Date? Mystery.

(May 8, 2011)
I'll thank you not to be so snide about my definition of closure with one Matt Palmer. Even though you made me laugh :P I will have you know that at this point, my "closure" meets both your criteria and mine, thank you very much. Haha Matt and I hung out this week and it was totally awesome. I was one hundred percent myself, which ironically probably made him think that I was a completely different person than the one he remembers, as I never ever accomplished that feat around him previously. He even said I was funny :) It was a bunch of us, too, so don't be too impressed, but yes. No more awkwardness. And wonderfully, no more interest on my part.

I also moved to a place called Glenwood in Provo. It is insanely ghetto. Even by Provo standards, with which, I'm aware, you are not all that familiar, but let me be the first to tell you: that makes it Ghe-hetto. Also, boys in our ward - 90% pre-mission. They all look like babies to me. It's crazy.
However, I don't know how much I care about that, because there has been some slight progression on the Stephen front.

Dude, scratch that. Some major progression.

So, let's see....I don't think he even had my number the last time I wrote you [yes, I'm a bad person], so you might want to kick back because I can't restrain myself from sharing as much of the interim change in behavior as possible.

My end of finals present was him asking for my number of his own volition. We were at a party together at my old apartment complex and he said something about hanging out more and presumed ease of doing that if he had my number. Then, two days later, he called me up to go laser tagging/nickelcade-ing. That was really fun, I hadn't done that for a long time. He also played air hockey with me after we finished and as we were leaving, we passed a group of people, and he says, "Wow, that guy just totally checked you out."

Ha ha ha:) My, Stephen, why are you paying any attention whatsoever to who is or isn't checking me out?

Then I saw him again at yet another event at my former living establishment (there's been a regular slough of birthdays lately, it's peculiar) and he jokingly held my hand for like thirty seconds while we talked to some people. We see each other every other morning when I'm walking to school at eight in the morning and he's driving the same road in the opposite direction to go to work. The first couple of times it happened, we texted each other about the awkward rendezvous - because it's always awkward for that half a second before we're entirely sure that that person in the white car/that girl with the long hair is the other.

I passed him driving Wednesday and called him up just to be like hey, I think I just saw you on University, tra la la, and he says that we should go hot tubbing. We did. Just the two of us. I mean, there were other people in the hot tub, but neither of us brought any friends. And we flirted like crazy :) Seriously. It was marvelous. And I made him laugh. I feel so proud of myself when I accomplish that feat. Afterwords, we sat in my car for a good half hour or forty-five minutes just talking.

Brief detour for commentary: it was this particular excursion that made me fairly certain that he is interested. At least a tiny bit. If you, as a boy, feel like confirming this fact, it would be greatly appreciated. I feel that inviting someone to go hot tubbing with you solo is not something you do if you really prefer to just stay friends. I didn't and still don't really know how much he is interested - I may have a significant amount of competition - but I feel that this excursion says, at the very least, "I find you mildly attractive and not unpleasant to talk to."

And then, two nights ago, he texted me to go to a barbecue with his friends in Orem, which turned out to be some sort of peculiar quasi-datey thing.

You may think that I'm being intensely girly and stupid for wondering whether or not this was a date, but the funny thing was that all of his friends seemed to think it was. They referred to me as Stephen's date and I displayed my rather spectacular talent for blurting and said, "Oh, date, is that what I am?" I love those moments when I say things and have an immediate, slight desire that life had like a twenty-second rewind button. But his friends were funny and
obliging and immediately set up a discourse as to what, exactly, it was. I think the verdict was that it was a half-date :P

They all seemed to like me. They told me so, at least, several times :) It was actually really nice - you know how marvelously, intensely awkward I can be around new people. But they were all really easy to talk to and I didn't have to spend the night awkwardly glued to Stephen so I'd have someone I could speak to. Ha, and I was leaving, his friends were saying, " You're the best girl that Stephen's brought around in quite a while. And there's a lot, so that's saying something." We flirted quite a bit on this excursion, as well - He even came up behind me as we were finishing a game and put his hands on my shoulders and asked if I had fun. Which, in retrospect, sounds decidedly unimportant.
But I swear it was a big deal at the time.

Meh, we'll see where this goes. Heaven knows whether he wants someone else or if he's about to discover this or that significant personality flaw in me :P But at present, I feel reasonably safe in saying that he likes me, at least a little bit.