I think it was in the early months of 1996. I was a junior in college. Childhood friend Sandy and I were hanging out in another family friend’s living room during one of our multi-family get-togethers that our parents used to have with their fishing buddies. She was admiring a pearl ring I wore on my right ring finger. It was a one-month anniversary present from my first boyfriend, whom I’d gotten together with shortly after Christmas. Pearl is my birthstone (although I much prefer my alternate semi-precious birthstone of Alexandrite), and a white one was set in four yellow gold petals. Two tiny diamonds connected the petals to the band. Sandy was saying, “Wow, he must really like you. My mom says you can marry someone with a bad temper, or marry someone poor, or marry someone boring, but you should never marry someone cheap. Someone who’s cheap to you will make your life really, really bitter.” This was back in the day when Sandy started really taking to heart old Chinese proverbial advice from her mother about whom she should date because, at the ripe age of 20, anyone we dated seriously at that point is a potential husband. The irony, of course, is that 10 years later now, neither of us are married. And we’ve both swept through strings of men. Heck, we learned a lot about ourselves in the process of dating wrong people, though.

The fun part of this memory is what follows. I had to go pee, so I got off the couch and went to the restroom behind the living room. I closed the door behind me, then walked the length of the long restroom and sat on the toilet. The door was to my left. Suddenly, there was a bang as the door swung violently open and Sandy flew through the door into the restroom with an “Oof!”, stumbling. Then she paused, laughed, and ran out the door, slamming it behind her. I just sat there and looked down the length of the bathroom. What the heck just happened? When I left the restroom, I walked out to see her laughing hysterically on the couch. “Do you need the restroom?” I asked her.
“No!” she gasped in between gales.
“What happened?” I asked.
“I was just — *gasp* I was just — messing around *laugh laugh* — I was gonna pound on the door and say, ‘LET ME IN! LET ME IN!’ and mess around like you locked me out, but the door wasn’t closed and I fell in!”
HAHAHAHA!!!! Talk about a stupid practical joke/stunt backfiring and making you look stupid! I can just picture her sitting on the couch having this brilliant idea to be stupid, then walking around to the bathroom raising both fists to pound on the door, and then one pound and the door gives way and she falls in. HAHAHAHA!

Okay, you had to be there.