Good Impressions

My anonymous favorite little Indian girl had the following suggestion:
"i see only one solution: we should become strippers. for reputable bars (with health insurance). that way we stay in shape, make money, only work at night, and are free during the day to explore other career options."

Sweet.

This is going to be another brief episode of the who-am-I variety.

Yesterday we played a great game of First Impressions, where we all got to share memories of meeting each other. Everyone's first impression of me is as follows:

It was about 5:30 AM at JFK International. I was sitting at the gate with everyone who had shown up already, about 2/3 of the group. I was silently reminding myself to not come on too strong. I didn't want to scare anyone away before they got to know me. Easy, no?

...And then Ashley whipped out the Scrabble tiles. I jumped out of my seat, eager to play Speed Scrabble. By then I had noticed that no one else was quite as excited as I was. Oh well. Hi, my name is Robin, I like Scrabble. I figured my first impression was already made, so I passed around a bag of homemade tofu jerky and the latest issues of Popular Science, Scientific American, Glamour, and Us Weekly.

Last night, around the campfire, we were speculating about where we'd all be in five years. Somehow, I turned into a victim of a short but humorous game of Never-Have-I-Ever, which quickly went from "Never have I ever been Jewish" and "Never have I ever gone to Brown" to "Never have I ever been part of a literary fraternity", "Never have I ever sat around in a bathing suit for two weeks straight", "Never have I ever told stories about wild nights playing Scrabble", "Never have I ever had wild nights playing Scrabble", "Never have I ever eaten two pints of Ben & Jerry's in one sitting", and "Never have I ever not done laundry for [mumble mumble]." They know me so well. (If you don't know the general idea of Never-Have-I-Ever, ask the nearest thirteen-year-old.)

So, who am I? Can I be summed up with 100 lettered wooden tiles? In a few flavors of ice cream?

I think this is one of those questions where the journey is more important than the destination.

Then I discovered that Robert Frost's poem, which is called The Road Not Taken, not The Road Less Traveled, is not as inspiring as I remember it being. It's actually pretty depressing. Also, the rhyme scheme bothers me.

TWO roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;	5
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,	10
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.	15
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.