I was exuberant to find a cache of photos from an afternoon Amanda and I passed in a library study room during our Junior year (I think) at BYU.
I lived off-campus and between our work schedules (I was dishing out burritos and delivering pizzas, and Amanda was educating beginners on the finer points of film and staffing the grounds office) and earning ourselves college degrees, dedicated friend time was hard to come by. One fine day we orchestrated an hour or so to hang out, and to be able to discuss our many flights of fancy and girlish whims, we reserved a library study room so we could divulge secrets and analyze the desires of our hearts in privacy.
Reserving library study rooms became a pleasure of mine; once I realized they didn't police them to ensure you were engaged in scholarly pursuits, they became private oases (that's the plural of oasis, I just learned) in a school teeming with tens of thousands of people.
Later on, I reserved a room so I could interview Amanda's then-fiancee, now-husband before her bridal shower.
Amanda and I were varsity-level M.A.S.H. players. For those not familiar with M.A.S.H., you have missed out on a vital ritual of American girlhood (and apparently for Amanda and I, American young adulthood--as we are at least 20 here...) You make lists of potential husbands, potential careers, the number of children one may potentially have, the age at which one may be wed, and the acronym M.A.S.H. refers to the type of dwelling you will occupy (Mansion, Apartment, Shack, House). Then you choose a random number, and begin counting and crossing out names when they land on the number until you have only one option in each category, and--BAM--your future is made clear.
Everyone plays this in elementary school, but Amanda and I resurrected the art of M.A.S.H. on our yellow legal pads as we waited in hallways and rode buses to debate tournaments as high school upperclassmen, and as evidenced by the above photographs continued our practice of the art of M.A.S.H. into our college years.
Apparently on this occasion, post-M.A.S.H. we graphically analyzed our affection for various men in our lives. This sort of calculation of seems sort of clinical and unfeeling, but I assure you, we were full of feeling. Hence, the need for the feeling to spill out into charts, so the data could be discussed among company well associated with the subject matter in a way that yielded clear-headed conclusions. (Okay, maybe just a little unfeeling.)
Actually, I am kind of embarrassed by my chart. Obviously not embarrassed enough to keep it off the internet. But if you look closely the dotted line running parallel to the X axis is labelled "Nice Guy" and the Y axis is labelled "Scale of love (in degrees of hotness)". I'm sure even at the time I was being a little hokey, but it is now forever recorded on the internet.
Anyway, good friends are a wonderful thing to have. I think that's why I was so jubilant to find these pictures tucked away on a file in my external hard drive.
***Okay, and can everyone please note how I so considerately obscured the names of the boys who made it onto our lists? Actually, I mostly did it for myself, since I am too private a person to ever so publicly declare the names of boys that have been objects of my infatuation. However, it took me like 30 minutes to figure out a way to edit them that I didn't think made the pictures look totally stupid.
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