I never thought I would receive an origami love letter. Maybe it was because it had never even crossed my mind that someone could give you a love letter in the form of an origami shape. It’s a pretty simple concept actually. You just write a love letter and fold it into a cool shape. But as you know, origami is no joke and requires you to actually know how to do origami. I tried it when I was a kid. I was terrible at it. I was never any good at drawing, or painting, or coloring inside the lines for that matter. I remember my Mom reminding of that fact and I thought she was exaggerating a little bit. She took out some old coloring books that I had used. Winnie the Pooh. Oh yes, my favorite. She then proceeded to open up the book, and there was all the evidence she would ever need. It was a page with Christopher Robin and Winnie the Pooh on it and I had simply just taken a brown crayon and scribbled over the whole page. There was no regard for the lines in the coloring book, and I had used only one color for the whole page. I basically scribbled over the whole page with one color and moved on to the next one. Wow. That says a lot. Can you say A.D.H.D.?! My Mom said that I would take about 2 minutes to color in about 10 pages, then say I was all done and move on to the next thing. Apparently, I had no interest in coloring, and no respect for boundaries.

Sometimes I would use a few different colors but would be equally as sloppy. Sometimes you could see I tried a little bit, but it was still terrible. The more I think about it, the more I can come to a reasonable conclusion. I knew I was no good at coloring, or drawing, so instead of trying really hard and ending up with a sub-par piece of work, I just made it so terrible that it was evident I put in no effort. So, essentially, you couldn’t really judge me on how bad it was because I didn’t even try. I was clever even at that young age. I basically forfeited my coloring from early on so I could spent my time getting better at something else that came more naturally to me. Why work at something that I clearly had no natural ability at? Why not focus on my strengths so I could excel at something else?

Anyway, the same thing with origami. Not for me. I was awful at it. It still amazes me to this day that people can be so precise with things like origami, or painting, or damn it, even coloring! My Mom and my sister Margot are great artists. My sister Danielle is very neat and organized. My dad, well, he is very good at making a lot of money, and being a great business man. All skills that I do not possess at this point. Well, at least I can play drums and guitar I guess, which none of them can do. I mean, I can look to every member of my family and see several qualities that I don’t possess. That’s what makes the world so great. And origami. That makes the world great too.

So I kind of lied in my first sentence of this section. Well, it’s not a totally lie. I did receive an origami love letter. But I was not the first to receive the origami love. My infamous, and more handsome, roommate at the time (Tyler Radford) was the original recipient. This all began in the winter of 2003/2004, when Tyler went out with a few of our friends, and met a few lovely Asian ladies in Allston, Massachusetts. You see we lived in the town right next door called Brookline. This apartment (4 Davis Ave) was my first apartment after college and definitely was a nice place. It is far nicer than where I live now, you can be assured of that. Anyway, Tyler was working on 100% travel at the time, so during the work week he was in California, and on the weekends he was back in Brookline, MA. So, one day during the week I see an origami letter (in the form of a flower or something) taped on our mailbox at the apartment. I grab it and bring it upstairs. It is a letter to Tyler. And it was ridiculous! It was a full-fledged love letter, in semi-broken English, that said how beautiful Tyler was and how in love this girl was with Tyler. I must say, this letter laid it on pretty thick.

I called Tyler immediately, because I hadn’t even heard the story about him meeting any such Asian Origami makers. Tyler begins to laugh hysterically and said it was a girl he had met last weekend out and about and that he got her number. I think they had spoken maybe once since then and she had asked for his address. Now, Tyler definitely gets off on this type of stuff. He loved the fact that it was origami, and he loved the fact that it was a ridiculous love letter, and he was even happier that the English barely made sense at times. In all honesty, it was incredible. And I know Tyler still has this note. To think that a girl would actually be this in love with someone after meeting someone one time for a few hours and speaking with them once on the phone… well, this is absolutely ludicrous! Outrageous, in fact. It was beyond all reason. And that’s why we both loved it. To this day we still talk about this letter. I must have read it to him about 5 times over the phone. We couldn’t get enough of this situation. And believe me, this is not the end of it at all. How could it be? A girl this in love. Unstoppable!

Now before I move forward I want to set something straight. The fact that the note was in broken English was just a fact of the matter. To be honest, it simply amazes me that anyone can speak more than one language. I can only speak one language. English. I took French in high school and Spanish in college and I can barely even form a sentence in either language. It’s pathetic how unilingual I am. Obviously, this girl’s first language was not English. I think it was Korean. Either way, I give her a ton of credit that she even knows how to write in another language at all, never mind English, which is a tough language to learn. And she got her point across, believe me. Tyler can actually speak Spanish too, I feel like he learned this to impress women, and interact with any Spanish speaking woman he wanted to, and it actually has worked for him, that bastard. So he is bi-lingual. Me, nope. Speaking of people who speak English, let’s talk about Germany. Every time I go to Germany I try to speak to the cashiers in German to order food. It is 100% obvious right when I open my mouth that I can‘t speak German, not to mention Americans stick out like a sore thumb anyway. “You want a cheese sandwich?”. “Yes”. At least humor me with a response in German at least one time! Everyone in Germany speaks English, some better than I do. It’s amazing.

Apparently, they learn English from like first grade on. I wish they did that in the U.S. I mean, when I started learning French I was about 12 or 13. I think I had just grown my first whisker on my face. I was awkward, just had to start using deodorant, probably just had my first nocturnal emission, was as skinny as a rail, had a ridiculous bowl cut, the list goes on and on. And I can tell you that the last thing I wanted to do was learn another language from scratch at that point. People were beginning to devalue school at that point anyway, and I certainly wasn’t going to be gung-ho about a foreign language elective. I wanted to be cool… or sort of cool at least. The last thing I wanted to do was geek out in the language lab. Now I wish I had. It would be sweet to be able to rip off some French or Spanish. It would make me look sophisticated. And the ladies love sophistication.

Now, let’s get back to the Asian ladies and my Brookline apartment because I am very fond of this next part. About 2 days later from the original origami note (we got the note on a Tuesday, so this is Thursday) I hear a knock on the door. Since it is a Thursday, Tyler is in California, but I am home and my roommate at the time and current roommate now (Steven DiRamio) is home as well. I open the door. Two lovely Asian girls are standing there, well, not literally lovely, but sort of cute. “Tyler?”. “Ummm, Tyler isn’t here right now… But. Yeah. I remember now. He is out getting some dinner but should be back in about an hour or so”. “Oh”. They turned around to go. “Hey,” I said, “Why don’t you both come in and wait for him with us?”. “Just tell him we stopped by”. “Come on, don’t be shy, we’re just as nice as Tyler, I promise. Why would he live with us if we weren’t? Come on in and hang out!”. They looked at each other for a second and smiled at each other. And then they came on in. I can’t believe it actually worked!

So they sit down on the couch. And we begin to talk with them. I offer them a drink and we all have a decent conversation. About 20 minutes later, they begin to get a little skeptical that Tyler will actually be back to the apartment in the 40 minutes that I had promised. So I told them I would call Tyler. So I texted him and told him to say he would be back in about 40 minutes because the Asian girls were at the apartment. Eager to be a part of the shenanigans, he picked up my call which came a few moments later. “What is going on?!” he asked me. “Hey man, your friends are here and they just wanted to talk to you to make sure you were gonna be back when you said you would be…”. He begins to laugh. “You want to speak with him?” I asked his lady friend. She says ‘Yes’ and I hand her the phone. They begin to talk and Tyler assures her that he will be back to the apartment in not too long of a time. Now, obviously the kid is in San Jose, California and there is no way he is coming back until Friday. But he did a great job playing it off. I took the phone back when she was done with him. “This is great. Work some magic Najarian!” he said to me and then we hung up.

Now, in our apartment in Brookline, Steve and I had accumulated some instruments to jam on. Steve had just started playing drums and he had a set of bongos that he would play percussion with. The bongos were at the apartment, his drum set was not. I had a starter Yamaha acoustic guitar and a $14 electric guitar plugged into a 25 Watt Peavey Amp that I would crank with my Boss ME-50 pedal. I still have the Boss pedal, which I love (despite much ridicule), but that Peavey Amp broke a long time ago, and that electric guitar has been retired. The acoustic, however, is still kicking. It has seen better days but it has a damn cool sound. I still dig that too.

So, on this particular Thursday night, our two guests pointed out that we had a bunch of musical gear. They asked what we played and we told them. They then made the mistake of asking us to play them a song. At first we gently refused but they really wanted us to play. I thought this might keep them there a bit longer. So I picked up my acoustic and I began to play. “This is a love song for you 2 lovely ladies…”. I stopped pretty quickly. My guitar was way out of tune.

So, I’m not sure how many of you play guitar out there and can tune a way out of tune guitar. At this point I had just started playing and I could not. I mean, we are talking so out of tune that every string is not matching up. I couldn’t even tell which string was even close to in tune to begin with! Which means I didn’t have a reference point to even begin to tune the guitar. In addition, tuning didn’t come to me immediately, it took some time to get it down really well, to know which frets to match up, to know which string was lower or higher. It confused me. And at this point of my tuning career I was useless. So I floundered around for a bit to try to tune it and just couldn’t get it done. My guitar tuner (which tells you if your string is on the right note) had just run out of batteries and I didn’t have replacement batteries. To be honest, I would use that tuner most of the time to get my guitar in tune anyway. I had never really even attempted to tune the guitar by ear at this point. I thought about plugging my electric in but didn’t want to lose the love song moment. So I just bit the bullet and started playing this wretchedly out of tune guitar. We are talking out of tune. Noticeably. Terribly. Outrageously. I, to this day, do not think I have suffered through playing a more out of tune guitar for a whole song. Actually, I know I haven’t. But Steve and I just went with it. He started playing along with his bongos and I started singing about how beautiful they were when I saw them at the door and how glad I was that they stayed. I sang about how one of them loved Tyler and commented on how well dressed the other one was. They actually seemed to like it. I honestly don’t know how this mesh of sounds could have pleased anyone’s ears.

After the “love song” it had been a little over an hour that the ladies had been at the apartment. They again began to wonder about Tyler. So we called him again. I once again sent him a lead in text for him to tell his lady that he would be yet another hour! So the same process went down. Tyler was getting a huge kick out of this. And we began a long text exchange so I could give him a play by play of what was happening. He started giving me advice even. ‘Take the other one for a tour of the apartment’. So I did. I showed her all 3 bedrooms, the 2 bathrooms, the kitchen, explained who lived in each room, etc, etc. I then took her out into the hallway to show her the washer and dryer that we used. During this whole time Steve was holding down the fort and talking to Tyler’s girl, allowing me time to work my magic, or something like that. Anyway, when we were out at the washer and dryer I all of a sudden felt the ‘inspirato’ and moved in for a smooch with our fair Asian maiden. And she kissed me back. So we kissed for a little bit. I couldn’t believe it. This random girl who had just come to our door with a girl who had met Tyler just one time and had profusely professed her love for him. This situation was getting more and more ridiculous. Maybe this girl felt left out that she didn’t have a ‘Tyler’ of her own and I would fit the bill for the time being. Or maybe I am just that smooth… hmmm. Probably the first scenario. Either way, I was sitting at home in my wind pants and then an hour and a half later I was kissing a girl I had never met, still in my wind pants, still at home. I felt proud about that. Thank you Tyler.

After my short little make-out session, we came back in and hung out for a little bit longer. By this time I had texted Tyler and told him to say that he wasn’t going to be home for another 2 hours and that he was sorry he couldn’t make it back to see his girl. It had been about 2 hours that these girls were at our house when we finally called Tyler for the last time. He played it perfectly again, apologized to his girl, and said that they would have to hang out another time. He said thanks for the surprise visit and hoped they had fun with his roommates. He was a pro. The girls seemed satisfied with that and I apologized again and told them I really thought he was going to be back an hour ago. They said that they had fun anyway and since it was around 10PM at this point, they took off and went back home.

I never did find out where they lived. Neither Tyler, Steve, nor I ever saw them again. But we did receive another origami note a few days later. And it was in the form of a boat or something, a little more elaborate than the original flower letter. And lucky for us Tyler keeps a lot of random stuff. There was no way in hell he was going to throw this gem away. Take a look through the pictures of this book and you might find my origami love letter. It is quite beautiful I must say…