Awkward Things I Say To Girls

“Hello?” Oh good, she’s there.

“Hi, it’s Justin. Hey so how are you doing?”

I still remember her phone number. Still, at 25, I remember the number of both of the girls I had simultaneous perpetual background-radiation crushes on from 11 until about 17. Who even memorizes a girl’s phone number anymore? The world lost something important when cell phones made phone numbers unmagical.

“Um. I am fine. Hey so why are you calling?”

It is Thursday, November 9th, 1995 at 8:31 pm. I am a freshman in high school. I know that this conversation happened on that date at that time, because of 30 seconds I just spent searching the internet. This is possible for a reason that shall shortly become painfully and awkwardly apparent.

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Part 1, Chapter 4

In the summer of 2002, after the third year of college, I had decided to do research in a physics lab to figure out whether or not I liked working in physics labs. I figured that if I liked it, then I could maybe get a master’s degree in physics. Fortunately, I realized that being buried daily in a living crypt of equipment whose ominous humming likely indicated a slow erosion of my ability to reproduce, only so I could add, piece by piece, to mankind’s great and august body of knowledge regarding how to fix pumps wasn’t what I was looking for in a career.

Before I found any of that out, though, I decided to go home for a week after junior year finals were over. As I was being driven home from the airport by my parents, I leaned my head against the rear driver’s seat window and looked out at the Virginia greenery of a May afternoon. I had things to think about, and being driven in a car is one of the best possible times to think about things.

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This one kind of amazed me when I figured it out, like 6 months ago, when I was still single.

So, assume you’re single. Hold on. First, let me say that the following is a plausible yet hypothetical situation inspired by, like, my entire freaking website, including the posts that are nothing but a twinkle in my notepad file. This hasn’t happened to me. Yet. Keep this in mind.

Assume there is a guy or girl, depending, that you desperately want to talk to. Say, you’re, I dunno, in the laxative aisle at the drug store and this incredibly smoking-hot person is just achingly close to you in the worst way. Your two choices are obvious: do nothing, or say something. We will exclude any alleged choices that could involve eventual incarceration.

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Part 1, Chapter 3

For every relationship I’ve ever been in, there’s always a moment of unbearable non-classical-mechanics, such as “sparks” or “chemistry” or “magnetism,” that predates the relationship. If that doesn’t happen, you don’t have yourself a relationship – which, sure, everyone knows that. But then, how come it sometimes doesn’t happen until months or even years after I first meet the person? How come the initial strength of this impulse seems in no way correlated to the intensity of physical desire, later on? What is wrong with classical mechanics, anyway? It’s as though the entire world of romance metaphors has it in for ol’ Sir Isaac.

When I walked into the Chinese restaurant for the customary end-of-the-year dinner in May of ’02, I wasn’t thinking about any of these things. I was thinking only about how late my friends and I were, and how it was, almost certainly, going to cost me the opportunity to sit next to Hot Copy Editor. As far as I knew at the time, it was going to be the last time I saw her for a whole summer. I didn’t want to be gazing at her across a table.

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Edit: I am sick, like, things are happening that I don’t really want to talk about. This has been this way since yesterday. There’s no way I can write an INAD:ILWMBF episode right now. So, instead, you get the thrilling conclusion of last week’s mystery. Enjoy!

Last week in TMotHGM – TSB, I impressed a girl with my frisbee skills, then went up to talk to her. I was just working up the nerve to take things to the next level by asking her what she majored in, when I was interrupted. But why was I suddenly ignoring her?

This is because one of the most spectacularly hot tennis-playing girls in the history of my college, who happens to also be a friend of a friend, walked by. And naturally I have to say hello. I’m going to be honest: blonde girls aren’t entirely my thing, although I’ve been known to make exceptions in the interest of science. My current girlfriend is deliciously brunette, though. And even if I were interested, which I wasn’t, Tennis Girl had a boyfriend. But spectacularly hot Bench Engineer didn’t know that. And, I might be wrong, but it’s my hypothesis that if you’re hitting on a hot girl and another empirically hot girl just happens to walk up to talk to you, it doesn’t hurt the cause one bit. I think there have been a few scientific studies. Or at least, you know, I read a thing on the internet.

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One of the Universal Truths that lie just beyond the fabric of modern society is the axiom that geeks, along with nerds and other peoples who overinvest in intelligence but boast underdeveloped social skills, make the best lovers. Once people realize this, the sexual revolution that will sweep through western culture will make the seventies look like the fifties, and I’m not talking about wider pants. The reasons why geeks are unparalleled as lovers are simple and many:

Geeks don’t sleep around. Geeks, through their higher IQ and therefore greater understanding of the tragedy of human condition, know that the dice only seem to have more sides on the other side of the table. Hence, they instinctively stay loyal to their lovers through thick and thin. Their social skills are also not well developed enough to support an affair, and frankly, geeks generally aren’t quite sure how they ended up with the lover they have attracted. When you date a geek, you know the geek will be yours until you are done.

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This is an archived awkward adventure in two parts. I just got way too wordy, so I decided to Kill Bill-style it. Enjoy.

“Hi. Do you mind if I sit here?” Folks, if you’re scared to talk to someone because they’re intimidatingly hot, but there are places to sit nearby, this probably the easiest possible way to get your ass planted within a 10 foot radius of your object of affection. But, generally, the awkward silence that immediately follows pretty much kills the entire mood like a big cup of mood-hemlock.

That’s why I recommend being a total rock star. That way, there won’t be any awkward silences.

“No, go ahead.” Her big, dark eyes flash at me with recognition. “Wait, were you the guy who caught a frisbee amazingly just a bit ago?”

I mean, whatever. That kind of thing happens all the time, when you’re an ultra athletic rock star like me. “Sure. That was me.” Like I care.

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Part 1, Chapter 2

“I figured out the world jumble.”

“What? Already?”

Hot Copy Editor was standing behind my computer with a printout of what was to be the back page of the campus newspaper in her hand. She couldn’t give it to me yet, of course, because the Editor in Chief had to sign off on the thing, just to make sure none of us had managed to subversively slip porn (didn’t happen), curse words (he always caught them), or anything disrespectful to women (did happen, he didn’t catch it, we felt bad, we got letters, but we were honestly kind of pleased to get some letters to the editor for a change) into this week’s edition.

She just wanted me to know that she was smarter than me.

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You’ve been to bars, but you really aren’t interested in choosing someone to date based 100% purely on looks. Well, fine, 98%. You don’t go to church; the church you go to has only old people, married people, or kids at it; or you’ve already dated someone at your church and, since all the people in your age group at your church are friends, you’re pretty much off limits to all of them now. You aren’t in school anymore, and you’re still annoyed that no one told you how much amazingly easier it is to meet people in school than in the real world.

Work is work.

You might have even tried online dating, but subsequently found that the human brain is incredibly sophisticated in its ability to integrate the innumerable subtle behavioral variables by which each person is uniquely distinguished from each other person, giving live face-to-face contact a tremendous advantage over online encounters when it comes to evaluating and selecting potential dates. Or, you know, maybe you tried and all you met were losers.

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“Oh my goodness, that’s a sweet forehand that girl has,” I said to myself. It was college, and some friends and I were tossing a frisbee around. One of the friends was a girl I’d never met before who was short, had brown hair, big eyes, and, seriously, could make a frisbee look like it leapt out of her hand powered only by happy thoughts, bound for the second star to the right. I was playing frisbee because frisbees are like the optimistic dreams of footballs yearning to be liberated from the pernicious grip of an oppressive gravity. This makes it way easier to make spectacular catches that impress the ladies.

No, I’m serious. I already had in my future blog post list a story about a girl I impressed by catching a frisbee, and subsequently said an awkward thing to. But, now that I think about it, that happened twice. We will get to those stories eventually. But first, I need to talk about girls who can throw frisbees before we get to how hot I am when I catch them.

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