How to win friends, but not really influence anyone

By 2002, my mother and stepfather were fed up with the California lifestyle. I remember them complaining a lot about how it took an hour to drive less than 10 miles to work. So they came up with the brilliant idea of moving to a magical land without traffic jams: Washington!

No, not the nation’s capitol. That’s what I thought at the time, too. I was sorely disappointed to learn they meant the state. 

The only thing I knew about Washington state was it rained a lot and they had a city named Seattle, which was the state capitol and which contained a large needle-like building. Turns out Seattle is not the state capitol, and it really doesn’t look anything like a needle. Nor is it from space. False advertising.

Without going into detail about the anguishing decision I had to make to stay in California with my father or move north with the rest of my family, by August 2002 I found myself living in a town just outside Seattle (I am withholding the name for privacy’s sake and because everyone who lives near Seattle has learned by now to just tell strangers “I’m from Seattle” rather than provide a more exact, honest answer. It just simplifies things).

My new town was a small, isolated community. I can’t say that everybody in town knows each other, but the degree of separation is equal to just one Kevin Bacon. This was certainly true for all the kids in the local school system who had all grown up together. I was now thrust headfirst into the deep end of this pool known as middle school. 

Needless to say, it wasn’t an easy transition. But one seemingly innocuous event in 8^th grade helped turn my fortunes around slightly.

As all such life altering events do, it occurred in the school cafeteria.

Our school lunches were nothing to write home about, but there was always one item all the kids fought over: the chocolate chip cookies. Helen of Troy may have launched a thousand ships, but if Paris had captured our school’s supplies of cookies instead of her, we would have easily launched five thousand ships to recover them.

I too had an affinity for these cookies, and one day it passed that I was still hungry after finishing my own lunch. My friends at the lunch table had finished their own hassled bargaining for control of the most chocolate chip cookies (lunch at our middle school looked like the floor of the New York Stock Exchange with all the trading going on) when I noticed that amidst all the ruckus a few crumbs had fallen upon the table.

With no sense of shame, I gently swept the crumbs off the table into one hand and proceed to devour them as though they were the last morsels of food I’d ever see. Then I immediately spit them out.

Turns out those weren’t cookie crumbs. It was dirt.

Why tell this humiliating story? Because some of my most embarrassing moments are also my proudest. Because that was the day, and the exact moment, that I made my best friend in the world.

We shall call him “Puma” for privacy’s sake (it is an inside reference I’m not even sure he remembers. No, it’s not Lance Berkman – sorry baseball fans). To this day, if you ask Puma when we first became friends, he’ll point to that moment – watching me eat dirt at the lunch table – as the moment he realized I was a pretty funny guy. 

Puma also might talk about our time spent in 8^th grade heading up the middle school newspaper, but, believe it or not, that was actually more traumatizing than eating dirt. I’d rather not talk about it.

Bottom line, Puma and I were practically like brothers by the time we survived high school. To this day there’s no one I trust and value more than him.

Moral of the story: if you ever find yourself moving to a strange new town where you don’t know anyone, just embarrass yourself during a meal in front of a bunch of people and at least one of them will take pity on you and become a friend for life.

Am I embarrassed? Sure. Am I also proud of the result? You bet.

Here’s to life altering embarrassment. Cheers!