I didn't open the cookies last night. Still, I had an interesting dream -- I cannot actually remember what happened in it, but I woke with an inexplicable desire to recall it (I tried, but to no avail), so I assume that it was interesting. I think that I might have gotten into a philosophical argument with an alien monster thing in the dream. I've had several dreams like that, but I can never remember exactly what we discussed. I did remember the discussion I had with Morpheus, though -- not Laurence Fishburne (Cowboy Curtis!!!), but the god of dreams. He looked a lot like David Gunn in Vampire Journals. Anyway, I did have cheesecake, so maybe it was the cheesecake. But I've had cheesecake at other times during the past month, to no effect, so maybe it was the cherries...

The next post will be more substantial, I promise. I almost feel bad about it -- you come to my blog for vitamins; I send you away with a handful of M&Ms. Next time, Flintstones vitamins for all. But in the meantime, speaking of cookies, let's do the anecdote thing.

In the spring of my senior year of college, I ran into a girl who, seeing her at a distance, I thought was someone else -- namely, someone I knew. I called out to her -- not by name, but I said, "Hey!" and rushed up to her side. She turned to face me, whereupon I realized that I didn't know her at all.

"Oh, I'm sorry," I said; "I thought you were someone else." (Sometimes people are sincere when they say this, you know. And indeed, she was gorgeous -- but then, the girl for whom I'd mistaken her was also rather attractive, so that's no surprise -- but hitting on girls isn't really my style.)

"That's okay," she said. "How are you?"

"Me? Oh, I'm fine. You?"

"Great!"

A pause.

Then I said, "Um, what's your name?"

She told me her name was Liz, and then asked for mine. I hesitated for a moment -- I always have to decide whether I want to give them my first name or the name that I call myself (Wes, from Wesley, which is really my middle name), and sometimes I give them both so they can choose for themselves -- and then said, "Wes."

She smiled.

"Well, Liz," I said, "nice meeting you!" and darted off.

Later that evening, back in my room, I thought that perhaps I should've gotten her last name, or asked for her e-mail address -- since at Yale, e-mail addresses consisted of "[email protected]", these would have been equivalent questions -- so that I could've sent her an e-mail, and maybe suggest that we together for lunch sometime and chat a bit. And it was a slow night, and I was bored, and I often browsed the online facebook anyway, so I limited the display results to students with the first name Elizabeth and looked through them until I found a match. (I did this kind of thing often, sometimes with people whose names I didn't know at all, just so if I ever ran into them again I could greet them by name -- is that creepy? I mean, the info's right there; it's not like I went through any shady channels...and if students didn't want their pictures or other information displayed in the facebook, they could easily log in and change their display info.)

So then, having found out her name, I ran it through the Yale web search to see what came up, and voila! -- I discovered that she was a member of one of the women's a capella singing groups. Their next concert? That coming Saturday night! And in her member profile, among other things, she wrote:

I am obsessed with chocolate chip cookies and could probably tell you the difference in price and taste of every chocolate chip cookie sold in New Haven.

Well! Being something of a cookie fiend myself, I found this information rather interesting. I filed it away for the moment.

That Saturday morning, however, it came to me again, and I thought, "I'm going to buy her cookies." And that's what I did. Not regular chocolate chip cookies, though -- after browsing the various kinds of cookies in the Shaw's cookie aisle, I figured I'd throw a little something interesting into the mix and get her a package of Chips Ahoy! CremeWiches, each of which consists of TWO chocolate chip cookies with vanilla creme SMACK DAB IN DA MIDDLE. Also, they were buy one, get one free, so I bought myself a pack of the chocolate cookie peanut butter sandwiches.

It was pouring rain that evening when I went to the concert auditorium to deliver the gift -- I'd met Sean for dinner, who, having an umbrella on him (I'd left mine in my room because I hadn't expected it to rain), walked with me to the place; the umbrella helped, but only a little -- and we were both soaked by the time we got there. Standing to one side of the table where the tickets were being sold, I wiped my hands dry on my trenchcoat and unzipped my backpack to bring forth the prize -- I had placed the cookies in a white paper bag (which, being inside my backpack, remained dry), stapled at the top, with "Liz H." (there were two Liz's in the group) written on a piece of Yale stationery and affixed to the bag with a piece of scotch tape. Inside, scrawled on another piece of stationery taped to the package of cookies, I had written (this probably isn't exactly what I wrote, but it's in the spirit of it):

Liz,

We met the other day. I wanted to thank you for being so pleasant during our brief exchange -- so few people are. I read in your profile that you like cookies -- have you ever tried these? They're not chocolate chip cookies proper, I know, but I wanted to do something a little different. And they were on sale -- buy one, get one free -- but it's the thought that counts, right? 🙂

Hope the concert goes/went well --

--Wes

Beneath my name, I'd written my campus phone number, in case she wanted to contact me, for whatever reason. Of course, she didn't, but that's okay. I didn't expect her to.

I sincerely hope she enjoyed the cookies. 🙂