4- Intercultural Communications, Robintino's & Baseball

This is post #4 of our love story. If you haven't been following, start with post #1 and read in sequential order.

Summer quarter came around and I registered for a full 18 credit hours. You paid the same amount for 12-18 credit hours and I liked to get my money's worth. I was a strategic, frugal overachiever. :) Plus, it's a little known secret that professors generally are just as lazy as students during the summer and the classes tend to be a bit easier. One of the classes I was taking was to fulfill a general education requirement - Intercultural Communications. I'd taken another communications class that I liked so I figured this one would be fun. We showed up the first day of class and found out our paper that was due four weeks later (it was one of those accelerated summer classes) was based on interviews we would conduct with someone from another country. We had to conduct three separate interviews that were each at least an hour long and then base our paper on what we learned. The professor recommended we go into one of the ESL classes and find someone there. I went home whining to my mom about how awkward it was going to be to walk into an ESL class and try to coerce someone into letting me interview them. Since I tend to share most things with my mom, she knew all about Marcos. "Why don't you just interview Marcos? Isn't he from Argentina?" Holy cow! Why hadn't I thought of that? He would be easy to interview. Yes, that's what I'll do. I got his phone number from Sherice (the girl he'd been sitting next to when he first hit on me) and called him up. He agreed to be interviewed so I arranged to meet him at the home where he was living in Centerville. Perfect!

I showed up with my questions prepared and all ready to interview him. He had other plans. I knocked on the door and he greeted me with a smile. "Why don't we do the interview over dinner?" "Sure." I needed to eat anyway - I'd been at school all day. I drove since poor Marcos had no car - well, he had a piece of junk that didn't run, but that was about it. We ended up at Robintino's. Okay, I can do Italian. I ordered the half and half, half spaghetti and half lasagna and then he ordered the same. I wasn't sure if he was trying to be polite or what. I started asking him questions about where he was born, how he grew up, what his childhood was like, etc. and found myself completely drawn to his story. The more he told me about himself, the more the butterflies in my stomach fluttered. I was really starting to like this kid. Dang it. I have no idea how long we were there, but we had finished our dinner and were still chatting away. Sometimes I wrote things down for my paper, sometimes I just listened.

We weren't really finished talking so we decided to finish our conversation elsewhere. I went to pay since it was my interview, but he wouldn't let me. After all, he was loaded. He worked at the UB 20 hours a week making approximately $5/hr. The kid was just rollin' in money. :) What a gentleman! He earned points for sure with that smooth move. Plus, he insisted on opening doors for me the whole night and treating me as if this were an official first date. To him it was. He was going to take advantage of every little chance he had to court me. Once again he was the navigator and I was the driver. We ended up stopping at a junior high school and watching a baseball game while we finished talking. After I'd asked him all the questions I had prepared, he paused for a minute and then said, "Now that I've answered everything you wanted to ask me, would you mind if I asked you something?" "Okay, sure," I responded. "Would you ever go out with me if it wasn't for a grade?" Ouch, that hurt. I guess I had been a little hard on the poor kid. My face was a combination of embarrassment and flattery. I responded with a simple yes.

I dropped him off, thanked him for the interview and dinner, gave him a hug and was on my way home. I'm pretty sure I replayed every word of our conversation the entire evening during my 30 + minute drive home. Yep, I had a total crush on this kid I'd turned down almost a year before. How was I ever going to live this down?