First Impressions

Had someone told me, before my senior year in high school, that Michael Lee and I were ever going to be friends I would have told them to go see a doctor. ASAP. Because the day Michael Lee and I would be friends was the day pigs would fly. Few other facts were as clearly defined in my mind as this one.

I was the the goodie-two-shoes who did her homework and went to church. He was the person whose name everyone in the school recognized and who mooned people in the hallway on the way to gym class (this wasn't just rumor--I'd witnessed such an occasion). I thought he was full of himself and I had better things to do with my time than to get to know him--like homework. Michael Lee would just have to live out his days never having known me, and I, never having known him. That was fine with me.

And so of course we would happen to become friends. Because that's how life goes.

Our senior year of high school we both became heavily involved in the school's marching band and joined the school's We the People team. I can still remember the first time I ever really engaged in a conversation with him. It was at the very end of our junior year and all the band's future seniors had gathered together to lay out goals we had for the upcoming year. When Michael started talking and sharing his ideas I was surprised. He had a lot of ideas, and they were all good. After Michael would share a thought I found myself following up by expressing a similar idea of my own, and vis-versa. I remember leaving that meeting feeling a little stunned. Where had all of that come from? This guys was supposed to be shallow and immature, not intelligent and motivating! I was honestly perplexed.

Then, as senior year stared, we began having actual one-on-one conversations. We talked about religion so much that be began to call me "Blo-Mo"--his make-up nickname for blond Mormons (and the reasons I named this blog what I did). We talked about band. We talked about how many classes he'd skipped and how many I hadn't. We talked about friends. We talked about his love life and my lack of one. We talked about food. Our futures. Plans. Goals. Dreams. Life. Soon, I came to realize how absolutely and completely wrong I had been about him.

Yes--he was a silly boy who did silly boy things. In fact, I don't think anyone in our gov class will ever forget when, on our trip to Olympia, he striped down to nothing but his superman tidie-whities in the middle of the hotel hallway and held a fake tree while we all waited for our teacher to come out of her room. Or how he did the exact same thing again on the last day of class, walking across the tables towards the back of the room while doing lunges.

But while he was silly and he knew how to enjoy life, he also knew how to take it seriously. Michael showed me a whole new way of thinking and understanding that I'd never known before. He taught me how to not be so self-righteous and how to put myself into others shoes. He taught me that it's okay to like a guy. He taught me how to look for the good in people. He taught me that I can buy things off the Starbucks menu that don't have coffee in them. He taught me to live a little more and to not take life so seriously all the time. He taught me to not be so quick to judge and that our first impressions about people are almost always wrong.

The more I came to know Michael the more I came to understand that though I didn't quite agree with all his opinions--and he certainly didn't with all of mine--that what made us similar was our conviction to stand up for what we believed in and to fight for what we thought was right. He's a pretty awesome guy.

And so I can tell you that somewhere on this earth there are a group a pigs that can fly, because Michael and I are now friends.