How I met Gareth

How I met Gareth

The road to Gareth is a long and convoluted one that starts out nowhere near the person in question and makes you wonder how the heck are you even going to get to him, because you probably need to borrow money from him and he’s the only one responsible/shady enough to have huge wads of cash on hand.

That sentence sort of got away from me there…..let’s try again.

As I may have mentioned before, Gareth is my roommate. He is also my very best friend, which is why we can stand living together without resorting to murder and cannibalism.

Or to feeding each other to Larry.

Looking back, I realize that I met Gareth because of three totally unrelated facts about my life as a sixth grader.

• 1.     My Music teacher was a prick

• 2.     My middle school had no drama class/club, and

• 3.     I had trouble with math.

Stay with me, this is going somewhere.

Well, with my math grade in jeopardy, perhaps from lack of a creative outlet due to my dropping out of Chorus because of said prick teacher and having no drama class to enroll in, my mother sought out a math tutor for me. I didn’t resent it; in fact, I rather liked going to see her after school once or twice a week. She was a nice lady, and teachers have usually ways liked me.

So the two of us got on fine, and one day I mentioned to my math teacher how I loved to sing and act, but could do neither because one road led to prick-y-ness and the other was a depressing dead-pool of lies and nothingness.

Thanks a lot public school budget cuts

I don’t remember why I told my math tutor those things. They seem very unrelated to math and math-like accessories. I realize now that she was not unlike a helpful NPC, directing my life in a preferable, if a bit random, direction.

Not that kind of NPC. The other kind

Anyways, she told me about Instantaneous Theater, which lead to five years of mind-exploding fun and hilarity. It was one of the few things that I allowed to influence me while in mid-teenage mode. Until very recently, all of my friends were people I had met via IT and I now have an incurable love of show-tunes.

This may or may not be a good thing

But anyways, we were talking about Gareth. Gareth did not actually participate in IT at the time, it was his brother who did. However, Gareth would sometimes come and operate the stage lights for the performances, so I sort of vaguely knew him by sight.

Three years passed with this being the extent of our relationship.

Then high school came. I wasn’t feeling overly confident about going to high school. From everything I had heard, it sounded terrible. That, and according to my older brother, they flicked pennies at freshmen and I did not want to be flicked with pennies. I don’t know why pennies seemed so terrifying at the time. They just did.

Because Abraham Lincoln is the stuff of nightmares. That’s why.

Then Xande, the director of IT, suggested a charter school that her kids had gone to. A charter school is like a regular school, except you get to sleep in as long as you like, go to class in your pajamas every day, get to choose between onsite classes, homeschooling, or taking class at the local college. The onsite classes rarely have more than six students at a time. So when I say they are like regular schools, I actually mean they are nothing like regular schools.

And it just so happened that Gareth and I ended up going to the same charter school. Even then, we may have never truly met had it not been for the fact that my onsite Spanish class took place right before his onsite Physical Science class. I mean, I didn’t even know anyone in my graduating class; this school was not made for the social butterflies of the world. But we sort of knew each other from IT, and there was a twenty second period between classes where I was coming and he was going. So what did we do? Strike up a conversation? Nod politely and mumble something that sort of resembled pleasantries? No.

We meowed at each other.

Pictured: Gareth and I, age 12 and 15

We spent an entire semester meowing at each other in passing. Here is how a typical conversation went.

Me: Meow

Gareth: (thoughtful look) Meow

Me: Mrow?

Gareth: Meow (decisive nod)

Nary an actual human word exchanged. It seemed that we were both just too weird for fate to bring us together in a decisive fashion.

Screw you, Fate, we’re going to make this as difficult as possible

Finally, finally, October came, and our mutual friend BT invited me to come to a re-enactment fair with her. She was selling some crafts that she had made and was piggy-backing off of the booth owned by …wait for it… Gareth’s family.

Gareth and I were the only ones who had nothing to do at the fair other than hang out with each other. And so we did. Having fun, we decided that we should hang out more. Because we are both lazy sods, nothing came of this. 

At this point, I would like to point out that BT must have been channeling a very annoyed and impatient goddess of fate, because she insisted on inviting me to the next event that Gareth would be attending, her Halloween party.

BT’s Halloween parties are an annual occurrence that include a game of capture the flag in the fields near her house.

At night. 

With only glow-sticks to see by.

After a lot of stumbling around in the dark, getting lost, tripping over various bushes and hoping that I wasn’t about to be attacked by a rabid fox and/or a skunk, Gareth and I found each other squatting in the same patch of grass, guarding our precious flag.

“…….”

“So…..”

“Wanna hang out sometime, then?”

We acceded to fate and arranged a “playdate” Though I suppose “get together” would be a less immature way to put it, but that sounds stupid. “Slumber party” would be closer to the truth, but it wasn’t a party. Whatever, I’m gonna go with playdate, even if it makes us sound like preschoolers.

Somewhere between the bad horror movies, cookie dough, chocolate, and staying up until two in the morning writing  bad comedy skits, we became friends.

I’m gonna go ahead and blame the bad horror movies for this one

So that is the long, convoluted story of how I met Gareth…. And Je-sus, it’s five pages long…..and that’s with a lot of the details skipped over or summarized…..and without adding any of the pictures yet. Damn…er…

Have some hedgehogs to make up for the long post