Look, I know it’s been a while, and I know I didn’t call or write, and I’m sorry. Though it’s little consolation, I want you to know that I thought about you constantly. I only saw other people like half a dozen times, and frankly I didn’t enjoy it and missed you.

There were lots of reasons not to write the blog, virtually none of which I can describe in detail without continuing the extended metaphor much further than is approved by the FDA for human daily allowance of metaphor. However, I do realize that I won’t get out of this week’s blog post alive without hitting three more things:

1. Yes, I am 100% single.
2. INAD resumes in a week. Buckle up.
3. I swear I wrote an awkward thing for today, but I can’t for the life of me figure out where the hell I saved it. But I promised myself that I’d post about girls today, and post I shall. Here’s a brief little vignette that I jotted down on a business trip a while ago.

—

I leaned forward. She looked up at me.

“Let’s build a campfire right here between these benches,” I said to her. She shivered and giggled. “We’ll get some marshmallows and sticks and camp out. Are you in?”

She nodded and giggled again. “Once, when the power was out, I roasted a marshmallow with a candle! It took like an hour.”

She was another single serving friend from the airport, a cute and bubbly freckled blonde sophomore engineer at Lehigh who was trying to get to Allentown, departing gate F17. She wore purple but liked pink. I was on my way back from recruiting in Cleveland, departing to Richmond from gate F16. We were both trapped in Philadelphia for an hour and a half with nothing to do but pretend to ignore each other when we weren’t subtly flirting, not for keeps but just for the hell of it. It sure beats not quite making eye contact with anyone while hoping to get out of the stupid airport.

I’m not even going to pretend that this post was about how I talked to a random person, humanity was connected together, how happy we’d be if we understood strangers, and so forth. I mean, it originally was about that. How we should reach out as a country to our brother man and lift him up.

Seriously. Lets be honest with ourselves. If you have a floral skirt on and smile a lot, you’re a lot more interesting to me than my brother man.

I wanted my mom to follow her car to their house to see where she lived, but she wouldn’t. She was the cutest girl in pre-school. All I remember are overalls and brown hair. I didn’t really feel like coloring, so we just kissed instead.

That was before we got caught. Now that I think about it, it’s astounding that between all the school buses, parked cars, parents’ houses, and non-private-areas in college in which I’ve made out, the only time I got in trouble was when I was in pre-school.

“Justin! No kissing girls until you get to big-kid school,” the woman said. I figured that’s, what, a year? I can wait a year to kiss girls again.

I looked up from the science worksheet our teachers made us do to justify to themselves that taking kids on a field trip was actually contributing to our learning, and she was totally checking me out. She was a leggy brunette with clear, big eyes and freckles sprinkled around her incredibly cute and slightly upturned nose. Suddenly, as though drawn by emotion long suppressed, we both drew closer.

I had always suspected she had had feelings for me. It’s hard not to be noticed when you’re in the school marching band, on the academic team, and your school’s eleventh best long distance runner, but she’s never been nearly so forward. I understand, though. If you’re as popular as she is, you can’t be as open as you’d like to be with your hidden yet deeply felt emotions.

Leaning ever so slightly towards me, her lips purse as she thinks of what to say.

“Justin,” she begins.

“Yes?” I say. I incline my head towards her, though by only the faintest of degrees. I feel dizzy and in danger of stumbling, though I’m standing flat on an allegedly immobile ground.

If possible, her eyes get even bigger without widening. “Justin, I have to ask you something.”

My heart’s so high in my throat, it’s impaled on my tonsils.

“Okay.”

I’m paying very close attention to my facial expression, begging it to please be remotely normal and cool.

She licks her lips and steps toward me again slightly. Our faces are now about 8 inches apart.

“Justin, will you do my science worksheet for me?”

A lightbulb slowly begins to illuminate mentally, but at this point we’re talking about an extremely low-watt and dirty lightbulb at like the thoraco-lumbar level.

Well, look, it will only be better for her in the long run if she does it herself. That’s just the truth, and regardless of your personal feelings, you have to make sacrifices when you care deeply about someone. I blink and coo, “No” softly, with the approximate tone of what I would later learn to be pillow talk.

She stepped back and said, annoyedly, “Oh. Nevermind,” and walked away.

It’s time to write about the time I went to a strip club and got a lap dance.

—

“Oh geez, what do I do? How does this even work?”

“Well, the first thing you need to do is to take everything out of your front pockets and put it in your back pockets.”

I was out with some acquaintences on a bachelor party. It was maybe two summers ago. As bachelor parties go, this one was entirely unsuccessful in its intended purpose because the bachelor, a coworker with a cubicle contiguous to mine, didn’t show up. (We didn’t see or hear of him too much after that, until he was arrested later in the year for attempting to kill his then-estranged wife. Three times. That we knew of.)

But, seriously, the lack of a bachelor is no reason to call off a perfectly good bachelor party, right? Right.

I had a pretty good idea where the evening was headed, and, look, I wasn’t going to argue with the chosen itinerary. I’d never been to a strip club before, but I sure do like girls, so I figure that qualifies me for admission. So we had our dinner and beers, stopped at the ATM, and rolled into the strip club in a few carloads.

Imagine this: I’m sitting at the back of my group of seven-ish friends in an armchair with wheels on the bottom, sipping on an $8 bottle (as in, 12 oz.) of Budweiser. My friends are looking at the dancers, periodically moving closer to the stage to put dollar bills in front of particularly interesting (to them) nearly naked women.

Me, I’m looking the other direction, at the bartender. She is wearing all of her clothes, and, honestly, looks nothing like the girls who are stripping. She looks intelligent. That isn’t meant to disrespect the strippers. It’s just that even Hannah Arendt wouldn’t look particularly luminary if she were near-nakedly crouching down to collect scattered dollar bills off a darkened stage. I’m thinking of asking her if, like, she wants to get a cup of coffee or something (the bartender, not Hannah Arendt), when one of my friends comes up to me.

“Do you want to get a lap dance?” he asks. I mean, is the answer to that question ever going to be no? Actually, I can think of several situations where I might say no.

“Wait, why? Not really. I mean, maybe.”

“Well, look, this girl over here heard you have never gotten one before, and she really wants to give you one.”

I’m sure she does. “Which girl?”

“That short one, with the dark hair and glasses. Do you want a lap dance from her?”

Wow, good freaking guess. “Yes. Yes I do. Wait, how do you even do that?”

So there I am, in the sort of sparkly darkness that you can just tell would be incredibly depressing to see suddenly lit up to normal wattage, getting lap dance tips and pointers from a new acquaintence. Nothing in the front pockets is key. Just ask her for a lap dance, she’ll take you in the other room and tell you where to sit. You give her $20. When the next song starts she’ll do her thing, then you’re all done. Just: don’t touch her. At all. Anywhere.

Okay, sure. That’s easy enough. I look over at her. She winks at me.

Oh god, I have no confidence anymore suddenly. Well, Justin, you had better go get this thing started, or it’ll never happen.

That is when I walked over to a nearly naked stripper, sitting and talking to another client in those plush rolly armchairs, and said to her, with about the same pitch and tone of voice, rising at the end to fully enunciate the question mark, that you’d use when offering someone a stick of gum, acompanying the query with a shrug of my shoulders:

“I think I need a lapdance?”

—

“That’ll be $20.”

I got out my wallet to give her the money in advance, trying to think of something conversational to say to take up the time remaining in the current strip-club micro-song. She had already taken me by the hand to a dark booth in another room. My eyes alit on my “wallet,” which is actually just a binder clip clasping bills to a few cards and my license.

“Do you like my wallet?” I say with an ironic self-deprecatory glance, indicating the binder clip as I handed her the $20 bill.

Pointing at a garter (I think that’s what those things are called, but I was initially thinking “thigh-scrunchie”) overflowing with neatly folded and organized denominations of various sizes, she asked, “Do you like mine?”

I laughed uncomfortably.

“So you’ve never had a lap dance?” she asked me, settling down next to me in the booth.

“No, I’m really not sure what’s going to happen.” I said.

“Well, look, I do some tricks, but don’t worry. I’ve practiced a lot.”

Uh, tricks?

That’s when the next song started. She grabbed ahold of the back of the little booth behind me and slid onto my lap. “Slouch down and spread your legs.” she said. “Spread them more!” Okay! They’re spread! What is happening!

Oh god. She’s upside down. What if I have to catch her! But I can’t touch her, though, right? Do you think there’s an exception for the life of the stripper? I’m going to drop her for sure. She’s going to sue the hell out of me. Then everyone who hates strip clubs will know that I went to one, and everyone who loves them will know I dropped a stripper on her face. Everyone is going to hate me.

“Relax!” she said, and turned a few more flips on my lap.

—

To this day I have absolutely no idea what was happening on my lap that night, but there’s no question that the poor girl was extremely athletic and burning one hell of a lot of calories. The thing was, though, the best part was when she just put her face really close to mine. Nothing that happened in my lap was nearly as interesting.

Honestly, the whole thing made me just want to go make out.

When you think about it that way, it makes you wonder if love is supposed to feel like a train wreck at all.

Either way, that’s why I don’t believe in love at first sight anymore. Maybe people who can trust their instincts can have it, but I went 7-24 against the spread in college bowl games this year. I watched the Howard Dean scream as it happened and thought, gee, that guy sure sounds like he has the energy to get this thing back on track. I heard the Spice Girls for the first time on my first trip to London in high school, and was immediately struck by the inferiority of the British taste in music, because Americans would never listen to something as ridiculous as the Spice Girls. It’s not that my first impression is wrong, more that it is spectacularly disastrous.

But if you add a girl, it just gets worse. Take the line integral of the judgement vector field as I approach from infinity to r = 1 meter (assume spherical coordinates, duh) with a girl at the origin (assume the judgement vector field is the gradient of the scalar field of smelling nice) (duh), and either you end up with either a large negative number or a large positive number, but pretend it is large and negative because I’m sure as hell not whipping out a math text right now just so I can make sure I didn’t make a sign error in my multivariate calculus joke. I would also like to note that completing the parenthetic phrase about scalar fields involved leaning back in my chair, tapping my chin, and saying to myself, “What increases near girls?”

That sign issue still bugs me. I can’t even do multivariate calculus anymore. I’m a shell of my former self. All I think I’m good for now are excel spreadsheets and telling stories about girls. Maybe I should try starting one, eventually, here.

So: the most recent time I was absolutely love-at-first-sight obliterated by a girl-train-wreck was when I was working at a restaurant after I had moved back to Virginia from college in Ohio. I had just gotten word that I had been hired on for the cubicle adventure I now enjoy on a weekday-ly basis, and therefore was newly excited to be quickly ending my time as a server, when into the restaurant walked the cutest hostess I had ever seen in my life.

Now, I generally have a soft spot in my heart for hostesses in restaurants because, no matter how bad of a shift I’m having at the restaurant, it only takes ten seconds of flirting with a hostess and suddenly I’m feeling great. I just didn’t anticipate this particular server exploiting, like, 8 other soft spots in my heart at once.

She was tall and slender, with long dark hair, big eyes, and the kind of teeth that are crooked but cute, like Kirsten Dunst’s teeth, but with everything else about her being completely different from Kirsten Dunst, who is not my type at all, which nevertheless didn’t stop me from being convinced slash excited for a solid week in college about the rumor that she was going to enroll at my school (please note paragraph two above re: judgement). She (the hostess, not Kirsten Dunst) was ultra flirty with me, too. Talking to her was like a chemistry experiment exploding. And when she started dropping hints about liking geology and video games, I was done.

Seriously. Relationships work so much better, at least for me, when I am acquainted with a girl, slowly start to appreciate who she is, become attracted more and more, realize how she compliments my personality and I hers, and then finally decide that I can’t stand to be apart. This is how I did it this most recent time, and, I must say, good work, Justin. Gradually, is the thing. That way you get used to how amazing the other person is, in baby steps, and can be rational and not necessarily the apocolypse, or at least not in such large doses.

I ask you: how am I supposed to make any good decisions at all about things to do or say when you spring a tall, brunette, snaggletoothed science girl hostess in a black dress who loves videogames on me for four shifts a week? What do you want from me? If you prick me, do I not bleed? If I meet a pretty dark-haired science major who likes me, will I not somehow awkwardly screw it up?

After flirting my way into dinner with her after one of my final shifts, she asked me if I wanted to take her out for real the following Sunday night.

Now, first of all, hell yes I do. But, look. I’m a laid back cat who is hip to that jive. She jotted me some digits and I figured, whatever, I’ll give her a call eventually, if I even care.

Right.

Two days later, I can’t stand it anymore.

“This is Cute Hostess Girl. Leave a message. I sound high.”

“Hi! This is Justin from work. So, um, we were going to go out right? Sunday! You should call me and we can work it out.”

Another few days pass. It’s like giving a kid a marshmallow but telling him to be patient, it will hop into your mouth when it wants to be eaten. That wasn’t really the image I was going for. That was unintentional. I’m moving on. Another few days pass.

“This is Cute Hostess Girl. Leave a message. I still sound high.”

“Hey, hadn’t heard from you, so I figured I’d call back. This is Justin. From work. So, I think I should pick you up at, like, seven. On Sunday. We are going out, right?”

Sunday arrives. Still nothing. I mean, sure, that’s reasonable. Maybe she just forgot. Twice.

“This is Cute Hostess Girl. Leave a message. I sound like Keanu Reeves on Robitussin.”

“Hey, so, are we going out tonight? Because if not, that’s cool. Totally cool. I mean, you know. I know how it is sometimes.”

Another day passes, making it, yes, Monday. Finally, my phone rings!

“Oh my goodness! Cute Hostess Girl!”

“Hello! Listen, I’m sorry I didn’t call you. I was out of town.” By the way, do cute girls go out of town more than other people, or is this just the best way you could think of to reject someone? Seriously, ladies. At least have the decency to be creative. Zombies attacked, your dog turned into an alien from Saturn, you were busy establishing fight clubs around the state. Anything. Then again, technically, the last option counts as “out of town.” That must be it.

To return to the conversation: I’m approximately at the excitement level of an extroverted thirteen year old girl getting her first cell phone, her ears pierced, and a car, all after having fifteen cups of coffee.

“Well that’s an amazing coincidence! Because I’m just now watching the episode of Seinfeld where George leaves all these messages for a girl! He thought she was ignoring him but,” I chuckle affably, “she was out of town! Just like you were. And so he thought she didn’t like him but really she liked him, she was just out of town! Just like you! Have you seen that one? Did you have a good time out of town? What a coincidence! Isn’t that funny? Can you believe it? I sure can’t. Do you like to go out of town? When do you work next?”

Awkward silence on the phone. I can’t overemphasize how not-cool I am sounding at this point. It’s impossible.

Undaunted, like Lewis and Clark, I press onward. “Wow, so, like, when do you want to go out?”

It was late evening, December 31, 1996 in London, England, and I was impatiently looking around a New Years Eve themed London hotel ballroom for my at-the-time favorite girl in the world. We were there on a high school marching band trip, which intelligently incorporated opportunity for inter-genderal socialization for the same reason that you have a fuse on circuits in your house. The girl was only the cutest and most ticklish blonde flute player in the universe (I think it is okay to admit that tickling was a key component of my game back when I was 15), but despite a heavy amount of apocalyptically inept flirting, she wasn’t my girlfriend yet.

Honestly, at 15, I had no idea what girlfriends really were. Like with quasars, I knew the word had meaning and described a thing that exists, but only for other, cooler people than me.

It didn’t matter. I wasn’t even thinking in those terms, I’m sure. I knew that I felt best when Cute Flute Girl was close by, and that I was absolutely sure that I would get to dance with her for the first time on New Years Eve. But as I turned to look out the window into the snowy London night, I started to doubt. Maybe she wasn’t coming after all. But at some level, I knew not to worry. It would be okay. As if to reassure me, the DJ put on a song by The Cranberries.

I turned away from the window, and there she was in the doorway, framed against the brightness of the hallway. She didn’t have to look around. We instantly made eye contact, and as The Cranberries surged in the dim ballroom, I felt like flying as I closed the distance to go stand next to her.

I can’t remember a better New Years Eve than that one, dancing 1996 into 1997 with a girl I didn’t honestly know what to really do with.

—

The evening at its close, we stopped at CFG’s hotel room. She leaned against the wall to the left of the door, and I looked at her, knowing instinctually that something needed to be said.

“Do you want to be my girlfriend?” was what I came up with. Honestly, compared to everything I’ve said in the intervening 10 years, I don’t know if that isn’t the best and least awkward thing I’d ever said to a girl.

She whispered back: “Yes.” And before I could help myself, with absolutely no clue that I was even remotely about to do this properly, with no preparation or warning, I leaned in slowly and kissed her. It couldn’t have been more innocent if we were Disney characters. I also practically passed out.

That was my first kiss.

“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.

“Listen, were you just watching Friends?”

“Well yeah, I was.”

“The thing is, I just had to call someone. I can’t believe that Ross finally kissed Rachel.” I would like to remind you that, like everything else on this website, I promise I am not making this up. “I mean, that’s fantastic. I thought he was going to walk away, because he wanted to be with Julie, but no. He came back and kissed Rachel after all. I’m so excited.”

To repackage a John Cusack line from High Fidelity, was I awkward because I was exposed to hundreds of hours of popular culture in the form of movies, TV, and songs? Or did I have a fundamentally unquenchable need to see people acting out and describing the confident, successful-in-love self I someday wanted to be because I knew that I was unchangeably awkward?

I say yes.

“Uh, yeah. Yeah, it was nice. So listen, I’ll see you tomorrow in school. Maybe. Good night.”

“Good night!”

I hung up the corded phone. I felt slightly depressed, as though some part of my 14-year-old self knew exactly how awkward I had just been. I stood up to go to my bedroom and get ready for bed. What if she didn’t want to talk to me? I shook the feeling off as I brushed my teeth. Because, really, who cares. Ross just kissed Rachel.

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.

So I chatted a bit about weekend plans, then I shooed Tennis Girl away. I turned back to bench girl.

“What are you majoring in?” Shut up. This is key information.

“Biomedical Engineering.” Ultra hot. Only a chemical engineer could steam up my glasses more than a BME girl.

But as I looked at her, something didn’t seem right. I either had a hunch or a cramp. I guessed hunch, and acted accordingly.

“No, that’s not right at all,” I said, as I visually sizing her up. “You’re too much like me. Sure you’re smart enough for BME, but by the end of the semester you’ll be checking out poetry from the library, and before you know it you’ll be an English major. I can tell these things.”

She looked back at me, eyes slightly wide, and said, “No, I don’t think so. I really like what I’m doing.” But it was easy to see that I had struck a nerve, or at least a lymph node, deep inside her. It was like she was saying lines she’d said before but didn’t honestly believe.

Clearly, I’m at the absolute pinnacle of my game. I’m unstoppable. You can’t invent a scale that I’m not off of. So, what’s my next move? How do I keep this going? How do I get her number? Do I just plan our first date right then and there?

Do you remember what this website is called?

“Well, great to meet you!” I said. And I walked away.

—

I never post the rest of awkward stories, because generally there’s nothing good happening after the punch line except me feeling embarrassed, but this one deserves some follow-up. About six months later, when I had almost forgotten this girl and the whole incident, I was working a shift at the restaurant where I waited tables to make rent in college when a girl and her mother sat in my section. I knew I recognized the girl, but I couldn’t place her.

When they paid their bill, it finally clicked.

“I know who you are.” I said. “You’re the girl I met on the bench when I was playing frisbee.”

She started. “That’s right!”

I had two questions for her, while her mother sat and stared as though she had never seen carbon-based life forms before.

“Can I have your phone number?” and “I forgot. What is your major?”

The answers were kind of amazing:

“Sure.” Now, of course we didn’t date. Too much time had passed. You just can’t walk away like that and expect to resume right where you left off, even 6 months later. That’s just not how these things work. I think there was one awkward coffee and then that was the end of things.

But that doesn’t mean I’m not a rock star. What was she majoring in, again?

“Actually, I switched to English.”

“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.

Okay, before I get too full of myself, we need to set the scene. It is the fall of my last year in college. I’ve just finished playing a game of ultimate frisbee. It’s late afternoon. I’ve decided that I needed to sit down on a bench, partly because I’m ridiculously tired, but also because a spectacularly hot girl was sitting on the bench too, and I figured, you know, if that bench is good enough for her, well then it’s good enough for me.

Yes, I had been amazing directly in front of her earlier. Generally I’m a tangled mess of spastic elbows and arms, but for some reason ultimate frisbee brings out the only gracefulness I have in my entire life. So when a horribly overthrown disc appeared to be going out of the back of the end zone a few feet ahead of me, I didn’t even hesitate before launching myself horizontally, snagging the frisbee, and dragging one foot behind me for the touchdown in bounds. Getting up, I caught this girl’s eye. She was stunning. Sure, I’m going to sit on that bench.

So: fast forward to sitting next to her, probably smelling funny. I turned to look at her, then asked: “What are you reading?” This never fails. In the history of modern flirtation, asking a girl what she is reading never backfires, even though it seems like a horribly intrusive and rude thing to do. It makes no sense to me, but if the set of all things that worked were limited to the set of all things that made sense, none of us would get laid.

“Oh, it’s just some reading I have to do for an engineering class.”

Hot girl engineers? Sure. I went to a college full of nerdiness, so, chances are, pretty much every girl you meet is going to be ridiculously smart in a way that might not necessarily be traditionally associated with femininity. It’s just statistics, and plus, what is typically associated with femininity is stupid. I’ll tell you what’s hot: dendrimers, titration, and vector fields.

So naturally I have to ask the girl what she majored in. Hush. Which kind of engineer she is could change everything. But, my goodness. The girl and I just met. We needed to get to know each other much better before we start learning about each other’s curricula. So, I started asking questions. I was witty and interested, and she was charming and interesting. Everything was going fabulously.

At this point, I do not have her phone number.

But, just as I was about to take the relationship to the next level and ask her what she majored in, a spectacularly lucky reason to ignore Hot Bench Engineer just happened to present itself.

What reason could I possibly have for ignoring a cute engineering student who I had conned into thinking I was athletic? In what way is this lucky? Is this story going to start getting awkward anytime soon? Now, that’s just a ridiculous question. But for the answer to all of the remaining questions, continue on to the thrilling conclusion of “The Mystery of the Hot Girl’s Major.”

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.

Here’s the thing: I don’t know what makes most guys realize that they’ve met someone special, but for me, it isn’t the sort of thing that I see in teen movies, like “she has nice legs” or “I bet I could make her into the prom queen.” These are the things I have thought to myself when I have, at one time or another, out of nowhere, been suddenly attracted to a girl:

• Wait – she likes physics?
• That scarf is hot.
• I can’t believe she likes to play the xylophone as much as I do.
• Wait – she likes brown ale?
• I didn’t know any one person could like economics that much.
• Oh my goodness, I thought only Winnie the Pooh said “Oh, bother.”
• Oh my goodness, she curses like a sailor.
• Wait – she likes video games?
• Boy names for girls are the best things ever.
• She throws a frisbee like a dream.

So, to reset: I was attracted to a girl in college once because I thought her frisbee-throwing technique was hot. So naturally I had to say something awkward to her.

“Do you play frisbee often?”

“Yeah, you know, we play every once in a while.”

“What’s your name? I’m Justin.”

She had a boy name. Oh man, it’s totally over. By the way, I try not to think about why this is attractive. It just is, and it doesn’t matter why. Especially when you have been watching an unhealthy quantity of Bewitched and Dawson’s Creek.

“Well, listen, why don’t you call me when you are playing next?” See, that’s how you take the bull by the horns. That’s how you get girls on dates. Actually, that’s how you turn into a best friend, but I haven’t necessarily mastered all aspects of my talking-to-girls game by college.

“Sure. Write your number down for me.”

So I did. Look, I know. I’m a disaster. This website doesn’t exist because I’ve always known what I was doing.

Later that evening, I caught up with one of the friends who had also participated in the frisbee-throwing from earlier in the evening. They looked grim.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Well, you remember boy-name girl?”

“Do I ever. I gave her my number. She sure could throw a frisbee.”

“Right. Well, listen, she is in the hospital. She ran into a tree just after you left, like, headfirst.”

“Oh no! Is she okay?”

“She has a concussion and a pretty big gash on her head, but she’ll be fine.”

There was a pause. I thought, looked at the girl I was talking to, thought some more, and, finally, couldn’t help myself.

“Do you think she still has my phone number?”

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.

So: hot girls. We (the guys) were looking over there, and, seriously, they were cute girls, don’t get me wrong, but they definitely weren’t making me put my beer down immediately so I could go figure out their respective scenes.

But I mean, I was listening empathetically while my friends slash acquaintances insightfully broke down the situation in scintillating detail.

“Seriously, dude, those girls are so hot.”

“True. Especially the brunette one.”

“I don’t think so, dude. The blond one is way hotter.”

“You guys are crazy. Those girls are, like, 17.”

Oh no he didn’t. All of the guys immediately stop talking and look over to consider the data in light of this new hypothesis.

By the way, this is pretty much the death knell in the hearts of college guys. “She is, like, 17,” is pretty much the executive branch equivalent of Congress not funding your war. Sure, you could go ahead anyway, but what the hell are you going to do? Everyone’s going to make fun of you. You’re going to have to, at least, try a different strategy.

So we instantly sprung into debate to try and settle this crucial question. Some said 17, and others said 19. The rhetoric was eloquent and the argument vigorous. Suddenly, I had a great idea, and spoke up for the first time:

“Why don’t you just ask them?”

Silence. “Uh, what? I’m not doing that.”

What? Why not? “I mean, if you want to know so badly, that’s what you ought to do. Ask them.”

“No way man.”

Well, if you want a job done right, and so forth. “Okay, fine. I’ll do it.”

At this point, we need to pause and deal with a matter of business that has become pressing. Here it is:

Don’t look at me that way.

I’m serious. This is legitimate. I have 25 year old friends that look 13. When I worked for restaurants, I carded 36 year old women that appeared 19. Conversely, have you seen what the kids are wearing these days? How am I supposed to know who’s what age? It’s better to know the answer than to guess.

Okay, unpause. So I walked right over to the girls, sat down, and it was much worse than I could have ever imagined in my wildest dreams.

“Hi! So, listen, my friends and I think you two are really cute, so, we were wondering: how old are you?”

The girls giggled in stereo. “How old do you think we are?”

“Uh, well, I think you’re 18, and you, well, you look 19. Yeah?”

Giggle supernova. “We’re actually 14!”