You learn my secrets and figure out why I'm guarded

A first year ME grad student had a birthday party last night, bar tour style. Not usually my thing, but I went along. She's becoming one of my best friends down here, I am actually getting to really enjoy all of my classmates, especially the girls. At Behrend I didn't hang out with the other girl ME's too much (I did room with Diana for 3 years and she is one of my best friends to this day, but we also had our own separate sets of friends that we spent most of our time with...), but here it's where I've fit in the most, with the girls. They are all really awesome, down-to-earth, non-socially-awkward, caring-about-other-people, involved-in-their-communities, fun-to-be-around type girls. I think it comes from being one of a very few number of girls in your entire college experience. You learn to cope with being surrounded by testosterone 24/7 and become better for it :-)

Anyway, this blog post isn't supposed to be about the girls, it's supposed to be about a boy.

I was sitting in that long booth at bar #3 listening to the band that was playing with some of my classmates, when he sat down beside me. We started talking (like we had been all night, really), about random things that have the feel of small talk. We talked about the band and how we both loved it (they were good). The band was loud, I leaned in close to hear him speak. He put his arm around me. I leaned my head on his shoulder. We stayed there for awhile, while also continuing our conversation.

Funny thing about that conversation, it started to evolve into not so much small talk anymore, but real things.

We talked about our thoughts on grad school and how difficult it was. How both of us felt that this semester was the hardest ever, and that we are anticipating next semester to be worse. We both shared our legitimate concern over failing out of grad school. Although we did both get A minuses in our fluids class, you fail out of grad school when your GPA drops below a 3.0. Terrifying.

We talked about our families.

We talked about my guitar experiences and the few worship songs I knew how to play.

We talked about mutual friends we have from growing up (We know a decent amount of the same people from our pasts ... even though we didn't meet each other until October). He told me about a crush he had on one of those mutual friends in high school. We talked about the mutual friend who had died. We talked about the mutual friend who is now a missionary in Mexico.

We talked about the large number of people we know who are now missionaries, and our thoughts on being here, in grad school, rather than out in the literal "mission field." He quoted CS Lewis (I don't remember the exact quote guys, sorry), that was something to the effect of that the professional world needs Christians too. Helpful for me, and something I know but have at the same time been struggling with the past few months, the fact that my grad school experience seems to be selfish at times, motivated so that I can learn more and get a better job in the future. It's hard for me to be in grad school when I have a handful of friends who are living entirely in intentional Christian communities serving God through serving those in need and spreading his word at the same time. Sometimes I feel less useful to His kingdom than they are. But that's not true. And this boy reminded me last night.

He mentioned being a "new Christian," and I asked him to tell me what he means by that. He said it was a long story, but if I asked him later he'd tell me about how he became a Christian. I am excited for that story.

In the meantime, the rest of the bar tour totally ditched us. Whoops. But I think both of us were mutually okay with that. He walked me to the bus stop and we hugged goodbye.

It was a good night.