In a frenzied attempt to clean my 100% feline-free apartment, I happened upon an envelope that contained several class notes collected in the middle part of last year. While they are a bit overdue, here they are, mixed in with some newer notes. And my apologies if some notes are a tad redundant; as I write this I have not yet received the July/August issue and my hard drive and its record of what was submitted previously have died. Boo hoo! And now onto the good stuff.

Lindley Tilghman (JE) wrote that she was “working as an Editorial Producer at CNN in financial news.” She lives and works in NYC – at least, that was true as of a year ago! By now I’m sure she’s runnin’ the darn place (CNN and NYC both).

Vlad Cole dropped a line, and I promise I didn’t pay him to write this. “Here’s a story that I hope will convince more people to write in with updates. The May/June issue of the alumni magazine arrived in alumna Kelly Cheng’s mailbox on May 11th (in those notes, I asked the community to let me know if anybody knew of any MBA internship opportunities in video games). Later that same day Kelly received an email with just that sort of opportunity. She forwarded it to me two hours later, and one week after that I had procured the internship of my dreams at ESPN360. Wow. In other news, I’m currently on meal #186 of a 314-meal pizza-only diet… no joke. I like pie. (Book proposal on request!) Anybody in NYC want to grab some pizza before I’ve got to move to Philadelphia? vladi@aya.yale.edu / 917.882.5965.” Are there any trainers in the house? We’ve gotta get this boy into a weight room! (I’m teasing you, Vlad.)

Emmy Betz (SY) wrote, “Having finally finished medical school, I’ll be moving north to start my residency in Emergency Medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess in Boston, and I’d love to connect with other 99?ers in the area.”

Mergers

Stacey Johnson and Andrew Rose (Bucknell) were married in March of 2004. According to the Times, by now they both should have graduated from Columbia University’s College of Physicians and Surgeons, where they both met.

Dr. Catherine Benton and Reid Lerner were married in June of last year in Tallahassee, Florida. According to the Charlotte Observer, they met at Yale, where Reid was the captain of the Varsity Tennis team and Catherine was the captain of the JV Volleyball team. Reid just graduated from Harvard Business School and Catherine just finished the first year of her residency in radiology at Duke. Congratulations to both!

Carla Shen was married in late June, 2004 to Christopher Schott at the Rainbow Room in Manhattan. According to the Times, Carla’s a VP and project manager in the stock research department of Bank of America securities, a division of the Bank of America. (Already I am seeing the problems with including notes that are a year old – all the companies will have merged as well!) Christopher went to a school in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that shall lovingly remain unmentioned. Oh, but where will the kids go to school? I see unrest fomenting already.

Sumit De (SY) reported on the wedding of Chris Burke (PC) and Christine Michalopoulos (TC), which took place in D.C. on June 4. Over a dozen fellow Yalies attended the “union of the two lawyers settled in the nation’s capital.” (Sumit’s pithy prose, not mine!) Fabian Rosado (PC) and Virginia Desilets (CC) were among the revelers, and “were seen taking notes for their own wedding on July 30 in San Juan”. Fabian also sent in a note remarking that they’ve been dating since their freshman year. Ay dios mio! I think the only thing I’ve been doing consistently since freshman year is whining about my pathetic love life (to be proven in two paragraphs).

Charlie Lozner (SM) sent in a note about a prospective merger. “I got engaged in late June to my girlfriend of three years, Elizabeth Davis. We got engaged on top of Camel’s Hump mountain and will get married sometime next summer here in Vermont. Elizabeth and I have been living in Burlington for the past two years enjoying all that Vermont has to offer. Elizabeth is a Structural Engineer with a local Civil Engineering firm. I have been working in Sales and Marketing for a small winter sporting goods company here in Burlington.” Congratulations!

As for me (JE), I hawk credit cards over the internet in my small but valiant effort to increase the national consumer debt. I just got dumped by a balding 41 year old who sleeps on a couch in a partitioned living room, takes a lotta anti-depressants, and has credit card debt. Needless to say, my ability to pick complete winners for paramours remains unchallenged. Oh, the woes of singledom in the City outer boroughs!

A bit of a housekeeping request: if you can include your college in your class notes submissions, as well as the year and college of the fellow Yalies that you mention, that would be most appreciated and spare me the sad task of pawing through an old freshman facebook (which I have, sadly, memorized – Zaki Wahhaj, what are you up to, kind sir?) or our yearbook (sans index, argh!) and still getting it wrong. It’s also difficult to parse nicknames and email handles and all that jazz, so please also include your first name and last name as you’d like it to appear. Thanks!

Send the goods my way. Until next time.

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All I ever wanted when I was younger was to be pretty.  I saw how the popular girls were always giggling with their girlfriends, or sending notes back and forth with cute boys, or making out in the back of the bus on the way to school.  If I just didn’t have these big teeth or huge feet or hairy arms or Asian genes, I thought.  Maybe if I got a perm or had braces.  Maybe life would be different for me.  Better.  Happy.

Something has happened, maybe it’s the thousands of dollars I’ve sunk into therapy, maybe I have just done the ugly duckling thing.  I don’t know.  I don’t know, but now apparently I am one of the pretty people, and I’ve grown into my teeth (not my feet, but Zappos carries size 12, so fuck it), and my hairy arms I guess aren’t so hairy after all, and this Asian thing makes me look all exotic and shit.  But now, I notice, people are looking at me and wanting a piece of me. 

Let me back it up a bit.  I remember the judgments that people used to make about me, just by looking at me.  Assuming things about where I was born (Taiwan), what I liked to eat (rice only), what I might sound like (ching chong).  It pissed me off, I felt like I had to go tenthousandmiles in the opposite direction just to prove how off base they were.  I was born fifteen minutes from where I grew up, I ate fast food like a good li’l Hoosier, my diction was flawless (after the stuttering thing got cleared up).  I was just like them, so they could stop staring at me and making those noises behind my back as if I didn’t hear.

Now I am what feels like tenthousandmiles away from the States, travelling around Europe, and the quiet sense I felt in NYC is now off the charts ridiculous.  I mean, the French dude with his international TV show interviewing world leaders chasing me down the street in Midtown.  Okay, that was weird.  And the occasional catcall from a bunch of drunk guys in a cab.  That just makes me uncomfortable.  But these European guys.  I mean really.  You don’t speak a lick of English.  I don’t speak German.  No, I’m not going to get out of the cab I am sitting in in order to ride shotgun in the Mercedes of a stranger in a strange land.  No, just because you have your own architecture firm in Dublin and are prospecting on some land in Berlin does not give you the right to assume you own a piece of me, too. 

I hate it, and yet here I am, I am finally what I wanted I guess, men are telling me I am beautiful and don’t I have a beautiful smile and here is my number in case you are ever in Abu fucking Dhabi and need a taxi ride.  And I hate it, they don’t know me, they don’t have any idea about me, they think I do this all the time, stroll into a random bar in any city in the world and slay men one-two-three and take my pick.  It ain’t like that, there’s nothing more empty and emptying than having people assume that they know you just by looking at your outsides, lasciviously or otherwise.

This place makes me lonely.  Men make me lonely, with their obnoxious gazes and furtive glances and sense that they know who I am.  I’m sure he is out there somewhere, the guy who gets it, who can go to an art gallery in the day followed by some pick up hoops, dinner at a hole in the wall, music at a punk club, before crashing out at the Ritz Carlton.  The guy with range who does not assume that just because I have a pretty smile it means he has the right to come up and press his semi-hard dick against me at a packed club. 

But argh, what do I wish for now?  It’s not like I can wear glasses again.  Maybe I stop waxing my upper lip, wear baggy clothes again, gain a lot of weight.  Stop looking at me, stop looking at me, if I want to look hot it’s for me, not for you.  Leave me alone.  Except for you, whoever you are, the guy with range and depth who might be feeling lonely right now too. 

There’s too many demands on me, I don’t owe any of you dirty sleazebags anything, no I do not have a boyfriend but leave me the fuck alone.  No you cannot marry me.  Fuck.

This puts me in no kind of mood to return to the States and have to return phone calls.  It’s too much work, it’s emptying, it makes me want to throw in the towel on the whole meet market.

I miss my couch.   It’s so conducive to curling up into a bawl.  This mattress on a floor in the Prenzlauer Berg has gotten old.