Marla tells another story.

So I made a quick trip to Seattle, just long enough to celebrate one year of dating a certain person, and to have a good Seattle night out with the girls.

It was the night out with the girls that made me wonder if I have too many acquaintances.

Afton and I were outside R-Place, smoking, and people were doing the "do you have a light?" and chatting thing. We're talking with 'Tavita'--a gay Samoan volleyball player, and calls over his friend, Hal. Hal shakes my hand. "Hey, you look really familiar." It only takes me a second to realize we worked at the same Christian summer camp in Issaquah, the summer after my freshman year. He had been a lifeguard, and his camp name was "Hasselhoff."

Well, Hasselhoff is drunk, and apparently that's when he likes to spout off all the intimate details of his life. He proceeds to tell me all about how that summer he had sex one night in the woods with a girl who worked in the kitchen, he couldn't remember her name, and then had been terrified that he might have gotten her pregnant. "'Cuz she was like, you know, against abortion. Man, if she'd really been pregnant, I would have been totally fucked. You know?" My response was along the lines of "You had sex in the woods? Did you have a blanket?" Negative.

We weren't really pals when we were on staff together, and at this point I'm pretty okay with that. Afton and I head back inside to dance with the rest of our group. But after a little while, I realize that Hasselhoff and gang have found us and are dancing by us. Thus far, Tavita is the one person we have liked at all, so other than him, we do our best to ignore them.

Eventually, we go outside again and apparently Hal and his other bud, Eric, follow us. We're chatting, being polite, Hal passes around cloves and I take one. He starts asking all these questions, along the lines of So you're at R-place, are you gay or straight? Yeah, I'm straight too--Do you hang out on the hill very often? and Where do you live? At some point I think to myself, "Is he...flirting? Did he really tell me about his protection-free sexcapades and now thinks I'm sufficiently impressed to follow his drunk ass home?" I test my hypothesis. "Actually, I live in Idaho. I'm here for a few days to see my boyfriend." "Boyfriend? Oh, well, that's too bad." "Bad? I don't think it's bad. He's great. We've been together a year." "Yeah, well, I've been dating my girlfriend for three years. She lives in Bellevue."

Hal disappears, never to be seen again.

Oh, Capital Hill. The world would be a dull, dull place without you.