Confessions of a Cat-holic (178)

I had a feeling Bobby really paid attention to what I wore. Even though I was on a tight budget and could only afford brands like Gap or American Eagle and A&F, I still liked to shop in Manhattan. One brand that I particularly disliked was urban outfitters. They had a branch on Yale campus and I hated it so much, well because I hated Yale so much and this hatred against Yale was shared amongst the majority of Columbia. Yale didn't know what kind of a school they were in the hearts of the New Yorkers. Gay and sissy with ungrounded arrogance and white supremacist yet sexually open and sleazy attitudes. They felt no shame of having orgies on campus.

Bobby liked to talk to me about fashion and he knew what was on my mind. Urban outfitters and Anthropologie were different brands under the same mother company, Free People. Obviously, I preferred Anthropologie not just because it sounded better, it was more of my style anyways.

So he got me wondering about the anthropology classes offered at Columbia and so I took a few anthropology classes in sophomore year, such as the rise of civilization and introduction to Korean civilization. And now that I looked back, they were the classes I enjoyed the most, even though I had had reservations taking them worrying that my grades for humanities classes would be bad for a non native English speaker from Hong Kong with a STEM background. I kind of regretted not taking more classes offered by the college at the time. I was too concerned about my GPA.

Bobby understood women and he was such a romantic guy. He took me to watch a movie at the theatre once. It was my first Spider Man movie. That movie was the one with Tobey Maguire as Peter Parker. I really loved that movie. It was my first Marvel movie too. Now I could brag about how Peter Parker went to Columbia and was a physics major at the engineering school while working as a journalist downtown. He even drove me to Jersey to see the house of Peter Parker where it was filmed. So Peter Parker was a Columbia student from New Jersey, what a surprise! At least I could say Spider Man and Dr Strange were officially affiliated with my school when Edmond told me how Superman's daughter went to Yale. He'd better not share the same fate as Superman, we all knew what happened to him. Oh and Batman too.

Bobby said he wanted to take me to Brooklyn bridge when I was still exploring the city freshman year. I was of course pleasantly surprised to hear that, but then I declined his kind invitation because that was a little bit too much for platonic friends. I had never been to Brooklyn yet but Bobby implanted a seed in my brain that I would think of him every time when I saw one of the twenty one bridges of Manhattan. Chase 21? I could not believe that advertisement slogan by Stephen Fung about Manhattan Chase credit card by JP Morgan was gradually becoming my reality. I used to even imitate his American accent all day long in middle school.

To be honest, I didn't know how to start a relationship with Bobby. Should I have offered to creep into his bed and dress naked to seduce him? No, that was just not my style. But he stopped asking me out for dates some time after first semester of sophomore year. But I started to get closer to Eddie from then onwards. He finally talked to me on a personal level after my sophomore winter break. We were finally in the same classes in the same IEOR department after I finished all the mandatory core curriculum classes for freshmen. I accelerated to start taking IEOR electives at the start of sophomore year as opposed to junior year, so everyone thought that I was one of those hard core Singaporean accelerators (they all graduated college in less than three years with double majors).

Bobby never talked to me about other girls when I was with him, except for once. It was after we watched the Spider Man movie at Times Square. He mentioned something about a girl in my year. Her name was Joyce Hau. She went to a prep school, St Paul's School and she was originally from Hong Kong. She joined a few a cappella groups with her friend, Ashleigh Lau, also from Hong Kong in my year.