6 Dates with SaraJean: A Love Story? (Date 2!)

Last time: I recounted Date 1. It started as a simple lunch at an Ethiopian restaurant, but it turned into a surprise let's-have-SaraJean-meet-the-relatives-right-now salmon dinner! Since I had planned Date 1, now it was SaraJean's turn!

After SaraJean read the previous entry, she thought some people would think "SaraJean's turn" meant it was her turn to write on this blog! I know everyone would love that, including myself. Alas, that's not the case.

Also, I didn't take any photos on Date 2, so we'll have to use our imagination. Sorry!

Date 2 was June 2, 2012, three weeks after our first date. A few things happened in between:

1) I got to meet SaraJean's good friend Freya, who was visiting from out of town. I definitely wanted to make a good impression. When a guy is starting to date a girl, I don't think it matters what his guy friends think. But for a girl, I think it can matter a lot what her girlfriends think. (At least, it worked out really well for a friend of mine. They're now happily married with two kids.)

What did Freya think about me after we met? I heard she said something like, "I really don't know. He's so different from everyone else!" I'll take that. =)

2) SaraJean ran a half-marathon. A good day for me is walking a half-block-a-thon.

3) It was Caltech's Ditch Day! SaraJean and I explored the campus the night before, and a little the day-of. (I got lucky and was able to help out with a stack in Avery House: the Dominion stack, based on the card/board game.)

4) We both spent a weekend at church camp, at Pepperdine University. We hung out with other friends but also with each other, playing basketball, solving a jigsaw puzzle, and playing a card game called "Nertz."

I took one photo at church camp: Joseph and his newborn baby. Joseph was in SaraJean's Bible study group at church; we call them "sedaqah" groups. SaraJean and I are both outliers in our sedaqah groups: I'm the oldest in my group, and perhaps a lot older than the average. SaraJean is one of the younger people in her group, and for awhile everyone else was couples and families.

5) Oh, one other thing happened that I should share. The week of Date 2, SaraJean wrote me a long email, which included these words: "I did not like how you spoke to me in the car. … I felt like throwing your iPad at you."

And now it was time for Date 2!

Ok, so I'm not presenting the context for the above. Suffice it to say, SaraJean was really mad at me. She never did throw anything at me. We talked and made up. I suppose it was our first fight. (FYI, I'm really glad that SaraJean told me how she felt.)

And I forgot to mention something from Date 1: I really wanted to start things off on the right foot, so I asked SaraJean if we could pray together. I vaguely remember us holding hands when we did it. And we had hugged briefly at the end of Date 1. I didn't get a chance to drive SaraJean home and drop her off at her door, so we didn't get that stereotypical chance to kiss. I was definitely hoping for that for Date 2, or maybe Date 3, since that would be my turn.

Date 2 started with SaraJean telling me, "I don't think we should have any physical contact until after the 6 dates."

…

…

… I'll talk about that later.

We started with a nice walk to SaraJean's favorite park. (Not holding hands, of course….) On the way, SaraJean treated me to her favorite frozen yogurt place, "Cherry on Top."

We then walked to the park, eating our frozen yogurt and talking. I'm sure we talked about a lot that day, but one thing we especially talked about was her family. (Her mom lives in Saudi Arabia but was visiting the U.S. soon. And SaraJean was planning a trip back to Colorado for her dad's birthday.)

By the way, here's the outside of the Cherry on Top in Pasadena. I've been there several times, but now that I see it this way, it makes me wonder: What's on the second and third floors?

After dessert, SaraJean drove me to a Yucatan restaurant that she really likes. (I should say that SaraJean doesn't own a car. However, she had asked a friend if she could borrow a car for our date!) I don't know if I ever told SaraJean this, but I think I got food poisoning from what I ate that night.

SaraJean had a surprise in store for our date. However, I think we started too late, so I never found out what it was. Instead, she improvised a different surprise … by driving me to the top of Mount Wilson!

Mt. Wilson is a famous hiking/driving destination for Caltech, since it's just a few miles north of campus. Nevertheless, I had never been there! I don't have a picture of the entire mountain, so just imagine a mountain in the distance. =)

At the top of Mt. Wilson is an observatory and a ton of radio antennae. This photo is from 2009, when there was a fire threatening the area. (The plane is dropping fire retardant.)

The drive was really twisty all the way up, and I got a teeny bit car sick. SaraJean told me that she also gets car sick, so that's why she wanted to be the one driving up!

At the top, nothing was open, including the parking lot. So, we just parked along the side of the road and walked around. The view was great. I don't have a picture of it, so just imagine a really nice view of Los Angeles and the entire valley, with all the city lights. =)

I didn't think there was anything to do or anywhere to go up there at night. However, SaraJean found a slightly empty patch of ground right next to the road, put a blanket down there, and told me to sit. She had a bag of stuff, and out of it she pulled a board game called "Uptown." It was a little dark, but we placed the board on the blanket and started to play.

Uptown is an easy-to-learn, hard-to-master game. Each player has the same set of pieces, and each piece can be placed in a specific section, row or column, depending on what it is. The goal is to place all your pieces such that they're connected in one contiguous shape (or as few shapes as possible).

While we're playing the game, I take a few moments to just enjoy things. It's pretty different up there, at the top of a mountain with these giant antennae towering above you, and the city below. All quiet, and no one else around. Plus, it was a full moon! It was really quite romantic … until I remembered our new no-physical-contact rule. =)

At some point during our game, a large spider suddenly crawled across our blanket! I totally freaked out. Did I mention that SaraJean hopes to go to graduate school for entomology? That's the study of bugs.

We finished the game (SaraJean won on a tiebreaker), and I still had to drive home. When I think about this date, I feel like we stayed on Mount Wilson all night long, until the sun rose. But in truth, we stayed only until midnight, then we drove back down the mountain. Along the way, we talked about personality types, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI).

So that was Date 2. It started as a normal walk in the park and dinner, but it transformed into a mountaintop adventure playing a board game among the creepy crawlies of the earth!

I should say that, in my mind, a lot of the things we did that night were romantic. But that's probably because I had romance in mind. Many times when SaraJean and I hang out, she's really not thinking about romance; she's just having fun. I guess that must happen a lot: guys and girls having different perspectives on what a particular date is about.

Finally, I said I'd talk about SaraJean's request for "no-physical contact" throughout our 6 dates. I agreed to this immediately, because, well, what choice did I have?

But seriously, I did agree, and I thought it was a good idea. I wanted to be clear, so I asked if she really meant no physical contact at all, including holding hands, hugging, or even just a pat on the shoulder. The answer was essentially yes, nothing at all. At that point, perhaps I should have asked for more time to think things through…. Anyway, this rule will certainly come up later.

So: At the end of Date 2, I was mostly very happy. On the flip side, SaraJean had planned such a great date, I felt some pressure for planning Date 3! (SaraJean would note that the best parts of Date 2 weren't planned at all. =)

The next date would be next weekend, June 9, 2012. We had a no-touching rule to live with. And, SaraJean's birthday was that month! Pressure!

Next time is Date 3: Saved by dirt!