Awkward Things I Say To Girls

“Hey! Dudes, seriously. Take a look at those girls in that lane. They are so hot.”

I mean, sure. I guess I’ll buy that. The girls in question were, in fact, bowling in the lane next to us. “Us” represented a thrown-together conglomeration of probably a dozen medium-level acquaintances and good friends, out for a fun night of drinking and bowling. There were about as many guys as girls, although the girls were paying attention to each other, or at least pretending better. The guys were gathered around the beer, doing what guys do.

When it comes to bowling, I’m usually good for a solid 75, and occasionally if I get hot I can crack triple digits. On this day, I think I bowled a 17. Seriously, I’m just saying, bowling alley bars should be illegal. If you make us wait 45 minutes for a lane, then charge $3.50 for a pitcher, how are we expected to retain the ability to maneuver our own thoughts, let alone bowl? I drink classy beer because I am a snob, so I generally don’t expect $5 of beer to make me wasted.

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It’s a cold, snowy, Sunday evening in Cleveland 7 years ago. Since no one I know is nearly as interested in the Academy Awards as I am, I decide to go watch it in the dorm common room, where I know a bunch of other people (who I don’t know) will be.

So, just imagine the situation. There I am, sitting on one end of a stupid uncomfortable dorm couch. There’s a cute girl sitting on the other end, and various other people are scattered about. All I really remember about the girl was how adorable she was, mouthing the words to “You’ll Be In My Heart” as Phil Collins sings away. So, I lean over, and say . . .

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Prologue

I woke up in the morning with my arm around her. The sun was streaming in the window the same way that they play light adult contemporary music in dentists’ offices. It’s not going away, and it’s not the worst thing that’s happening to you, so you just pretty much have to deal with it.

She woke up and stretched, then got up sleepily.

“How did you sleep?” she yawned at me.

“I slept better after you grabbed my crotch in the night.”

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I’m not going to say awkward things to random girls anymore.

Don’t worry about your supply of old awkwardness. There’s plenty of that to go around - I’ve already got a list that will last me for (literally) three months, and I’m thinking of things all the time that I want to cover eventually. If I want to write this blog for the next 85 years, I only have to come up with, like, 4,400 more old awkward stories between now and my 110th birthday. I think that’s totally doable.

But, honestly, though I am not entirely sure how things are going to go in the long run with this girl I’ve been talking about all week, I really just don’t want to say awkward things to other girls. I want her to be my girl, even though she’s so far away it’s insane, and the more I talk to her, the more I know I’m doing the right thing. So, no more current awkwardness.

At the same time, I have two additional things I want to add to the schedule.

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I wrote this on May 18, 2004. I present it to you unaltered, to give you a little more context on Awkward Miracle girl. At the time, I remember writing it, and then sitting back, re-reading it, and wondering: dude, where did all this emotion come from?

She was standing with one hand on her hip and her head tilted slightly, with her sweater tied around her waist. She was waiting for me, but she was hungry.

We ate.

We took the light rail to the amphitheater. Either my excitement or hers was contagious, and we chattered the entire way there. Once we arrived, it was fun to look at the people who didn’t look like us and think about if our lives would be different if we had different haircuts and showed our midriffs. The show started and we stopped caring about anyone else.

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I parked my car at her house, turned it off, and turned to look at her.

She was gorgeous.

In this brief moment at the end of the evening, no one wanted to move. I couldn’t not touch her, so I reached out my hand and ran it through her hair. It was darker and longer than I’d ever seen it before, reaching all the way down to her shoulders before it bent slightly in directions, just barely hiding the curve of her neck. My hand ended on her cheek, and, looking at her eyes, I did what I usually do in this situation.

I froze.

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Two years ago, before I became fully lodged in the ample bosoms of corporate America, I was, briefly, a substitute teacher. Not only was this the most fun job ever, but it inflated my ego like low interest rates in a hot economy. It was great. I felt like I knew everything. I felt like I was having a meaningful influence on people’s lives in a tangible way, especially when I actually got to teach a lesson or take the same class for multiple days. Kids looked up to me, which is one of the most uplifting burdens there are.

My favorite grade to substitute for was seventh grade, because, even though I remembered it differently at the time, now that I’m an adult, it seems like everybody is pretty cool when they’re 12 or 13. No one is a hormone disaster yet, but the kids aren’t babies anymore, and they don’t mind being treated accordingly, which was fine with me.

The most awkward grade to teach was 12th. Here’s a reason why.

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Oh. Oh dear. We haven’t talked about answering machines yet.

I just spent about 30 minutes trying to figure out if answering machines are to me what spinach is to an awkward Popeye, or like what kryptonite is to a socially super-adept Superman. There were pros and cons. I plotted a graph of accuracy versus humor. I was about to make a PowerPoint presentation. But, look, how about you decide for yourself which interpretation resonates with you the most, while I tell you about an awkward phone conversation I just had with a friend, and we’ll just agree to roll postmodern style.

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“Whoever designed this colorblindness test is dumb. How am I supposed to see a number when I can’t even tell these stupid dots apart?”

That’s what I was thinking to myself, not even remotely in the ballpark of understanding what was really going on. (I have since figured out the obvious.) This was tenth grade science class, and we were studying genetic disorders. People were doing class presentations.

Tenth grade means fifteen. Fifteen is the age when a person’s ambient level of life-long awkwardness is multiplied by approximately eleventeen thousand, which made me, at fifteen, an adolescent disaster explosion.

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I paused outside my car and thought through everything. I was about to go pick up a girl for our date, my first first date in over a year. There has to be something I am forgetting. Let me think through it from the beginning.

Wait, I can’t type that with a straight face. It’s a total lie in all possible ways. I am fundamentally incapable of thinking things through from the beginning, which is part of why I think I’m fundamentally incapable of expressing complete thoughts to girls. Ask any of them. This is what I said to a girl last night on the phone: “I’m not so . . . verbally . . . well, you know.” But that’s quite another story entirely.

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