I know all too well the feeling of being made to wait.  It's frustrating.  Often, it's as if somebody is saying to me, "Hey buddy.  Your time isn't quite as valuable as mine, so I'm going to go ahead and throw your whole schedule off so that I can keep mine intact."  When the car in front of me stops the flow of traffic so that a single car can make an illegal left turn across six lanes of traffic, I rage.  When the old woman at the grocery store parks her cart in some diagonal manner that impossibly blocks all of aisle 7, I see red.  When I have to retake two years of law school because . . .  wait . . . wait, WHAT?

Today was supposed to be a big day for me, for two reasons.  The first reason is that it wraps up this journey.  Over.  Finished.  Done.  I could wax on about that topic for at least five minutes (maybe longer), but I won't, because I really want to tell you about reason number two, which is a peanut butter and jelly sandwich from Potbelly.  For years, I've been wanting to try it, but I've always chickened out.  And I'm not even sure what that really means.  It's just that, no matter how certain I am that I'm going to order the PBJ, when the nice person at the counter asks me what I want, I freak out and yell, "Meat sandwich!  Meat sandwich!"  Today was the day that I was going to conquer my Potbelly / meat sandwich demon.  But I didn't.

K and I were supposed to meet downtown at 11:30am this morning for a slightly early lunch.  So naturally, at 11:35am, I hit the road for my 15 minute commute, fully expecting to arrive a couple of minutes early for our planned 12:00pm lunch date.  Notice any problems yet?  By the time I arrived, half of K's lunch hour was gone, making today's Facebook friend meet-up the shortest I'd ever had or ever will have.  What a perfect way to end this thing.  As much as I hate waiting for others, causing others to have to wait, because of my shortcomings, is so disappointing to me.  I absolutely hate the feeling.  To make matter worse, by the time I finally got to Potbelly, the line was so long that I didn't even get to attempt to order my PBJ.  Poor me.

Fortunately, K is a more patient person than I am, if not more forgiving as well.  But she's had practice.  If you're like me, you may have gone to law school and heard rumors of a woman that was a class below you.  Perhaps you heard that this woman had already completed two years, took some time off, then returned years later to complete her degree, only to find that some silly rules require a person to begin and finish their law school career within x number of years, where this woman was on schedule to finish in x+2 number of years.  If you'd heard that much, you may also understand that, by returning to law school, she'd essentially have to start over, go through the hell that is first-year, and do it all over again.  And, lastly, if you'd gone to law school, you could certainly appreciate the dedication and perseverance this woman must have had in order to be able to do what she did. Well, today, I finally met this woman.

Because I only had thirty minutes with K, some of my "facts" may be off.  If that's the case, I apologize.  It was a busy lunch.  I had tons of questions, she had tons of answers, and, together, we had no time to spare.  I suppose, though, that that's how it goes when somebody is late, and that's one of the consequences of lateness that drives me up the wall.  On her end, K didn't seem all that bothered.  Maybe that's because she had already ordered her sandwich and was merrily enjoying Potbelly meat and her break from work.  Or maybe her law school experience taught her something that I have yet to learn.  I'm not sure.  I think, in order to figure this out a bit better, I may need more than a half-hour with K.  So I'll wait, patiently, for the time when I can see her again, ask her some more questions, and finally, finally order that peanut butter and jelly.

So that my old-man gray hair doesn't get lonely, I've also got me some old-man knees. I'm not a joint expert and it's been quite some time since I've last seen an orthopedist, but the majority of my knee problems seem to stem from a lack of cartilage.  No cushion equals pain and weird, nasty sounds, which prevents me from doing much in the way of exercise.  Basketball, which, along with genetics, is probably most to blame for my current situation, is no longer a possibility. Neither is running, something with which I have a 10% love / 90% hate relationship.  Bowling can also sometimes be an issue, as can standing, sitting, lying down, and yodeling.  For some reason, though, the movements required to go up stairs does not bother me that much.

Along with my wife, I reside in the east tower of the most reflective condo buildings in all of the Twin Cities.  Our HOAs cover quite a bit of our living costs and provide us with all of the air conditioning that we can handle.  We've also got a decent gym that I like well enough, except that it doesn't have a stairstepper, one of my favorite machines of all time.  To make due, I started to incorporate actual stairclimbing into my workout routine.  Seventeen floors goes quickly but, at the same time, it seems to take forever to get to the top.  It sucks, it blows, and I miss my stairstepper.  As a result, I'm always looking for any little reason to stop.

On one occasion, I found a reason / was forced to take a break because there was a woman in my way.  That woman was V, one of my hundreds of neighbors and a fellow book clubber.  I suppose that I could've nodded like a polite person, sidestepped around her, and gone on with my day and life.  Instead, I think I took out my earphones, sweated on her, and said something wonderfully astute like, "What are you . . . *pant* . . . doing?"  Obviously, I've got a way with words.  As luck would have it, though, V was in the stairwell to do some exercising of her own, as she had recently had one of her knees replaced.  It really was about the greatest thing I could expect to happen in a stairwell, since I've been told repeatedly that I'd eventually have to replace my knees.

Since meeting V, I feel like I've always got my very own, personal knee mentor.  It's a grand feeling, as top notch knee mentors are few and far between.  Besides the knee conversations, V and I had only spoken a bit in the halls, in the gym, at book club, and in the elevator.  But tonight, we went for a walk that turned into more of a sit that turned into more of a gab session, which was probably more my style anyways.  It was nice, and it was good.  I like knowing my neighbors a bit and like having some things in common with them, even if it involves such terribly unavoidable things such as aging. I also take some comfort in knowing that she's done it (both the aging and the knee replacement) and she's lived to tell the tale.  And, mostly, I'm glad that she was in my way that day in the stairwell so that I could be around to hear her tell her tale.  Score one for not taking the elevator.

I struggle to do things just a little.  For the most part, I want to go to extremes, I want my life to be all or nothing, and I want to swing for the fences, regardless of whether I end up hitting a home run or striking out.  At least, that's what I sometimes tell myself. In reality though, my life might just be the classic case of somebody who lacks self-control and doesn't know when and / or how to say when.  I'll let history be the judge.  Either way, because of my odd go-big-or-go-home mentality, I often find myself in the middle of some really great things or, as the kids like to say, in the middle of an epic fail (not sure if I used that correctly).

C and I got together this afternoon at a frozen yogurt place.  This is the third time during this journey that I've met up with a Facebook friend for froyo.  Before that, it'd been a very long time since I'd gone out for the frozen ice cream impersonator.  I think these types of establishments are becoming more common, but I can't figure out if I love them or hate them.  Maybe it's a bit of both. On the one hand, I get to make my own sugar-dish.  So if I want four different flavors and seventeen different toppings, then that is what I get.  On the other hand, I've been unable, at least so far, to walk away from one of these places without a pretty sweet stomach ache.  Bigger is better, I guess, even when that means that I'm going to hate myself for the rest of the night.

It's funny / weird to me that C and I ever met in the first place, let alone for dessert-in-place-of-lunch. Like everything that's happened to me and everybody else since the beginning of time, had only one or two things gone differently four or five years back, my life could have been drastically different, perhaps I wouldn't be sitting here typing this, and I probably never would have known C. But, things didn't go differently four or five years back.  We made the decisions we made that caused C and I to end up in the same section in the same law school in the same frozen, midwestern state. Out of all the (m)(b)(tr)illions of different ways that my life could've played out, there was only one way for me and C to end up eating way too much sugar together today.  And it amazes me that it happened, even while the logical side of me knows that something, necessarily, had to happen.

While C had always known that she'd go to law school, there was a time when I didn't think anything above high school would be in my future.  That might have been my extreme personality talking, but if it was, then it was probably also that same extreme personality that eventually led me to law school as well.  Later still, it might've been my let's-do-something-big mentality that prompted me to take off 96 days ago, meet up with some Facebook friends, and see what happened.  I don't yet know how this all is going to play out, at least not in the long run.  It might be one of the best things I end up doing in my life, it might be the worst, or, most likely, it'll fall somewhere between those two extremes.  But for now, I'm happy with it, with the time I've spent with my Facebook friends and faux ice cream, and with my inability to do things halfway.

I kept fairly busy during law school.  It was time consum-ing and, at times, stressful, but it certainly was not compar-able to digging ditches or any other sort of manual labor. Rather than worrying about the blisters that come along with physical work, my greatest threat was the dreaded paper cut caused by the turning of one boring page after another.  That was 90% of my law school career.  Sitting at home with a book in my favorite red chair with my favorite drink in my favorite glass while being a grump was my bread and butter.  Some people put more into it, some less, but they all walked away from it with the same degree.  And, in general, I just don't think there's any way for law school to be as difficult as people make it out to be.  If you can make it through undergrad, you can probably make it through law school.  The trick is to not hate it and / or yourself in the process.  And finding a way to finance it.

S was kind enough to have me over to her home for lunch today.  As I drove to her St. Paul neighborhood, I tried to decide whether or not I knew who she was.  We'd attended law school together and were even in the same class, but I was not extremely social and, as I discovered today, S didn't spend a whole lot of extra time hanging out on campus either.  It seems that we both preferred our respective homes over the confines of our school.  Still, S was adamant that she and I had spoken a bit at a classmate's birthday party a few years back.  My wife later confirmed this story, but I'm still not convinced that the two of them aren't conspiring against me to make me feel old and forgetful.

I learned today that S, for at least a couple of reasons, was not an average law student.  First, at our graduation ceremony, she was being cheered on by a couple of rather young twins.  Perhaps our law school was different than others, but giving birth just weeks before graduation did not seem to be the norm.  Second, S is not working in the legal field, pursuing work in the legal field, or even caring about the legal field.  Instead, she's keeping just a tad busy with the whole two-kids-at-once thing, being a wife, being a daughter, and being a person.  And, oh yeah, she'll be pursuing a master's degree this fall.

Hearing of S's back-to-school plans made me jealous.  School is great, learning is fun, and syllabus day is where it's at.  But it also made me happy, a bit for her, but mostly for me.  Because I was terrible at being a traditional law student and am currently terrible at being a tradional former law student, I take an inordinate amount of pleasure from my law school classmates' pursuits of non-traditional ventures.  S studied the law for three years.  Three years!  And now she's just thumbing her nose at the whole thing.  "Yeah, I did law school.  No big deal."  To hear some tell it, that sort of behavior is crazy talk, wasteful, and a shame.  To me, it's wonderful and inspiring.

Sometimes, I feel like an all-star, like King Midas, like I can do no wrong.  Everything that I do seems to work out in my favor and turn out even better than its best case scenario could have predicted.  It's a good feeling, similar to being on fire when I'm playing NBA Jam.  Even though I'm Alonzo Mourning and I'm taking an off-balance, half-court shot, I know without a doubt that it's going in, and that it's not even going to graze the rim.  I had a pretty good stretch during this project where I felt that way.  I was on fire, people wanted to talk to me, and strangers wanted to meet me. But I also knew that it would eventually fade and, at times, I looked forward to it.  I was alright with it and I prepared for it, though I was unsure that I'd be able to recognize when it would happen. Well, yesterday, it finally happened.

About a month back, I was invited to a BBQ by a Facebook friend, J.  I enjoy her company immensely, so my wife and I jumped at the chance to attend.  Between bouts of my meat sweats, J mentioned to me that her mother, C, had recently finished her first year of law school.  To me, this was extremely interesting.  And since I like interesting stories / people, I asked J to put me in touch with her mother.  J obliged and, today, I had lunch with C, her husband, B, and their two granddaughters.  As a special bonus, J was also in attendance.

I walked away from my encounter with C with two overwhelming thoughts.  First, Rainforest Cafe is weird stuff.  The guacamole burger and fries were legit, but I couldn't figure out what was going on with the place.  And just who is their market audience anyway?  Whatever.  They seem to be doing fine.  My second takeaway was that my conversation with C was brutal, not in the sense that she hated me and wanted me to choke on my guac and / or get some of it up my nose (I did that, by the way), but because I got the vibe that she could not have possibly been any less impressed with me. It was amazing, a bit depressing, but mostly comical.

Perhaps I should have expected as much. After all, C is an accomplished woman.  She's a rising 2L after having worked for many years already in the legal profession.  She is not wet behind the ears, green, or a noob.  She's been there, done that, and has probably seen a hundred punks like me come and go.  So when I told her about my latest whisky-fueled, can't-miss ideas, perhaps I should have anticipated a what-the-hell-why-don't-you-get-a-real-job look.  But I didn't.  And that might have been my fault.  Maybe I'd bought into the hype a little too much, listened to my fans a bit too closely, and forgotten that I'm still just a girl.

Here's the thing, though.  I am a bit different, run from the mundane, and enjoy the challenge of challenging others' expectations of normalcy, responsibility, and duty.  At times, that's been a blessing and, at other times, a curse.  But it's gotten me this far and, believe it or not, I like my life more than I like anybody else's life.  So, while I've been taken down a peg and my luster has lost a bit of its shine, I'll be moving on and up very shortly, not because it's what I have to do, but because it's what I want.

I have a mental list of things that I want to do before I die. The list changes often, is probably quite unimpressive to the outsider, and isn't even that important to me.  It's not a bucket list really, both because I cringe when I hear that phrase and also because these aren't life goals.  Rather, my list is made up of jobs that I simply want to have at some point.  For example, I may never feel like I've reached my full potential in life if I don't spend a summer pumping gas.  While I'm not very familiar with automobiles, I have faith that, with the right sort of training / mentoring program, I can accurately pump gas, clean windshileds, and check tire pressure and oil levels in a speedy fashion without sacrificing the attention to detail that a full service customer would expect. I've got a few other positions in mind, but I don't want to mention them here out of fear that others may love the ideas, try to steal them, and saturate the market.

It was at one of these dream jobs that I met B.  She was my "boss," though I thought everybody there was my boss.  This came in handy, both when I couldn't remember somebody's name ("Hey! Good morning, boss.) and when I wanted to shirk resposibility for something I'd done wrong, which was often ("Ooooooh, I didn't know I was supposed to do it that way.  My boss told me to do it this way.  My bad."  Seeing her yesterday was fun.  It was the first time we'd spent time together outside of the work environment and, while it may go without saying, I definitely had a better time with her at Denny's than I ever had with her at work.  Maybe that's all her husband's doing, though.  He was a treat too and, together, they were hilarious.  It was the sort of situation where, after driving away from it, I started to wonder why it hadn't been done before.  The work / private life divide is a bitch though, and is often hard to break through.  But sometimes, that's the way it goes, in life and in the high stakes, take-no-prisoners game of weird-ass jobs.

When is enough enough?  I've been trying to figure this out as it relates to religion.  A lot of my Facebook friends that I've met with claim a religion, but they either have problems or disagree altogether with one or more things within the religion.  So why not quit, either that specific religion or religion entirely?  How many things must be wrong with one's chosen religion before one walks away?  Is 25% enough, or do at least half of one's religious teachings need to be incorrect before a person will leave?

So far, my interactions with my Facebook friends haven't produced an answer that I've found to be satisfying.  However, they have given me some insight into the "why."  On Day 92, I'm no closer to figuring out how much needs to be wrong with a religion before a person will leave it than I was on Day 0.  But, I think I better understand the reasons and circumstances that may lead to these less-than-100% believers staying put.  While that's not something I ever set out trying to understand, I'm that glad it happened, just the same.  It's got to be worth something, though I haven't figured out how much.

A and I attended law school together back when everybody attended law school.  We both have four siblings, both wonder what we'll be doing in six months, and both ran late for our 3pm date today.
It didn't matter much, though, since the place I'd picked out for us kind of sucked, prompting us to leave the comforts of downtown and head to a trusty, uptown liquor lounge that smelled and felt like the inside of a dirty dishwasher.  Unlike me, though, A still belongs to the  "spiritual, but not religious" camp.  While he considers himself to be only a lite / diet version of his former, religious self, he also cannot fathom that there is simply nothing else after death.  And I get that, or, at least I think I do.  Or maybe I'm just on the path to getting it.

Even if A, or anybody else, could imagine an existence that ended upon death, there are still valuable and legitimate reasons to continue on in a religion, even while disagreeing with some, or perhaps even all, of its tenets.  I think I've always felt this way.  Even while hating a lot of the negative consequences that result from religion, I appreciate the good that it brings.  If nothing else, having a religion is habitual, it provides comfort and social opportunities, and is often a family thing.  And while a 20 year-old may not choose to join a particular religion had she not been raised in it, leaving that same religion is an entirely different matter when it's what you've known and done, when it's something that has been part of you, for two decades.  I'd imagine that's not something that one walks away from easily or abruptly.  I certainly didn't.

When somebody agrees to meet up with me, unless they tell me differently, I block out a two-hour window for them on my Google Calendar. Sometimes it goes a smidge longer, sometimes a bit shorter, but two hours, without travel time, seems to be a fair estimate.  On one of my particularly busy days, I had six appointments, each two hours long, scheduled consecutively with no breaks in between.  While I ran about five minutes late the entire day, for the most part, everything worked out well.  On the other hand, on one occasion, I had a two-hour block on my calendar that eventually turned into a seven-hour thing.  So it's not an exact science yet, not for me anyway.

One of the great things about this project, though, is that there really are no rules, either for me or for my Facebook friends, other than that there's an unspoken expectation that we both show up. Ditching is a faux pas, but everything else is a go.  So when I met with MB today at an eatery in a mall, my initial plan was that I was going to get a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.  Upon seeing their menu board, though, I really wanted their chicken cheddar sandwich, so that's what I got. Changing my mind at the last minute over something as consequential as a sandwich?  Madness, I know.

This flexibility also comes in handy when people are hard to get onto my calendar.  I don't know what the issue is.  It's as if my Facebook friends have careers, family, and/or other somewhat important things going on in their lives.  Such is the case with MB, a former law school classmate of mine who is now working at a law firm somewhere doing something for somebody.  Now, one might think, "Hey, Mikel, you don't seem to know that much about MB, especially considering that you just spent time with her and the entire point of this project is to know your Facebook friends better." And one would be partially correct.  But I'd offer, in my defense, that I actually do know MB better than I did before today, even if I can't recite to you her favorite childhood memory.  I'd also offer that MB and I had a grand total of 40 minutes together today, and that was after not having seen one another for over 13 months, so we both had to work with what we had, which was a limited amount of time.  As it turns out, MB is a busy person for all of the right reasons.  So when my opportunity to meet with her arose, I took it, and I counted myself lucky.

That's the nature of the beast though.  Like I've said before, I'm not going to make best friends with every single one of my Facebook friends that I meet.  I am, however, going to take a lot of first steps necessary to develop more meaningful relationships.  Without these first steps, nothing else would ever unfold between me and MB / every other Facebook friend that I'm seeing.  And perhaps nothing more will develop even with these first steps, but at least I'm not limiting myself to a friendless life without even giving the friendship thing a fair shake.  I can't guarantee what'll happen with my tomorrow, but at least I can guarantee that today was good, and that the possibilities for my tomorrow are greater because of my today.

I really like what I'm doing, but I have moments of uncertainty, flashes of doubt, when I wonder if perhaps I'm the only one that cares.  This occurs both at the macro and micro levels.  Looking at the big picture, does anybody even notice that I'm doing what I'm doing?  Does it actually matter to anybody not named Mikel?  I have similar insecurities at the individual level too.  I will absolutely love some of the interactions that I have with my Facebook friends, yet, less than two minutes after we've parted ways, I can't help but worry that my feelings are not returned.  And the whole process makes me feel entirely vulnerable.

K and I knew one another from law school.  She was a year ahead of me, so I saw and communicated with her even less than with my average law school classmate turned Facebook friend.  She's been nice to me, though, ever since I can remember knowing who she was.  It hasn't gone unnoticed or unappreciated.  Today, she continued on with her nice ways, inviting, and then footing the bill, for me to have lunch with her near where she works in downtown Minneapolis.  I could easily be wrong, but I think it was my first experience with a food truck.  The food truck experience wasn't what I imagined it would be, but I feel that way about most things in life, so my underwhelming food truck review really shouldn't carry much weight.

K was on her lunch break, so we didn't have a ton of time together.  That was perfectly alright with me, though, since I'm going for quality over quantity with this whole thing.  When meeting with a Facebook friend, I rarely have a script, specific plans, or rigid questions that I've prepared.  I just show up, meet with somebody, and see what happens.  If we've only got an hour, then we've only got an hour. And I enjoyed our hour.  As it had been with many of my Facebook friends before this project began, 60 minutes is probably more time than I had spent with K in all of our previous interactions combined, so I'm not complaining.

The best part of it all, though?  The ending.  Not because I desperately wanted to get away from her and / or find the nearest urinal, but because, less than two minutes after we'd parted ways, K sent me a message.  Five simple words.  To her, they might have just been something you say after you've met with somebody for lunch.  Good manners, perhaps.  To me, though, they made me think that, yeah, people may actually care about what I'm doing and that the Facebook friends I'm meeting up with aren't having a terrible time while I'm happily oblivious.  Today, those five words meant the world to me.

My second road trip of this adventure ended four or five days earlier than I thought it would.  I was fine with that, perhaps even gleeful, but it also meant that I was back in Minnesota with a pretty empty calendar.  My solution?  Post about it on Facebook and do a bit of not-so-subtle begging. Well, it worked.  Though I was left with no pride, I did scrounge up quite a few invitations to meet, four of which were from people that lived in Minnesota.  Suh-weeeeeet.  So I picked the one closest to me, sent her a message, then waited to see if I needed to move on to the next-closest person to me.  Happily, I did not.

K, my rather new-ish and unknown Facebook friend, brought some muscle with her this morning, just in case things went sour.  So did I.  Altogether, the six of us met up at a south Minneapolis coffee shop that didn't mind if we spent a couple of hours taking up a prime corner table while not spending much money.  I might have felt guilty, except that when I ordered a large decaf, they simply gave me the cup and pointed me to their coffee pots.  Pour my own coffee?  Oh, the injustice. And, I couldn't even find any cocoa powder!  It was truly a small miracle that I made it through my day.

I've given some thought to the best way to discuss this, but I'm actually less confident in my approach to this topic now than I was an hour ago.  So please bear with me.  I feel like I'm more successful than my parents were.  Note that I am not attempting to claim that I am better, but simply that I have been able to achieve more of the things in life that would make others see me as successful.  Typing this makes me feel . . . weird, but perhaps it shouldn't.  From my perspective, it speaks more to my parents' role in creating decent children than it does to my decision-making, work ethic, or anything else that people often see as the pathways to success.  Really, I may have just lucked into my successes by being born at the right time, in the right place, and to the right parents.  I've got four siblings and, as an average, I think we are better off than our parents.  But to me, this is a testament to them.  While they weren't perfect, they must've done something to get us to this point, whether intentional or not.

Here's where I get even more uncomfortable and, I hope that I don't piss anybody off, at least not with this post.  From my very limited interaction with K, I think that perhaps her children are on the path to become more of a traditional definition of successful than she was.  Again, this feels weird to state.  It's as though it could be seen as a slight toward K.  But really, I see it as a huge compliment. I'm not a parent, but I would imagine that one of the goals as a parent is to see your kids happy and, even more so, to see them be more successful than you.  If that's the case, or maybe even if it's not, K has to be ecstatic in regard to her children.  I only met two of them this morning, but wow, they really have it together.  While speaking with them, I kept thinking, "Why wasn't I more like them when I was in high school?"  If you like to bet but don't like long odds, put your money on them.  K's kids were crazy good.

So that's where I'm at now.  I hope that my thoughts have not have ruffled any feathers, either with my Facebook friend, my parents, or the general populace.  I also hope that people feel free to provide me with feedback.  Like I said, I have not yet produced any offspring, so, as with most things, I embrace the possibility that I have no idea what I'm talking about.  But in my current naive and ignorant state, I can't help but think of a day 30 years from now.  Maybe my wife and I will have a daughter, maybe she'll be awesome, maybe she'll be more successful than both of us combined. And maybe, just maybe, there'd be nothing in the world that could possibly make us any prouder.