Well here I am, about to go headfirst into a... I suppose it's now a twelve or thirteen year long story I've had going on in my end of the world. My story started in my last year of high school, followed me into my university years, and inexplicably came back after I started getting into the local convention scene here in Vancouver. It's a weird story and at times it's actually pretty stupid and I can't really recommend it to anybody... but yeah, anyway...

If any of you guys knew me back when I was still a young, awkward, hopeless romantic of an arts student at the University of British Columbia, you probably remember some stories about a girl whom I actually referred to as "The Girl". If you didn't know me back then and could never, ever be bothered to go into my wacky ultra-weeb myOtaku posts, I'll try to give the short version - honestly, it's going to be the most to-the-point piece of this entire work:

• Boy has a few classes with girl in high school; befriends girl.
• Boy and girl's mutual friends set them up as dates for grad.
• Boy and girl awkwardly date for a summer until First Year started.
• Girl stresses out about an overly heavy course load, breaks up with boy.
• Boy spends next two years trying to get girl back.
• Accepted understanding that feelings are mutual yet unactable because not in girl's current life plan.
• Boy, with help from a very wonderful person here, slowly learns to get over girl.

Okay, technically I never explicitly mentioned that last bit ever. But it was true. A very wonderful, mature, straight up awesome friend here kinda helped me see there were more people with whom I could be sharing pieces of my life.

But yeah, for a couple years after that time I had pretty honestly and genuinely gotten over "The Girl". It helped that we never saw each other anymore at school and that we didn't chat so much any more in between either (nothing out of spite or malice really... just kinda happened), but I started to notice that I was going to miss out on a lot of interesting people if I didn't get over her. Luckily, said interesting people found me quicker than I found them... and believe me, some people were far, far more interesting than others... and y'know, some turn out to be completely crazy and you never want to see them again. Others... well, one other... you fall in love and see all kinds of possibilities for the future. It takes all kinds, I suppose.

Anyway, by the time I had started to think I was closing the book on this particular saga with "The Girl" - yeah, I guess that was about nine years ago - How I Met Your Mother started airing on CBS. Of course I didn't really watch it when it started and probably wouldn't see an actual episode until a few years later. But I'll get to that later...