differently. I mean Karen and I meshed pretty well. I clearly remember this one instance in a small microprocessor coding class where, for reasons still unknown, Karen and I just started laughing uncontrollably. I mean both of us. We actually both had to step out of the class in an effort to avoid disrupting the lecture. It was weird; neither one of us could explain why we were cracking up, but both of us were doing it. I don't know why I remember this, but for some reason I do. I'm sure Karen doesn't...

Anyway, this is just the way things go for me. I've got extremely bad luck when it comes to the opposite sex. It's either the cliché experience where I am thought of more like a brother or, as I believe it was with Karen, just bad timing. I actually wrote Karen a rather long and detailed letter telling her how I felt and gave it to her on the last time I saw her at school with the instructions to not open the letter until she was home alone. I found out later that she didn't head my instructions and actually read the letter in the parking lot - I think. I'm pretty sure that I may have freaked her out a bit but that most definitely was not my intention. I just wanted her to know that if she ever needed anything from me in the future that I would always be there for her. I do believe that the true intentions of the letter did come through.

You see, a couple years after graduation - when I was living in Boca Raton, Florida - I actually got a call from Karen. She informed me that she would be heading down to the Tampa Bay area on business and was interested in setting up a meeting with me. Now, if you are familiar with the geography of Florida, Tampa Bay and Boca Raton are not close to each other at all. We did, however, set up a meeting over on the west coast of Florida directly west from Boca Raton. Karen drove down from Tampa and I drove across the Everglades and we got together for a couple of drinks. It was at this meeting where Karen let me know that her marriage was basically going through some rough times. From what I have observed, marriages are just like that - there are always rough times. Many guys would jump on this opportunity and use this information to make a play for the wife. I'm not many guys. The advice that I gave Karen was that if she truly loved this man that she really needed to work this out. They had a child as well and, for the sake of the child at least, they needed to be there. It was nice to see Karen again, the circumstances weren't the best, but I had made that promise to be there if she needed me. I don't know if my advice was any help in this situation, however I am glad to say that Karen and her husband are still together and I believe that they now have multiple children - two or three, I actually am not sure.

Now here's an interesting side point - both Karen and Conny have been informed about this blog (by me) and I might be getting myself into a bit of trouble here. You see they are both married with children and it might appear that I am airing some dirty laundry in this blog. That's not my intent. I am basically just writing out the story of my life and Karen and Conny are included in that. Perhaps I should change the names to protect the innocent, but that just wouldn't seem right to me. So, if you two are reading this and think that something I mentioned shouldn't be public knowledge, please let me know and I will pull the blog. I really don't want to cause any trouble.

Well, I believe that I should stop typing now and perhaps get myself something to eat. For any of you that were hoping to see more accounts of my European travels I sincerely apologize for wasting your time with my silly little life stories. I will get back to the European stuff in a bit and have, in fact, booked myself a trip to Athens at the end of this month. For those that find any of my life stories interesting, I'll actually have a few more of those as well. Thanks for reading.

bis später,

Coriolis