Surprise, Surprise (and Surprise)

I'm going through my notebooks tonight as I prepare a writing workshop that starts Wednesday. (The other one I'm teaching this spring began on Saturday; I'm teaching a lot these days! I live in The Condo That Teaching Built!) I came across an exercise I devised exactly ten years ago: Write down three surprises from the last two days, then write about one of them for two pages.

On a separate page is a list of my surprises, which I must have written down to see if I could come up with three of my own -- to see if it was in fact doable -- before giving the assignment to my students (though I'm pretty sure I didn't write the two pages; I was too busy for that even then!).

Here are my three surprises from that day in spring 1997:

1. How windy it was last night walking to S's.*
2. How long it had been since I'd spun around and gotten dizzy.**
3. How Andy Garcia still takes my breath away after having a picture of him on my wall all this time.***

*Funny I should come across this today, one of the windiest days in memory.
**I have no recollection of what I had done in the two days prior to writing this that entailed spinning around and getting dizzy; I do know that, ten years later, I have gotten extremely dizzy being spun around madly by a sadistic two-step leader.
***Andy Garcia still takes my breath away, though I no longer have that magazine photo of him with a dog that for a couple of years -- in my thirties, like an infatuated tween -- I kept taped to my kitchen wall. (I can't believe I just found the actual photo online, albeit a crappy version of it.)

Three surprises from April 14-16 2007:

1. I still have that forgotten blue V-neck sweater from the Gap that I never wear because it's not the right shade of blue for me. (I wore it today anyway.)
2. A friend told me last night that a guy I'd met at a party the previous weekend let it be known that he "liked" me. (Echoes of tweeniness again!) The surprise wasn't so much that he "liked" me per se; it was that what I'd wondered in the back of my mind as I talked to him turned out to be correct. (But he's partnered, and I'm not looking anyway.)
3. After being annoyed by an e-mail about our dogs from S -- my ex, and the one to whose house I was walking on that surprisingly windy night ten years ago -- I couldn't resist, later in the day, sending him a review of a movie that I knew he'd be interested in, and that we would have loved seeing together had it come out ten years ago. I didn't enclose a message, and he didn't reply. Neither of which was a surprise.