Back in the distant past (Fall 2007), I was a supplemental instructor (SI)1 for Chemistry 475 (Quantum Mechanics and Spectroscopy). I was also far too cool for school and fancied myself an iconoclast, so when I had to go to a training for new SIs, I decided that it was pointless indoctrination and I shouldn’t have to take it seriously in any way2; I got some Dr Pepper and surreptitiously replaced ~20% of the volume with some sort of alcoholic liquid and tried to have fun.
During the training, there was a “meet other SIs” portion. I decided to use this as an opportunity to mess with people by introducing myself with outlandish opinions or assumptions to gauge their reactions. I don’t recall most of what I said, but people generally walked away mildly baffled. However, there was one person I already knew there — a girl from the Chemistry Club by the name of Tyren who I had always gotten along with but didn’t know terribly well. Of course she was not to be spared, so I went over to her and said something along the lines of, “Oh hey, I know you. I’ve been meaning to ask, why are you bothering to get a degree or pursue academics when you’re clearly just here to meet a guy to marry and settle down with?”3
Unlike the deer-in-headlights responses that I got from others, Tyren’s response was immediate and clear, “I don’t think I’ll ever get married.” Naturally, I replied, “Oh, I could get you to marry me.”
Since she was obviously the wittiest and coolest person at the training, we spent most of the rest of it hanging out (though it’s less clear why she was hanging out with me, especially as the Dr Pepper bottle emptied). By the end of the night I said, “OK, are you ready to marry me?” and her answer was something like, “Definitely not.”
This could have been the end of things, but then Tyren was elected treasurer of the Chemistry Club. As it happened, I was the outgoing treasurer, so we had to meet up for me to show her what one does as treasurer.4 During our enthralling conversation about the bookkeeping practices of a small on-campus organization, I made various attempts to convince her to marry me and was rebuffed each time; finally, after we had wrapped up, I got down on one knee and said, “One more thing. Tyren, will you marry me?” This time, her response was “Where’s the ring?”
The next day, I was bored during office hours (no one ever attended them, at least not for that class), and I decided that I should probably have a ring for the next time I saw Tyren. I went online and found a pattern for an origami box, and I made three of them and stacked them together to make a small ring-box. Then I crafted an origami ring and inserted it into the ring box. I added a note that said, “Tyren, marry me now?” and put it in her mailbox in the supplemental instruction center.
A few weeks later I hadn’t heard from her so I asked if she had seen anything interesting in her mailbox and she said, “What? No one ever checks those things.” I exhorted her to go check it, in case there was something interesting inside, but then I never heard anything more from her about it. From what she told me later, when she went to her mailbox, she found the ring box and thought, “I don’t know how to continue this joke. You’ve bested me.” Apparently when she showed her mom the ring box, her mom said, “You’re going to marry him.”
And that is the story of how I first proposed to Tyren. Much more romantic than the story of when I actually proposed to her (which did not involve a ring but did involve a cost-benefit analysis), but without quite the same satisfying ending. Although this didn’t directly result in us getting together, it did lay the groundwork for our later whirlwind romance, which is a story for another time.
Footnotes: Link to heading
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Basically a teacher’s assistant (TA) but without grading responsibilities, you just had to have done well in the class you were going to SI for and then you would attend it again and hold office hours for students who wanted some extra guidance. ↩︎
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I’m sure my younger self would be disappointed to learn that I did not in fact grow into an old curmudgeon but rather someone who recognizes the value of sincerity, and that a job well done is its own reward. ↩︎
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Hopefully this is absolutely clear, but in case it is not, the joke here is that some people actually do think this kind of thing, and I found this to be such an obviously laughable way of thinking that I was confident that no one would mistake it for my actual opinion, thus allowing me to play the fool at the expense of people who actually feel this way. Obviously I also chose someone to say it to who no one would think this about, since even 20-year-olds have some semblance of tact. ↩︎
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There is some disagreement on when this exactly happened. I thought it happened on some later day. Tyren says that immediately after the training we didn’t have anything better to do and so we went back to the Chem Club. The main difference in these accounts is my degree of inebriation during the meeting. ↩︎