Summer Lovin'

All I have to say is Fuck Monday mornings. It's 6:38 am right now and I've already been at work for two hours. The nice thing is that our studio is in a big tall office building so I get to watch the run rise every morning. That puts me in a good mood. We also face due east so we have a clear view of the Sierra Nevada's and on clear days you can see snow capped mountains in the distance...sometimes I look out at and realize how close I am to Lake Tahoe...the most gorgeous place I've ever been. That puts me in a good mood too.

I stayed up entirely too late last night watching the Grammy's. I was glued to the Chris Brown/Rihanna drama and it was in that moment, I realized how pathetic my life is...when I will stay up until 11:00 to find out all of the details about their fight even though I know my alarm will be going off at 3:45 the next morning. Needless to say, I'm hating life right now.

Anyways, it's a new week which means new and exciting goings on...we launched a new promotion this morning. It's a "Pay your Bills" contest where people can go on the website and sign up to have us pay their bills. That's the big news. Other than that, the only thing I have to report is that I received one of those random "blast from the past" e-mails over the weekend that pop-up every now and again. This one came from someone I dated when I was 19 years old...almost 10 years ago.

We met the summer we were camp counselors in upstate New York. I had just finished my freshman year at UNC and didn't want to move back home for the summer. So I applied to be a camp counselor. It was free room and board for 12 weeks plus you got paid like $1500. I definitely could have made more if I had gone back to the beach to wait tables at Blackbeard's Quarters but like I said, going home wasn't an option. So anyways, the counselors were brought up a full week before the first campers arrived. Half of the staff members were American college kids and the other half were international kids who came through a program called Camp America. Their deal was simple. They came to work at a summer camp for 3 months, earned a little bit of money and then they got an extra 3 months to travel the U.S. with the money they had earned. So basically, there were 250 staff members between the ages of 18 and 25...all with an appetite for foreign cuisine...if you know what I mean.

The Americans went straight for the internationals...an vice versa. I wound up with the 23-year-old Australian soccer coach. His name was Scott. He had such a thick accent taht when we'd have time off and we'd go out in town, I'd have to translate for him at restaurants because nobody could understand whathe was saying. What I remember most about our summer fling was the innocence. I lost my viriginity at 16 and at that time in my life I was pretty promiscuous...but Scott wasn't like that. We never slept together. It was just good, clean fun. Things got pretty intense for a lot of the couples and many of them remained together after the summer ended. In fact, a few years back two of the counselors who met that summer wound up getting married in Ireland (where he was from). Unfortunately that wasn't the case for Scott and myself. I was going back to school and I knew our time was fleeting. He came to me one night and suggested that he move to the United States so that we could get a place together. It kinda freaked me out because suddenly it all became really real...if that makes any sense...so I completely shut down on him. I treated him like shit and while I don't regret much in life...I do regret the way I treated him towards the end of that summer.

Well of course, life got busy and we'd keep in touch briefly through mass e-mails sent between counselors...but eventually those stopped coming and going.

To make a long story short, we lost touch for a while. Last time I heard from him was a couple of years ago and then a couple of weekends ago I was down in Modesto cleaning out my house when I found two letters he had written me the summer we were together. Memories came flooding back...there's nothing like a little summer lovin' from that past to make you all nostalgic...and then over the weekend I got an e-mail from him. I got all excited and e-mailled him back immediately.

The question is, now that we're both single...is it even worth exploring? It was so long ago...we've both changed so much...and we live half-way around the world from one another. Yet somehow I can't shake the memories of our summer together. It's probably just better to be cordial and check-in with another from time to time...