Our Story
As one might expect at MIT, the story begins in a freshman physics recitation...
Fall 2001: Freshman physics was a great class, except for our lofty recitation leader, Professor Stanley Kowalski, who had a favorite student, a certain Thomas Coffee. Thomas was in both my math and physics classes, and in each class, to my utter annoyance, he would be called on to answer the "challenging" questions. The boy wore ridiculously big glasses that covered half his face, and walked around with his pants pulled up way above his waist, while always hunched over his over-sized fanny pack, in which he carried, among a myriad of other rarely useful items, his camera and calculator, each in individually packaged zip-lock bags. Thus I trust you'll understand as I say, he was the last person on Earth I would have ever imagined ending up with.
Spring 2003: In sophomore spring term, I got a call in my dorm room: "Thomas, this is Shannon's friend. She wants you to come over to the Burton Conner talent show right now." Who? Whose friend? Shannon? The girl who had sat across from me in Unified for a year and never said a word? I never found the talent show, but I did remember my first call from a girl at MIT, who I found out months later was Lynn Kamimoto.
My friend Lynn said to me one day, "Shannon, are there any nice guys in the Aero/Astro department? Introduce me to some." Being facetious, I named off the silliest person I could think of. Unfortunately, she took it seriously and during our Burton Conner talent show, picked up my phone and called up this Thomas Coffee from Aero/Astro, whom she had never met before. Although slightly embarrassed, I couldn't help bursting into laughter at the thought of what must have been a very confused Thomas Coffee.
Spring 2004: By this time, our relationship was strictly business: we had somehow become the sole remaining officers of the MIT Mars Society. For the next year, we organized a national space conference called MarsWeek 2004. Several friends pitched in to help (and thus was Nicholas Hoff appointed our High Chancellor), but it was Shannon who made most of my wild dreams come true. On the night before opening, as the two of us printed and stapled name tags and programs till dawn in the Building 37 Athena cluster, I thought to myself that here was someone I'd want to have by my side when the going gets tough. I asked my dad, "Whatever can I do to thank her?"
A few days after the tiring MarsWeek conference, I received a vase of flowers in my mailbox. Who in the world? It must've been sent to the wrong person, I thought as I fumbled around for the tag. "You've been a foundation and an inspiration. Thanks for everything. Thomas Coffee." Whoa, a little over the top, but a nice kid, he was. As I took it up the stairs to my room, my neighbors Lynn and Sam excitedly expressed their musings about the gallant Mr. Coffee. What silliness! Every time I saw them, they wouldn't stop asking how the chivalrous Mr. Coffee was doing. My face was red for days from embarrassment.
Fall 2004: The flower incident got me thinking about the general problem of women, and I turned to socionic type theory to shed some theoretical light on my confusion. This response alone was probably enough to diagnose me as type INTj, and render me hopeless in the world of dating. But after some success classifying my friends and predicting their relationships, I felt determined to search for my theoretical counterpart, the complementary ESFj. As Shannon and I staffed the ticket booth for our next giant space conference, SpaceVision 2004, we had a four-hour argument over the merits of my carefully researched approach to lifelong happiness.
The boy was hopeless. He had a theory -- yes, a theory! -- of what it takes for people to be compatible. His obvious lack of experimental data was both amusing and pitiable. Yet, this somehow appeared in my diary: "Thomas Coffee is the kind of person who I would marry, but never ever date. Perhaps because we are both INTj. Go figure."
Suspiciously, fall term of senior year found us in the same graduate AI course together, through no effort of mine. Even more curious was how eager he was to work with me, the only other inexperienced undergrad in the class, on the course project together. Our combined senior-year schedules summed to a week of late- and all-nighters before the project was due. As I was coding away at four o'clock in the morning, I turned to see him asleep in his chair. Poor boy. I felt a slight twinge in my stomach as I put a blanket on him.
December 2004, Boston: The more I thought about my quest for the perfect soulmate, the more I thought about Shannon. Earlier that term, as we celebrated ending the madness of SpaceVision, I asked her what she was doing during the semester break in January. She had applied to go to Kennedy Space Center with Professor Hoffman's Space Grant program, something that had fallen off my to-do list in the buildup to the conference, the application deadline now weeks behind us. I suddenly felt devastated. The next day I dashed off a belated application to Space Grant, and a week later I had my answer: I was going to KSC. She had helpfully sent her flight information to our group to help us plan our trips, so I wasted no time booking alongside her on the first flight out of Logan on January 3rd. Like myself, she was flying in to Boston the previous evening, and I guessed she would be spending the night at the airport.
I was leaving for home right after finals, with no chance to talk to her (or anyone) about the coming year. As I rode across the tarmac to my plane, bound for LA, I decided I had to call her, but as the phone rang, realized I had no idea what to say. "Hey Shannon ... umm ... say, I forgot to check the Mars Society mailbox before I left, we were supposed to get a letter ..." Oh brother. But as I was laying over in Newark, I got a second chance: "Hey Thomas, it's Shannon. Did you leave me a voicemail?" Thankfully she never read her voicemails, didn't realize it was old. "I'm waiting for a bus at South Station, on my way to an interview ..." We talked until the final boarding call for my flight to LAX. "Well, have a great holiday ... see you next year." Which was just two long weeks away.
December 2004, Ann Arbor: Home, finally, after another hectic round of finals; where I can stop worrying about all the problems of the world -- exams, problem sets, boys ... At home, I can focus on my favorite hobby: food. Working in harmony alongside two of the greatest chefs in the world, I was perfectly relaxed, until my dear mother stopped in the middle of dough kneading and said, "Have you found a boyfriend yet?" I nearly choked as I replied, "What? No! Of course not! MIT guys are ridiculous!" My aunt and cousin were over at my house, too -- what an embarrassing question to ask in front of them!
The next day, we were all happily cooking again as my dad went to check the mail. Upon returning, he handed me a small packet as he asked, "Who's that from?" I looked at the packet and stood there shocked. "This is, uh, from a ridiculous MIT guy." Completely red from embarrassment, I opened the small packet as my aunt and cousin gathered excitedly. A delicate letter emerged along with, well, Mars. It was a ceramic Christmas tree ornament bearing a photo of the most recent Mars approach. The letter wished me a nice holiday and told of Thomas' recent hiking excursion on Mt. Josephine, describing in flowing detail the breathtaking view from the top. Chaos broke out. "No boyfriend, eh?" "Where's he from?" "What is that thing?" "Look at his penmanship!" "Did he print this on a computer?" The remaining days of 2004 were history. I could not hear the end of it -- questions, speculations, exclamations about his neat handwriting ... It was the beginning of a very interesting era in my life.
After the New Year, I was on my way to Kennedy Space Center via an over-night flight transfer in Boston. For some reason, I wasn't too surprised to find Thomas also there the night before, and also just happen to be taking the same next-day flight into Orlando. There was no avoiding him. He got out a book about Body Worlds -- the human anatomy museum that uses real human bodies -- and excitedly began to tell me about his visit there over the break. That was just about the most ridiculous, nerdy, and sort of grotesque form of flirting I had ever encountered. He was indeed, a very "special" person.
January 2005, Cape Canaveral: Here it was --- my chance. My three-week launch window had arrived, and I was determined not to miss it. But where was the spark of ignition? I thought of Lumiere from Beauty and the Beast: "Say something to her!" What should I say? I wondered each morning as I drove across the Indian River to KSC, watching the Vehicle Assembly Building looming ever larger in the morning mist. Every night I tossed and turned, thinking of her there in the next building, of talking to her, making her smile her gorgeous smile. Most nights I barely got to sleep in time to be up again at five o'clock the next morning and head to Space Shuttle operations. When I came home, I'd show her the pictures I'd taken inside the Shuttle orbiter or from the top of the launch pad --- anything to get a moment of her attention.
Leaving a bitter cold Boston behind, we had landed in balmy palmy Cocoa Beach, Florida, where the most eye-opening spacecraft were being assembled for launch nearby, and the dreamy waves of the Atlantic could be heard through our windows. It was paradise. Whether coincidence or not in this strange and wonderful world, I knew not, but somehow I always found myself standing or sitting next to a most charmingly awkward Thomas Coffee. When driving somewhere on the weekend, Thomas would find an excuse to ride in the girls' car, next to me. During evening movies I found Thomas somehow always sitting right beside me. I couldn't help toying with him a bit, purposely relocating to a different seat, only to find him miraculously next to me again after giving some silly excuse.
The first time we spent alone together since our arrival was in the aisle of a grocery store. (This was a harbinger of times to come.) She inquired why someone like me so enthused about unprocessed food would buy dehydrated milk for his oatmeal. "Isn't that a kind of processing?" "But it's just taking the water out ... and it doesn't spoil that way ..." The ensuing discussion lasted for nearly an hour. I talked to my mother on the phone that night: "I'm in love with this girl ..." There, I said it. "But so far all we've had are these absurd arguments ..." One day we got started at dinnertime, and after a few hours everyone else had gone to bed. Does she just want to win the argument? I wondered, or did she actually want me to stay?
As our friends in Boston braved blizzard after blizzard, we built sandcastles on the beach and kayaked in the ocean around the launchpads of Cape Canaveral. As we paddled together toward the open sea, I asked her if she ever wanted to have a family someday. Once when it was windy, she gave in and let me offer her my jacket. She was still wearing it a week later, when we watched a Delta II rocket lift off the Cape, carrying a spacecraft to shoot a comet in the sky.
During playful moods, I enjoyed challenging his unique habits, watching his surprised reaction at such strangely candid inquiries. At work, we almost competed with each other over who could ask more questions of the poor engineer in charge of the Space Station Processing Facility. Off work, we would argue about the most unusual topics, leaving the other four interns to muse over whether we hated each other or were made for each other. By the end of our three-week program, I was sad to leave this strange dream-like world of new possibilities.
January 2005, Boston: We returned to Boston on the last frigid flight into Logan before it closed for yet another blizzard. When we got to campus, I helped her carry in her luggage through the swirling snow. Six hours later, at two in the morning, I finally bid her good night and rolled my suitcase down the now snow-white street to my dormitory a quarter-mile away. After all we'd been through together that month, we were suddenly back at school, and it felt like we wouldn't see each other again for a long time. Nearly a day, as it turned out. After that, we were together almost every waking moment for the next week. By day we explored what remained of the Independent Activities Period at MIT; by night we talked until our eyes could stay open no longer; and in the wee hours I jogged home half-dazed in the frosty air at two o'clock, three o'clock, four o'clock ... the days blurred. One night we fell amidst the snowdrifts of Briggs Field, and lay there for a moment beneath the silent sky. In that moment, I felt we had a world all to our own.
The month of January was coming to an end too soon, and the start of the spring semester was only a few days away. There is never enough time for blissful moments. Walking home together from the last day of IAP adventures, Thomas asked me if I would like to see the grand piano at the Ashdown dorm. Knowing his affinity for extremely long pieces of music, I told him I would see him in the piano lounge after visiting the ladies' room. When I reached the lounge, I was surprised to discover him no where near the piano, but rather, sitting gingerly on a couch, motioning me to sit across from him. A knot formed in my stomach.
"I don't really know how to say this, but I just wanted to tell you that ... I love you." Shocked. Breathless. My heart skipped a beat. I hadn't expected anything quite so extreme. I kept a strained face of nonchalance as I replied, "That's ridiculous. Do you even know what love really is?" To my astonishment, the boy had done research. "Well, my dad says that when you find someone you can't imagine living your life without, that's when you know you're in love." The rest of the night of January 28th, 2005 was history. The night shift security guard came by every hour, only to find that we were still sitting across one another chatting away quietly. We caught each other up on our previous decade or so of life experiences, learned about our shared and unshared interests, and chuckled together at the thought of the poor security guard wondering what mischief we must be up to at 7am in the morning, having sat there plotting for nearly ten hours. That morning I finally found my way back to my bed, tired but happy, smiling goofily at myself thinking, "Who would have thunk that two such unlikely characters would end up together?"