An Academic Athlete: Throwback Thursday: The D & D Edition

Today I will give you the D&D edition of Throwback Thursday. The date was May 19th, 2010--it was one of my best friend's 21st birthday. My friend, Molly, a few other girls, and I started the night out at a local Mexican restaurant where we had wonderful food and giant margaritas.

Molly enjoying her giant margarita while wearing her lovely 21 headband

After the Mexican food, we headed to the campus bars. We started at a bar called Brothers...if you went to a Big 10 school you might recognize the name, because there are several Brothers locations at various schools. Our friend Laura bought the group 2 shots each, one was a Bazooka Joe (tasted exactly like the bubble gum...), and the other was some delicious shot. Laura took the Bazooka Joe shot, but it was so disgusting that she spit it back into the shot glass. No more than 1 minute later, two of her friends walked in the bar to join us. One of them said, "Is this shot for me?" and grabbed the spit-up shot and took it before any of us could say anything...that, my friends, was Dustin. ha!

I ended up talking to him a little bit that night, but I had a boyfriend at the time, and the night was about Molly, so it was mostly just general introductions. The next time we saw each other was again at a bar (don't judge, it was college ha) with the same group of friends, and this time I talked to him quite a bit. He was about to leave for an internship with Penske Racing in Pennsylvania, which I thought was really cool, and we also spent a decent amount of time talking about my internship which was in the Product Testing department of a medical device company called MED Institute. We realized that we got along really well, and decided that we'd be friends. He left for Pennsylvania soon after, and we started casual texting each other. The summer passed by with us texting back and forth once in awhile, only seeing each other briefly with our main group of friends on July 4th, and all of a sudden school was back in session.

We had pretty much stopped texting completely at this point since I was feeling weird about texting him while I had a boyfriend (not that it was anything inappropriate, I just felt like we were getting a little too close). One day, my friend/roommate (Molly again!), threw a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend at our apartment. Dustin ended up coming with our friend Laura, and I was super annoyed that he hadn't told me he was coming...after all I thought we were friends (sort of? I guess we hadn't been talking, but I was still offended haha). I went up to him and asked him why he didn't tell me he was coming, and we talked for a bit, then I declared that we were kicking him out. It was in a joking fashion, and he was laughing the whole time, but I actually went around to the other roommates and asked if we could kick him out. We voted, and with a vote of 3-0-1 (Molly wouldn't vote, she stayed neutral), we kicked him out. He left with Laura and a few other people, but I realized at that point that I actually liked him a lot and I was offended because I wanted to be a part of his life and know what he was up to.

About a week later, I broke up with my boyfriend. I had been talking to D on and off, but hadn't told him I was going to break up with boyfriend because I wanted it to be a completely neutral decision. It was definitely sad, but I knew that I wasn't in it 100%, and that I wasn't being fair. D & I continued to text semi-frequently for a few more weeks, until I asked him why he hadn't asked me on a date yet. He said he wanted to make sure I was comfortable and immediately asked me to go out on a date with him. I had a really great time, and I pretty quickly realized that he was special. We had so much fun together, and he had all of the qualities that I think are important.

Halloween 2010...an amazingly fun night!

We became very close quickly, and we decided to take a trip to New York together for Christmas Break. His friend Anthony was also going to come, which took the pressure off a little bit. :) D's aunt used to own an apartment in New York City, very close to Central Park, and we were lucky enough to get to stay in it while we were there.

Us on the Brooklyn Bridge

We got to attend a filming of the Late Show with David Letterman

We watched the ball drop on New Years (although we were like 6 blocks away and could barely see it), and did lots of other fun things as well. After New York, Anthony headed back home, but D and I went to Washington D.C. He actually ended up getting sick, so we didn't get to do too much while we were there, but we did get to explore a little bit, and the road trip was a lot of fun. We continued to get closer and closer during the Spring semester, and eventually we decided to move to Chicago together (I had a job offer in the city, he was still looking for a job). Looking back, I guess it probably seemed like too soon to move in together, but I knew that he was my person and I wanted to be with him forever, so it made perfect sense to me.

While we lived in Chicago, we made friends and had fun times.