We fell asleep in our three-day clothes,
one tilted head on the other...

- Vienna Teng, Flyweight Love

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-- "We'll fix this lab!"
"Looks like you and me gotta, Christa!"

...

"It's like you have a Robin to your Batman!  Or... ube ice cream to your Halo-Halo!"

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How do two people meet each other?

More specifically, what happens in that transition between "strangers" and "lovers"? When two people first make eye contact, and, unbeknownst to them, lay their eyes upon the person that they would someday marry? When do two people become two independent souls in a world full of people, only to somehow end up absolutely intertwined with each other?

It's a strange feeling for me to have questions like these. Primarily, it’s because I feel so oddly detached from my own daydreams. As a single woman (albeit, as you may have read, a single woman with a more complex love life than she'd like), you’d think I would take these questions more personally. All things considered, maybe I should feel a little more lovesick about this. I’ll admit -- at times, I can feel quite lovesick. Yet, not about this. When my emotions reign free, it’s typically unrelated to this perplexing question. How do two people meet each other? When it comes to this, a larger part of me wonders about it in the same way that a scientist wonders about the mysterious role of ORMDL-3 in asthma pathology. Part of me wonders in the same way a bioengineer wonders about the single-cell behavior of transfused blood cells versus host blood cells.

How do two people meet each other?

I have been wondering about this ever since I was asked that million-dollar question out in Georgia, almost a lifetime ago. Out of everything that we said during our heavy-hearted conversation, I’m surprised by which sentence ultimately stuck with me the most:

“You really don’t think you’ll meet someone else?”

We were sitting on his bed in Georgia, and we had just talked about dating other people – he gingerly tiptoed around his great ambition to “have fun,” while I tried to convey that, in contrast, I’m personally not interested in dating around. I’m at that point in my life where I feel like I’m done playing games, so I’m not spending my time actively seeking someone else to be involved with; I can be fully content on my own, so my current priorities involve finding neither a husband nor a piece of ass. After all, I was with him because I liked him, not just because I wanted to be with someone. (Edit: Reading this post over, I think it's worth apologizing that my wording sounds like absurdly self-righteous, victimizing logic.  I'm still deciding if it was just my wording that's absurd.)

“It may be hard to believe at times,” I laughed, bittersweetly, “but I am, inherently, a good girl.”

He took my explanation as a lack of personal belief that I’ll ever find someone else. A reasonable misinterpretation, but it resulted in a curious question. The simple, sincere inquiry of, “You really don’t think you’ll meet someone else?”

I can half-shyly admit that the concept is not at all foreign to me. You meet someone, you flirt, and you hit it off from there. When that's over, you move on. Easy peasy. During my Crazy Extroverted Girl phase, I practically had it down to a science.  Yet, that singular question completely transformed “dating” for me into something strange and bizarre.

For starters: if I were to gamble on the claim, “Someday, I will date someone,” or even on the statement, “Someday, I will marry someone,” it is actually quite safe to go all-in on either of these bets. Looking everywhere and seeing little children all around, seeing people holding hands, seeing wedding rings on fingers – it’s actually enough to extrapolate that at some point (when armed with at least good hygiene and some degree of gung-ho steadfastness), it is entirely feasible that everyone can find someone else to call their own. Moreover, it is completely reasonable to suppose that someday, one of these people will be me.

Yet, it’s that exact scenario that strikes me as incredibly strange. When people believe they’re going to meet “The One,” is it a case of faith, or is it a case of treating love as a slot machine? Is it belief in Cupid, or is it belief that the ball will land on red in a game of roulette?

What is a gamble on love? What is a gamble on attraction, even? What about it makes it so simple that the question of whether I think I’ll “meet someone” can be treated with such nonchalance, to be stated so matter-of-factly? Essentially, the bet is this: someone out there -- who is currently a complete stranger, who is only one person out of billions of people -- will somehow cross paths with me, and we will become completely smitten with each other. Somewhere out there, there is a total stranger who will someday be the father of my children.

Clearly, this is a gamble completely unlike getting $10 back on a $5 bet. This is a gamble on getting butterflies in my tummy for someone who is essentially nonexistent. This is a gamble that somewhere in the world, there is a nameless person who I’ll someday want to spend the rest of my life with. When spelled out like this, having faith that I’ll “meet someone” just sounds completely bizarre. Nearly every component of the nuances that eventually lead to love – they’re all extremely dynamic and unpredictable. I don’t get how people gamble so readily on such an indefinable, intangible idea. I mean, I’ve personally experienced the steps to love, and I still don’t get it. And, yet -- I, too, would still go all-in on that bet, every time. It’s mind-boggling how something so complex can be so innocently summed up in the statement, “You really don’t think you’ll meet someone else?”

So what is a gamble on love?

There are times where I spend a lot of time wondering about this. Then, I would realize that my introverted, reflective daydreams start going in a stupid direction when my mind finds the tangent, “On that note, how do penguins meet each other? All they do is make eye contact with each other, give each other rocks as presents, then somehow pair-bond for life…”

Then I think, “This is getting really dumb.”

And it’s always that same tangent. Somehow, it’s never about prairie voles, swans, or other species that also demonstrate incredible pair-bonding. It’s always penguins. And then I stop thinking about the topic entirely until next time.

Kind of like how after just blogging about this topic for long enough, I am now thinking, “How DO penguins meet each other?” and am now Googling it extensively.

…. Ok I have to stop writing, I’m gonna read up on penguin pair-bonding now

</anticlimactic end to post>

“I used to feel so alone in the city.  All those gazillions of people and then me, on the outside.  Because how do you meet a new person?  I was very stunned by this for many years.  And then I realized, you just say, 'Hi.'  They may ignore you.  Or you may marry them.  And that possibility is worth that one word.” - Augusten Burroughs

The San Diego mantra. I've mentioned it on my Tumblr and my Facebook, but it's relevant enough that I thought it was time to etch it here, too.

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conversation with an undergrad on 11/7:

-- "Good news! So I've now been working here for exactly one month. I guess I'm not going to get fired!"
"I don't think that was ever the plan, Christa."
-- "I'M STILL STOKED, YAY"

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There's a fine balance between being alone and being lonely.

For me, that balance is now incredibly salient. As a working girl in the big city of San Diego, most of my loved ones are now hundreds, even thousands, of miles away. It's something that I've read about in Young Adult novels. It's something that I've watched about in romantic comedies. Of course, moving somewhere and starting a new life -- this is an enormously common occurrence. At some point, it happens to most people, if not everyone. It's just now my turn to take a stroll down the catwalk.

Now that I'm in the big grown-up world of careers and manifestations of life goals, I've found that relocating for a job puts a lot more stress on that social balance than when relocating between schools or when moving out to college. When it comes to education, like when I moved to Sacramento for high school or moved to Merced for undergrad, school all but guarantees that you'll be thrown into a pond full of other fish to meet and swim with. You are constantly surrounded by classmates going through identical learning experiences and share similar goals. Even when I was extraordinarily depressed and antisocial my first two years of college, I still met my would-be housemate in my General Chemistry laboratory class. I still met many people in a variety of classes and undergraduate clubs and societies. In fact, with group activities in most of my courses, sometimes it would even be hard not to meet people. It was my own personal shyness and my own preference of "uh do i feel like making friends or would i rather stare at the floor quietly" that dictated my interactions more than whether there was adequate opportunity. By the time that I reached that fledgling stage in my life where I made a complete 180 from "Anonymous Shy Girl That Only Wanted to Online Chat With Her Long Distance Boyfriend and Nothing Else" to "MAKE ALL THE FRIENDS," the tightly interwoven web of a small college community made it incredibly accessible to transform from a nameless introvert to a social butterfly.  Even after I came back down from that crazy extroverted girl to a more balanced, less forceful self that's more comfortable with her skin and her social attitude, my grounding and my lessons remained valid, and I developed some fantastic, genuine friendships.  Though it's been more than half a year since graduation and we're all relatively far from each other, we still try to regularly update one another, and we continue to plan our future reunions.

Now, conducting research as a lab manager in the huge city of San Diego, at an enormous campus compared to humble UCM, I feel like the social rule book has been thrown out. Even though I'm not a student, I still feel myself becoming one tiny fish in a giant ocean of people. It's hard to have a proper conversation when everything moves in waves and blurs. Where people come and go, faster than the blink of an eye. Moreover, although I walk down the streets surrounded by others, work itself feels like a social fishbowl. I mean, I'm developing a decent rapport with my co-workers, which is good. However, I'm primarily BFFs with my lab computer and my lab bench, who I hang out with Mon-Fri, 8am-5pm.

It's been two months since Jacob -- the last SURF intern standing -- left San Diego. In both of my summer experiences in San Diego, I was on a social island. After all, put 16 people from all over the country together in the same apartment complex, and of course it would be natural for us SURF interns to cling together, to explore San Diego as a unit. However, as summer came to an end, they all had to leave, while I stayed behind. The members of my undergraduate research dream team are now in Maryland, New Hampshire, Georgia.  Effectively, since then, my life in San Diego -- professionally and socially -- hit a giant Reset button. I've been living here for a total of nine months, and the sights and streets are increasingly familiar; I can tell you all about the cultures and reputations of the many distinct neighborhoods of San Diego, and I can take you to a bunch of great places to eat. Other than that, I feel like I've just arrived. As I wrote to a pen-pal online, "My work situation feels like I'm both very new and mildly old to San Diego at the same time."

Currently, I am now at that point where I am straddling the line between alone and lonely.

Many people at UC Merced knew me as some outgoing off-the-wall social beast, while others know me as a quaint, respectful listener. Empirically, the Myers-Brigg Type Indicator describes me as 51% extroverted and 49% introverted in the "attitude" domain. I was like, "ooo yeah that's cool bro," but over the past few months in San Diego, I've really started to get it. There are days where I'll gladly chat up any friendly person on the bus on my way to work, or I'll ask to sit next to someone at the food court and have small conversation throughout my hour-long lunch break. I'll be the one to ask, "Let's keep in touch!" to people that I sit next to in scientific seminars, and I'll be the one to provide my e-mail address or phone number before walking away. Then, there are other days where all I really crave is to be alone in my room and read a good book, or to go down Clairemont Mesa Blvd and enjoy a quiet, relaxing cup of hot boba tea. There are days where I only want the company of the sun as it sets behind the Pacific Ocean, and to enjoy the beauty of having a beach-side cliff all to myself.  I've been making acquaintances here and there, and I have two old friends in town (one from undergrad, and one from SURF) that I meet with at least once every few weeks.  And really, for the most part, that's been more than enough for me.

But it's hard to deny that I miss it. I miss it in increasing amounts. I miss coming home from school at the end of the day, and walking through the front door to the welcome sight of my housemates all having dinner together. I miss the choir of, "Hiiii, Christa!!!" ringing from the kitchen. I miss my best friends asking me all about the details of my day, and sharing with me the details of theirs, as I cook beef and broccoli on the stove. I miss how dinner could easily last three or four hours if we didn't take care in restraining our conversations, because we would just get so lost in talking about simply everything. I miss going over to the apartment in Merced that was essentially my second home, and every time I came over, its two residents would always scheme for a new prank to play on me as I rang their doorbell. I miss how we would just lounge around the living room, which was completely devoid of furniture except for a TV and a PlayStation 3, and I would do my homework while watching them take turns playing Skyrim.

Perhaps it's impatience more than anything else.  After all, from one perspective, it's been two long months since The Last Intern left.  In another light, it's been only two months since he left. I should be more patient, because honestly, it can take a long time to develop a foundation in a new city. But part of me feels like this off-kilter feeling to life may have started a long time ago, when I turned off that kitchen light in my Merced house for the last time, because that was the day that I moved away from Home. While San Diego, in so many respects, is the perfect city... it sure doesn't feel like home yet.

Some actual progress info: A lot of people have been giving me advice on how to spread my branches in this big city, and I've been taking them to heart. I'm definitely not a total wallflower (51% extroverted, ya boii), so I've been good on my word on testing out advice (one peculiar piece of advice even involves finding platonic friends on a dating site? what?), but it's definitely taking some trial & error in making them stick, especially in a town like San Diego.  Like, "Let's meet up for [lunch/dinner/dessert/boba/coffee]! Text me when you're free?" is always a gamble when I put the reins in the other person's hands, although I feel like the give-and-take balance is necessary after enough times that I coordinate meet-ups myself. Most of my memorable meet-ups in San Diego have been with old friends and co-workers, but nothing yet has really attached me to the SoCal natives except for 1-2 dinners with people that I meet on-campus or that I've met at Scripps.  So I'm not utterly hopeless, but I would not complain if the winds were to change.  Oh well, there's time yet!

I may not feel lonely quite yet (and hopefully I'm not going to continue going down that path for excruciatingly long), but man, I would sure like to start turning this great city into home!