Oh. That came out of the blue.
“I wanted to let you know that I’m not avoiding your invitation,” Ryan said seriously.
I gulped, but suddenly had trouble swallowing the food I had in my mouth. “No, don’t worry about it. I know you probably have other plans,” I said as nonchalantly as possible.
“I just can’t commit to it right now. I wanted to let you know so that you didn’t misinterpret it as me not wanting to be there with you, because I’d like nothing more.”
“Oh,” I said, both surprised by his response and relieved as well.
“I’ve committed to going to a fundraiser for Children’s Hospital. It’s for … a good friend,” he explained. He tilted his head coyly. “Are you going to ask anyone else to the wedding?”
“No, I wasn’t planning on it,” I replied to his visible relief. “It’s almost easier that I go alone anyways. I have the whole extended family there. It wouldn’t be very fair of me to subject you, let alone anyone else, to all of that.”
He smiled. “I wouldn’t have minded,” he assured me. “Can I consider the invitation open-ended? I might be able to get out of my previous obligation, I just can’t commit right now.”
“Sure, of course,” I said and smiled back.
If there was any way for Ryan to have declined my invitation gently without hurting my feelings, he had successfully done it. Not only was I okay with him not being able go with me, but I was flattered by his explanation.
I could see my old apartment from my vantage point and pointed to it. “I used to live about half a block up this street. I moved here right after graduating the UW and lived here for a few years. I would’ve loved to have bought a condo here or a small house, but there were none available in my price range at the time.”
“I used to run down here all the time when I was in school. I lived over on Ravenna,” Ryan said. Ravenna was only a few blocks away. “I shared a house there with a couple of guys my senior year.”
“What were you like in college?” I asked, curious about his younger years.
He was happy to talk about college. He listened to grunge music in the early 90s and went to clubs like the Crocodile Café to hear bands like Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Pearl Jam. I jokingly told him he was a time capsule straight out of the early Seattle grunge music scene. He pretended to look wounded, but laughed.
Ryan’s dad paid for school, books, and room and board, but made him earn his spending money. He did manual labor jobs during the summers, and worked at the computer lab during the school year. He remembered the days when he could go a whole weekend on just twenty bucks. Even though he grew up in Magnolia, it made him appreciate money and the value of a dollar.
I had always thought of kids that grew up in Magnolia as privileged, private school brats. Magnolia was only a five minute hop from Queen Anne, tucked away in its own little inlet directly north of Elliott Bay. It was an extremely protected upper class neighborhood in the northwest part of the Seattle limits. Apparently his parents hadn’t spoiled him, though.
With two girls in college at the same time, my folks helped out as much as they could, but both Anna and I had to take out some loans and worked through college to help pay for any personal extras and entertainment. I had great memories from college, though. The nerd that I was, I joined a business club at the UW business school, and that’s where I met the bulk of my college friends, including Andrew. I decided not to mention that part to Ryan.
Ryan graduated from the UW in ‘95. He explained that most of the jobs that existed today in technology didn’t exist when he was in college. We were both blown away by the knowledge that the burst of technology that we now knew as a normal part of our lives, really didn’t take off until Portals ‘95 came out. He thought being at MS would’ve been cool back then, but he went straight to the Bay Area after graduation to start what he thought would be a long investment career. I mentioned that I was in my last year of Junior High in 1995, which made him cringe.
He got all corporate genius on me for a little while, talking about the advances of social media in our culture and speculating where it would be in a few years. I only thought of it from the perspective of having a Facebook account, which I really only used to post my vacation photos, my arrival at a trendy restaurant, and to satisfy my curiosity about what my friends were up to. I wasn’t much of a Twitter user, but what MS professional didn’t have a LinkedIn account? That was the extent of my social media usage, though. He encouraged me to get more engaged with understanding the social media benefits for marketing and how it could be used to build stronger customer relationships. He said this would help me in my job.