Last night, I checked off the last item on the life to-do list I made in the seventh grade. Written in purple gel pen in my Hello Kitty diary, it read as follows:

• get paid to work in theater
• buy a CD player
• kiss a boy
• learn to play an instrument
• meet Taylor Hanson

Done.

In case he ever Googles “Taylor Hanson and Cari Turley” (a girl can dream), I’ll be brief and spare myself the future indignity. But suffice it to say that I owe several million favors to two of my friends, who called in a lot of favors to give me one of the best days of my life. Over the course of the evening, I met all three of the Hanson brothers and spent a pretty substantial amount of time around them, whereby I discovered that they are even nicer people than I had hoped. I mean, they must have taken one look at my starry eyes, estimated my age, and (correctly) assumed that I spent the better part of my adolescence imagining my future wedding to their middle brother. But instead of treating me like the crazed loon I was, they were incredibly gracious, and I’ll always be grateful for that.

It would be in the worst possible taste to repay that kindness by reprinting our polite conversations on the internet, but I will say this: sometime late last night, I sat at a bar next to Taylor Hanson, the boy whose named I doodled in my Trapper Keeper with alarming regularity from 1997-1999. And we drank a beer together.

I want so badly for a time machine to let my twelve-year-old, painfully shy, 98-pound self in on that fact. I want to tell her: “One day, you will be cool. Ok, not cool. But you will own a CD player. And one day, you will go to a bar with Taylor Hanson. He’s nice. And he’s a real human being. You are in fact a very lucky girl.”

I think twelve-year-old me would be so thrilled she would cry. Twenty-six-year-old me is pretty close, herself.