Provo Canyon--oolala!

There is a canyon just north of Provo that has the reputation of being the place you take you're date if you're more interested in making-out than anything else. I've only taken a date there once, but we certainly didn't make-out. I had lived in Provo just a little over two months at the time had made a handful of friends in my ward. One of them was a girl names Sarah. We hung out with the same group of friends, but we didn't know each other terribly well at the time this story took place.

Journal entry dated 12 October 2007:

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That was--interesting.

I suppose I may have just gone on a date with Sarah. Of a sort. In a way. I guess....

At about 10:00 tonight, apartmentmate Jason asks whether any of us want to go see Transformers, so a group of us piled in his car and headed for Movies 8.

Transformers was sold out at Movies 8, so we went to a different theater.

Transformers was sold out there, too, so we came home.

Now, as we were heading out, I saw Sarah ping-ponging in the lounge and invited her along, but she said that she just saw it a couple days ago. When we got back, we told her what had happened, and then we all kinda hung out in the lounge, shooting pool, playing ping-pong, and fiddling around on the piano.

Eventually, Jason and Danny and I were hanging out here in the apartment, and Danny played a funny clip of a Southern Baptist preacher on his laptop. After we had listened to it once through and had a good laugh, Danny said that it was the sort of thing Sarah would enjoy and that someone should go get her; I volunteered and went outside.

Sarah had apparently gone back to her apartment, and by now it was well past 11, so I didn’t want to knock; I decided to just return back to my apartment. A very odd thing happened next. I went back in the apartment and related what had just happened, and then Jason and Danny started—I don’t know what to call it; I don’t even know how to describe it.

It was so weird!

I mean, they were speaking plain English, but I have no idea where they were coming from! They started asking my why it’s taking me so long to ask Sarah out, what I’m waiting for, why I haven’t gotten around to it. They spoke to me as though whenever I’m around them, all I ever talk about is how much I want to ask her out or as though I spend all my time hanging out with her and it’s high time I take it to another level; perhaps if either of those two things were the case, then the way they were saying what they were saying wouldn’t have confused me, but because neither of those things are true, I could only stare at them in flabbergasted wonderment and ask several times, “What is going on here?”

Ultimately I found myself knocking on Sarah’s door and telling her to come over because Danny had something he wanted to show her. As we walked, she told me that Movies 8 still had a 12:15 showing of Transformers (it was midnight at this time) and that she had decided she wanted to go.

We got to my apartment, had a good laugh at Danny’s clip, and then called Movies 8 to makes sure they still had openings; Movies 8 informed us that there were still 70 tickets or so for Transformers, so we decided to go.

Dillydallying ensued, so I led the charge outside, and Sarah went off to get her purse.

No one else came out.

I popped my head back inside the apartment and asked Jason and Danny whether they were coming.

"We were thinking you could make it a date," Jason said.

"Yeah," Danny agreed; "I don’t want to get in the way of the magic!"

I blinked at them a few times in near disbelief, shook my head, and went outside.

"Well," I said to Sarah, "looks like it’s just you 'n' me!"

"Those other guys aren’t coming?" she asked in surprise.

"Nope," I said; "they all backed out."

So, we went to Movies 8 and were met with a long line that ate up the remaining 70 tickets.

So, we went to the other theater, but it was closed.

Cruising thought various parking lots as we left the second theater, I wound up on a street that I was totally unfamiliar with, but it led us to University Ave, so all was well.

"2700 North‽" I said when I saw the street sign at the stoplight. "How did we get so far north?"

"You really don’t know your way around this town, do you?" Sarah asked, amused.

"I have a terrible sense of direction. 2700 North. Wow. Let’s go south a bit, eh?"

I turned left and drove.

And drove and drove and drove and drove and--

As it turns out, left=north.

Oops....

I was seriously confused, wondering how so much canyon got between University Mall and downtown Provo; Sarah, I guess, though I was just taking her somewhere in Provo Canyon since the movie didn’t work out. It took a long time for us to figure out that I had made a mistake.

But the conversation flowed nicely enough; we had fun, talking and laughing. We spent, like, 45 minutes together, so I imagine that counts as a date despite the fact that it was both impromptu and accidental.

Hm. Well. There you go.