My biggest problems with girls aren’t that I am unattractive
and awkward, as my story about my first crush might suggest, they are a
combination of having no idea how attractive I am and a crippling fear of
rejection. I know I’m not Ben Affleck or
Brad Pitt, but I’m pretty sure I’m not Sam Cassell either and that leaves me
unsure how women look at me. Add to that
the fact that I can’t handle rejection at all, and you are left with someone
who needs a girl to throw herself at him before things can go anywhere. I’ve almost always needed 100% certainty to
make a move and the chances of getting 100% certainty about anything are slim
to none. Even with those odds, I’ve
worked things in my life so that I can only think of five times I’ve actually been
rejected. Only two girls have said no to
my advances (not counting break ups which are a whole other ball of wax), I had
only one college (Stanford) not except me, I’ve only had one job interview that did
not turn into a job and there was only one baseball team I tried out for that
didn’t take me. I don’t bring this up to
make myself look uber-successful, because that’s not what it shows. It’s about a crippling fear that has caused
me to have limited experiences in life and a number of painful and awkward
dealings with girls.
I should also take a minute and make sure I didn’t
paint middle school me as a hopeless loser; it really isn’t fair to the story
I’m trying to tell. Yes, I hung around
with the nerds and identified most comfortably with them, my wardrobe consisted
solely of jeans and t-shirts in a world where cloths signaled social status, and
I tended to bury my face in books while others were out socializing. But I had a lot going for me as well. Like I said earlier, I grew up with all the
kids that made up the cool clique. This
allowed me to move back and forth between groups whenever I pleased and this
held weight with people. If I was seen
socializing with Joe Cool, then I must be alright. In fact, as socially awkward as I almost
always feel, I had the rare ability to jump between almost any of the school
cliques I wanted. The cool kids, the
nerds, the goths, the metal heads, the jocks, I was like Ferris Bueller if you
took away his self-esteem and grace, they all thought I was a righteous
dude. I was also lucky enough to be in a
class that respected smarts. All the
popular kids did really well in school, so being smart helped my status as
well. Most important of all, I have
always been a strong athlete. Nothing
helps more with social status at that age then being able to hold your own on
the field. It’s the great social
equalizer. If you’re poor you can’t
afford the cloths, if you’re shy you never make the right friends, but all that
is forgiven if you can play ball.
I say
all this to point out that as much as I bumbled things with Lisa, I was far
from lacking when it came to female attention.
I never had a problem recognizing the girls who were interested in me
who I had no interest in. Or maybe it’s
better to say, I never doubted the intentions of those girls. But the girls who I was into, they were a
totally different story. My school years
were spent knowing there were girls I could have hooked up with but wondering
and wanting to try with girls I wasn’t sure of.
I have plenty of stories of middle school girls vying for my attention,
it was just none of them interested me or captured my affection the way Lisa
did. There was a girl who spent all of
history class every day kicking me in the shins. There was a girl who took up a full page of
my yearbook going on about how wonderful I was, leaving her number and strongly
encouraging me to call her over the summer.
There was a girl who would walk down to the local baseball field
whenever I had a game just to watch.
There was a girl I happened to sit with on the bus to a field trip who
would come to me every day after bringing up the inside joke we came up with
during the ride. Maybe the history girl
just liked kicking people, maybe the yearbook girl was just looking for a
friend, maybe the baseball girl just really enjoyed baseball, but I think it’s
safe to say there was more going on. I
recognized all of this for what it was at the time, it was just that none of
them were Lisa. So if you walked away
from my Lisa story thinking I was a character from Revenge of the Nerds trying
to hook up with the prom queen you got the wrong story. This isn’t the documentation of a guy who’s
never had options, it’s about a guy who sometimes comically but almost always
tragically makes the wrong choices.
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