I made the mistake of drinking regular coffee today. I have no tolerance for caffeine anymore, so I've been in bed for the last 3 hours staring at my blue LED night light (I hate when it's just too dark, gotta have a night light) all because my adenosine receptors in my brain are blocked by those tiny caffeine molecules. (All hyped up and no biochemistry final to study for.)

So I started having those strange random thoughts that happen when you're staring at a blue LED for 3 hours, like "I wonder if my kindergarten teacher is still alive" and "I wonder what all those kids from kindergarten are doing these days. Maybe I'll look them up." (Maybe it's the gossiper in me, but I frequently find myself in the middle of the night looking up people from my past to see what they're up to. I have issues.) But I couldn't really remember anybody's name from back then. Well, almost anybody. I did recall a couple -- my first boyfriend and his brother. (Odd how the memories from my past almost always involve my having a crush on some boy.)

I was 5 years old and lived in California. I don't remember a lot about him. His name was Matthew. He had a brother named Mark. He lived down the street from my house. I forced him to play with Barbies and make believe that we were grown up and living in a house together. His favorite game to play was doctor. (Oh the irony.) I vividly recall a day when his sister brought him over to my house. He had a bunch of purple flowers in one hand and a candy necklace in the other, all for me. How sweet. I was instantly smitten. We played as we normally did, then he said something like "Hey, let's hide back here," pulling me toward the bushes that lined the back wall of my backyard. We went behind the bushes. I sat down, and he sat next to me with his knees pulled up to his chest. I remember that he was wearing shorts, so his legs were naked, and, even at the age of 5, I liked that (I was definitely born heterosexual). He asked me to kiss him, and I bashfully said no. Then he kissed me on the cheek and asked me to kiss him back. I was still to bashful to comply, so he asked again. (Stubborn kid.) I didn't want to hurt his feelings, so I thought I probably should kiss him, but I also didn't want to make God mad at me and send me to hell for kissing a boy (it's one of the things we learned in Sunday school; God hates it when little girls kiss boys because the devil makes you want to do it), so I decided to compromise. I wouldn't kiss him on the cheek as he wanted. Instead, I'd kiss a safe place, some place God wouldn't be the least bit upset about. I bashfully kissed Matthew's bare knee. Poor boy, such a let down for a first kiss.

So I'm sitting here with insomnia and decided to look him up online just to satisfy my "whatever happened to" curiosity. (And might I just take a moment to note that I'm a very happily married woman who is in no way looking for old flames to hook up with but does have a strange overwhelming interest in what old friends, classmates, crushes, etc. are up to. I'm quite a nosey person really. Just wanted to make that clear.) I searched for my old kindergarten on some of those "say hi to your old classmates" sites to see if perhaps Matthew was on there. He wasn't, but I did find my sister, so I said hi to her instead. (I was also hoping I'd find some names or faces that looked familiar, but there were none that I recognized.)

I Googled his name and his brother's name together along with California to see if I could narrow things down a bit and give myself something more reasonable to search through. Do you have any idea how many people name their sons Matthew and Mark? Darn popularity of the New Testament.

And then I remembered that Matthew and Mark were idential twins, so I Googled their names with the word identical twins. Still too many. Then I added things like ages and potential years of birth. Results: Matthew Hughes, a mixed martial arts champ who honestly looks kinds like a grown-up version of my first boyfriend and is about the same age. Could it be? No. He was born and raised in Illinois, not California, so he's disqualified. (Oh well, it would have been funny at the next family reunion.)

There were others in the search results: artistis, musicians, and so forth, but there wasn't enough information about any of them to lead to anything worth looking at further (they all need better websites and a stronger desire to make their biographies public).

Oh well, the gossiping girl in me will just have to find something else to think about as I lay in bed looking at that blue LED night light. Hmmm, maybe I can count sheep in French. Un, deux, trois...

Labels: My Life