In Advanced Expository Writing last spring, I was supposed to write a life-lesson narrative. I showed my professor this, and he was like, "This is a highly entertaining non-life-lesson." "Shit." So I had to write another story, which I got an A on, of course :)
What Happens When You're Hopeful
February 1, 2007
“Turn around!” Emma yelled from the back seat. “Do it, Sam. Do it!”
“No, no, no!” I squealed excitedly. “Sam, don’t you dare!”
“I’m gonna do it,” Sam said, warning us. The two hot guys from the ice cream shop were walking down a sidewalk on the opposite side of the road, strutting like freshmen and not wearing shirts. Sam looked both ways, then abruptly pulled her giant red pick-up in a U-y, checking herself out in the rearview mirror as she did this.
We all stopped yelling (except for Kayla, who had been giggling at us the whole time) and tried to act cool as we drove by the boys (except for Kayla, who was still giggling). The guys had clearly noticed us too, since they both did a little head-nod our way when we passed.
“Ohmygod, they so checked us out,” I said after we were out of their sight.
“I told you guys,” Sam said smugly. “They want us. We need to pull over.” Sam was the most obviously, well, slutty of The Hardcore Four. She was the type that pretended she didn’t want another relationship, and acted like guys didn’t affect her much, but we all knew she desperately wanted something more than a fling with a guy she really cared about.
“No way, Sam. We are not going to meet those guys. That’s crazy,” said Emma. But Sam pulled another U-y and we were once again headed back towards the shirtless guys. This wasn’t like us to pick up random guys. But…it was summer, we were looking for adventure, and we were never going to see them again anyways, so what the hell.
They stopped walking when they saw us, and Sam pulled over the truck. We were parked on the opposite side of the road from them, but it wasn’t a big deal. They waited until a car went by, then walked across the busy street to meet some chicks in this random-ass vacation town they were in. The tall one came to my window, and the stoned-looking one went to Sam’s.
“’Sup? I’m Garrett,” the tall one said to me. He was sooo cute. Tall, dark, and tan. The four of us girls introduced ourselves.
The guy at Sam’s window- I want to call him Jason, but that might be wrong- was like, “Dude, I am never going to remember your names.”
“He’s been drunk since like ten in the morning,” Garrett explained. At this point the sun was going down. “But yeah, what are you girls up to tonight?”
“We don’t have any plans, do you?” I replied. This wasn’t so scary, meeting random guys.
“Nah, you should give us a call. We’ll chill,” Garrett said. I put his phone number into my cell, and the guys left with a “Peace.” After we watched them walk across the street, I was quick to yell “Dibs on Garrett!”
“You can’t call dibs on him, we all want him!” Sam whined.
“Okay, fine. Then none of us can have him,” I established. “Deal?”
“Deal,” they all agreed.
Sam drove us back to my cabin while we all chattered excitedly about actually doing something that brave. Back at Toothacres (all the cabins around us have nicknames; mine was named after my great-grandfather, a famous dentist), we said hi to Grandma and went upstairs to The Kid Room, a huge bedroom with colorful bunkbeds and room for seven.
Exhilerated by our accomplishment and unsure of whether the boys would really
call, we spent the next couple hours doing each other’s make-up and picking out cute clothes to wear. We ignored the obvious problem: there were two of them and four of us. Finally, they called, or maybe we called them, but what matters is we agreed to meet them in town so they could find the way to my cabin. We mumbled an excuse to Grandma about getting some medicine for Sam, then sprinted out to the truck and drove to town.
When we found the boys and brought them back over, I didn’t feel like explaining to Grandma that we’d brought boys over, so we snuck them down to the beach. “Let’s go swimming,” Sam suggested to Garrett and no one else. He agreed and they both stripped down to their underwear and jumped in the lake. Soon they were sitting on the diving platform about a hundred yards away. Surprise, surprise.
Back at the end of the dock, Jason laid on his back while Emma and I rested our heads on his strong arms and Kayla sat close by. We looked at the stars and life was perfect. Jason was a really cool guy to talk to. It turns out he and Garrett were a grade below us and went to a high school in the same district as ours. It was totally random that they lived ten minutes away from us, and yet we had met hours north of home. We learned about his past relationships and we all laughed when none of us knew any constellations, besides the Big Dipper of course. Duh, anyone knows how to find that one.
“God, they’ve been out there a long time,” I said after a while. “You think they’re making-out yet?”
“I don’t know, shh…” Jason said. We listened carefully.
“Whoa, they’re still talking,” Kayla said incredulously.
“She so wants Garrett,” Emma confided to Jason. I felt a pang of sympathy for my vulnerable friend out there on the platform. She was obviously going for the relationship, rather than the one-time make-out session at the lake. Stupid, stupid girl. They weren’t really into us, they just didn’t have any other plans for the night.
After we started getting bored with the stars, Garrett and Sam climbed back up on the dock smiling and shivering violently. We headed up to the hot tub, where we were loud enough to wake Grandma up. She came outside and asked, “Sarah, who’s out here?”
I leaped from the hot tub and ran over to Grandma. “Uh, it’s just us…” I said. “And the boys.” I quickly explained who the boys were and Grandma told me they had to leave now. About an hour and a half later, they left, and only one of us was expecting to see them again.
Maybe two days later, Sam decided she couldn’t handle not hearing from Garrett any longer. She sent him a text message, the universal “I’m too nervous to actually call him” solution. I acted confused and indignant when she later related the story to me, her eyes full of hurt, but inside I wasn’t surprised a bit. Apparently, when he got her text and realized that chick from the lake actually wanted to hang out again, Garrett replied with an “I lied to you girls. We don’t really live in Champlin. We live in Wisconsin.” Now, if they were from Wisconsin, how would they have known that Champlin is right by Andover? It was freakin’ ridiculous. He had pulled the sloppiest move ever to get out of hanging out with Sam again. I hated him for being yet another disappointing guy to my friend, but I had to admit, she asked for it.
Yet revenge is sweet. Half a year after we met the shirtless guys, I still have
Garrett’s number in my phone. I‘ll send him a text, and when he doesn’t know who it is, he’s absolutely tortured by it. “Who is this?” he always asks. I never reply. [1278 words]
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Tuesday, April 22, 2008
I Miss My Puppy
Summer, my English Springer Spaniel. Aww...She's so smart, she actually opens doors on her own.
Sadly, she doesn't look like this anymore.
I miss her. I have to drive a half hour to see her.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Hook Me Up With Some Heartache
This is a paper I wrote on November 3, 2006. I want it to be read.
Let’s say your best friend has just told you she hooked-up with a super-hot guy last night but didn’t know his name. If you’re a seventeen-year-old girl like I am, you might be putting on a congratulatory face but really praying to God your friend doesn’t get hurt. If you’re not a seventeen-year-old girl, however, you’re probably wondering right now, “What the hell does hooked-up mean?” Don’t be afraid; you aren’t the first person to ask this. To my generation, hooking-up is just something we’re expected to do. We know what it means. To others, it is something way beyond comprehension.
After polling 10,000 readers, Seventeen Magazine, along with sexetc.org, defined “hooking-up” as: “Slang expression that can mean different things to different people. Generally refers to when two people are sexual with one another -- kissing, touching or having sexual intercourse” (seventeen.com). This seems pretty reasonable. However, this definition doesn’t touch on the horrible truth that hooking-up always occurs outside of a relationship. In fact, a good portion of hooking-up occurs between two people that have met just that day.
So now that we’ve established what exactly (or, rather what generally) hooking-up means, it’s time to focus on the consequences of this trend. Can I let you in on a little secret? Shhh, don’t tell the boys our age. Hooking-up is ruining us girls. We won’t admit this is true; we’ll “do shit” with guys, and we might even brag about it afterwards. But all of us girls know how damaging this is to our emotional and sexual health. If you’ve hooked-up with a guy, you’ve probably cried about it later.
The expectations placed upon us girls these days leave us no room to say No. If you’re not hooking-up with people, and talking about it the next week at school, you’re considered a prude. If you like a guy, he expects to get a few good make-out sessions out of it. If he likes you back, you go out with him (which in our generation is like the equivalent of marriage) and you’re expected to have sex sooner or later. This is the situation we face.
Our parents wonder why we don’t casually date anymore, but we have a hard time explaining why. Basically, it’s because boys have grown used to getting what they want without putting forth much effort. Forget flowers and candy. We’re lucky if a guy takes us out to a movie before taking us back to his house to “get some”. Our version of dating is called “hanging-out” and it usually entails watching a movie with a guy you like. If this is as far as the relationship goes, you can say you had a “thing” with the guy, or that you hooked-up a few times.
I would be lying if I said girls never want to hook-up with a guy. It’s fun to let it happen once in a while. We rationalize it to ourselves by saying things like, “you’re getting good experience for when you have a guy you really like,” or “oh well we were drunk, it happens.” But we never really feel great about it later on.
We’re naturally the more emotionally needy of the sexes. Girls can’t get by on sex alone. And how often does a recurring hook-up turn into a relationship? It’s very rare. In fact, it will usually occur to a girl after hooking-up with someone that “Oops, I guess I ruined my shot with him.” This is how girls end up with broken hearts. Those boys get our hopes up and then play it off like it meant nothing.
I heard of countless girls that got too emotionally attached to a guy they had hooked-up with, but it had never happened to me. Then it did. I fell really hard for a boy I had never liked until the third time we hooked-up. He told me we needed to hang-out more often and promised me we would. But months passed, and he didn’t call. It hurt. I felt used. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, however. So I lost him as a friend, and I had to force myself to get over him. I hate to portray myself as the victim here, since it takes two to tango, but it really wouldn’t have played out like this if it had been up to me. It was after this situation that my friends and I realized this has to stop.
How will this problem be reversed? The boys our age aren’t about to change their ways. They’re spoiled, and they know it. Why would they go back to the whole White Knight/Chivalry thing when they get more sex as it is? This issue is so hidden that no one can change it except those it affects. To bring this problem to an end, we would have to look back in history and emulate the sexual morals of our forefathers. Today’s situation had to have come from somewhere. Societal morals have degenerated to this point. Can’t they go back to how they were? When discussing this issue with a guy friend, he said, “Shit, we’re just screwed, man” (Manlove). He was as torn as I am.
The other major question I ask is: Who is to blame? I’m not asking where the strange term hooking-up came from (I mean, think about it, what a weird name). I’m wondering who told our boys, somewhere along the way, that girls are okay with putting-out and being ignored. Blame is often placed on the media, and rightfully. Just look at James Bond, the man that must be mentioned in any discussion of womanizing. The character is never chastised for bedding woman after woman outside of a relationship.
But here’s my ultimate theory. The Big Dilemma is something we’ve inherited from our overzealous parents, along with our college funds and our big ambitions. Our parents have invested more in us than any other generation’s parents ever did. I know I’m generalizing here, but pretty much anyone my age can tell you how their parents told them every day, “You can be anything you want when you grow up!” Our entire childhoods, we were encouraged not just to go to college and get good jobs, but to dominate the world and please, oh please, not to waste all their effort and settle for anything less. With the sexist boundaries all but obliterated by the feminists of the ‘70s, we are now all free to be highly successful adults. There’s a lot of pressure on us.
So these days, marriage is not what we all go to college searching for. In fact, in all our ambitiousness, we have to push the idea of marriage far into the future, where we can’t think about it. There is a time and a place for everything, and your college years and early professional years are for ensuring your success in this world. My dad tells me the next ten years will be the most important years of my life and the choices I make will determine the rest of my life, blah blah blah. “Me Time,” I call it.
In the mean time, dating is a tricky thing. Slightly scared by the idea of falling in love at a young age, we tip-toe around the opposite sex in a game of feigned intimacy. We have made up a culture of hooking-up and called it normal because it is the only way we know how to relate to one another. God forbid we should find true love at such a young age! Yet we want fun and we want it now. Bring on the boys and the booze and the gossip and we will make believe this is what we want.
In order to fix this giant effing hole in our lives, we girls are going to have to assume some responsibility for these circumstances. We’ve gradually let more and more things slide. I think it got harder and harder for us to let the guys know that we’re not okay with things how they are. We need to learn how to do this. If we can start demanding something more- perhaps a little romance- we might save ourselves from the damage being done. I don’t wish upon any girl this bleak outlook towards men that has emerged in my generation. We whine about how sucky guys are these days, but it’s really the situation that sucks. Hooking-up needs to end.
Works Cited
"2006 Hookup Survey." Seventeen Magazine. 2006. 7 Oct. 2006 http://www.seventeen.com/health/smarts/articles/0,,625884_694391,00.html
Brockman. "Get Some." Urban Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2003. 3 Nov. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get+some.
Manlove, Luke. Interview. Minneapolis, MN. Spring 2007.
Let’s say your best friend has just told you she hooked-up with a super-hot guy last night but didn’t know his name. If you’re a seventeen-year-old girl like I am, you might be putting on a congratulatory face but really praying to God your friend doesn’t get hurt. If you’re not a seventeen-year-old girl, however, you’re probably wondering right now, “What the hell does hooked-up mean?” Don’t be afraid; you aren’t the first person to ask this. To my generation, hooking-up is just something we’re expected to do. We know what it means. To others, it is something way beyond comprehension.
After polling 10,000 readers, Seventeen Magazine, along with sexetc.org, defined “hooking-up” as: “Slang expression that can mean different things to different people. Generally refers to when two people are sexual with one another -- kissing, touching or having sexual intercourse” (seventeen.com). This seems pretty reasonable. However, this definition doesn’t touch on the horrible truth that hooking-up always occurs outside of a relationship. In fact, a good portion of hooking-up occurs between two people that have met just that day.
So now that we’ve established what exactly (or, rather what generally) hooking-up means, it’s time to focus on the consequences of this trend. Can I let you in on a little secret? Shhh, don’t tell the boys our age. Hooking-up is ruining us girls. We won’t admit this is true; we’ll “do shit” with guys, and we might even brag about it afterwards. But all of us girls know how damaging this is to our emotional and sexual health. If you’ve hooked-up with a guy, you’ve probably cried about it later.
The expectations placed upon us girls these days leave us no room to say No. If you’re not hooking-up with people, and talking about it the next week at school, you’re considered a prude. If you like a guy, he expects to get a few good make-out sessions out of it. If he likes you back, you go out with him (which in our generation is like the equivalent of marriage) and you’re expected to have sex sooner or later. This is the situation we face.
Our parents wonder why we don’t casually date anymore, but we have a hard time explaining why. Basically, it’s because boys have grown used to getting what they want without putting forth much effort. Forget flowers and candy. We’re lucky if a guy takes us out to a movie before taking us back to his house to “get some”. Our version of dating is called “hanging-out” and it usually entails watching a movie with a guy you like. If this is as far as the relationship goes, you can say you had a “thing” with the guy, or that you hooked-up a few times.
I would be lying if I said girls never want to hook-up with a guy. It’s fun to let it happen once in a while. We rationalize it to ourselves by saying things like, “you’re getting good experience for when you have a guy you really like,” or “oh well we were drunk, it happens.” But we never really feel great about it later on.
We’re naturally the more emotionally needy of the sexes. Girls can’t get by on sex alone. And how often does a recurring hook-up turn into a relationship? It’s very rare. In fact, it will usually occur to a girl after hooking-up with someone that “Oops, I guess I ruined my shot with him.” This is how girls end up with broken hearts. Those boys get our hopes up and then play it off like it meant nothing.
I heard of countless girls that got too emotionally attached to a guy they had hooked-up with, but it had never happened to me. Then it did. I fell really hard for a boy I had never liked until the third time we hooked-up. He told me we needed to hang-out more often and promised me we would. But months passed, and he didn’t call. It hurt. I felt used. I knew I couldn’t blame anyone but myself, however. So I lost him as a friend, and I had to force myself to get over him. I hate to portray myself as the victim here, since it takes two to tango, but it really wouldn’t have played out like this if it had been up to me. It was after this situation that my friends and I realized this has to stop.
How will this problem be reversed? The boys our age aren’t about to change their ways. They’re spoiled, and they know it. Why would they go back to the whole White Knight/Chivalry thing when they get more sex as it is? This issue is so hidden that no one can change it except those it affects. To bring this problem to an end, we would have to look back in history and emulate the sexual morals of our forefathers. Today’s situation had to have come from somewhere. Societal morals have degenerated to this point. Can’t they go back to how they were? When discussing this issue with a guy friend, he said, “Shit, we’re just screwed, man” (Manlove). He was as torn as I am.
The other major question I ask is: Who is to blame? I’m not asking where the strange term hooking-up came from (I mean, think about it, what a weird name). I’m wondering who told our boys, somewhere along the way, that girls are okay with putting-out and being ignored. Blame is often placed on the media, and rightfully. Just look at James Bond, the man that must be mentioned in any discussion of womanizing. The character is never chastised for bedding woman after woman outside of a relationship.
But here’s my ultimate theory. The Big Dilemma is something we’ve inherited from our overzealous parents, along with our college funds and our big ambitions. Our parents have invested more in us than any other generation’s parents ever did. I know I’m generalizing here, but pretty much anyone my age can tell you how their parents told them every day, “You can be anything you want when you grow up!” Our entire childhoods, we were encouraged not just to go to college and get good jobs, but to dominate the world and please, oh please, not to waste all their effort and settle for anything less. With the sexist boundaries all but obliterated by the feminists of the ‘70s, we are now all free to be highly successful adults. There’s a lot of pressure on us.
So these days, marriage is not what we all go to college searching for. In fact, in all our ambitiousness, we have to push the idea of marriage far into the future, where we can’t think about it. There is a time and a place for everything, and your college years and early professional years are for ensuring your success in this world. My dad tells me the next ten years will be the most important years of my life and the choices I make will determine the rest of my life, blah blah blah. “Me Time,” I call it.
In the mean time, dating is a tricky thing. Slightly scared by the idea of falling in love at a young age, we tip-toe around the opposite sex in a game of feigned intimacy. We have made up a culture of hooking-up and called it normal because it is the only way we know how to relate to one another. God forbid we should find true love at such a young age! Yet we want fun and we want it now. Bring on the boys and the booze and the gossip and we will make believe this is what we want.
In order to fix this giant effing hole in our lives, we girls are going to have to assume some responsibility for these circumstances. We’ve gradually let more and more things slide. I think it got harder and harder for us to let the guys know that we’re not okay with things how they are. We need to learn how to do this. If we can start demanding something more- perhaps a little romance- we might save ourselves from the damage being done. I don’t wish upon any girl this bleak outlook towards men that has emerged in my generation. We whine about how sucky guys are these days, but it’s really the situation that sucks. Hooking-up needs to end.
Works Cited
"2006 Hookup Survey." Seventeen Magazine. 2006. 7 Oct. 2006 http://www.seventeen.com/health/smarts/articles/0,,625884_694391,00.html
Brockman. "Get Some." Urban Dictionary. 15 Sept. 2003. 3 Nov. 2006 http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=get+some.
Manlove, Luke. Interview. Minneapolis, MN. Spring 2007.
Wednesday, April 16, 2008
Why I Laughed When He Sipped His Water
“Oh, Tara, did you see the guy behind us?” I whispered to my best friend on the first day of Creative Writing lecture. She nodded with raised eyebrows and we started giggling obnoxiously. He was amazing. If I looked sideways to her, he was directly in my line of sight. This caused problems for me for that whole first lecture. I would lean over to whisper something to Tara, catch a glimpse of his starlingly perfect face, and dissolve in a giggly swoon. She gave me a look of confusion at one point and I blushed in embarrassment.
This guy didn’t look anything like the other guys at the University of Minnesota. He was sharply handome, romantically handsome. He looked like he belonged in another time period. Black hair, strong jaw, dark eyes, pale skin. My dream. He would notice when I looked back in amazement. I must have done it five times in those fifty minutes. His eyes would meet mine and then go back to the lecturer, no annoyance visible on his angelic face.
Several days later, I discovered with a falling face that he wasn’t in my discussion class. I would only get one hour a week to ogle this boy. But I did well at ogling during that hour every Wednesday. By some miracle, he ended up sitting directly in my line of sight every single lecture. If I was to look towards the lecture podium, there would be my dream guy, waiting to be admired. He wasn’t exactly hot like other guys were hot. He wore weird clothes and didn’t speak. I doubted that he had this kind of effect on any other girl in the room. Beyond acknowledging his good looks, Tara never mentioned him again. I guess I saw potential in him. I could picture him in a new black leather coat that I would buy for him, walking next to me around campus and looking achingly handsome.
It became a habit on Wednesdays to dress a little nicer than I usually did. It was silly, really, to get all worked up about some nameless guy in one of my classes. But I never found boys that reminded me of a literary character, and the romantic in me grabbed at the chance to swoon over someone.
And remind me of a literary character he did. He shouldn’t have reminded me of Edward Cullen. Not physically, at least. Edward is supposed to have bronze hair, not black, and golden eyes rather than brown. But this mystery boy had something Edward-ish about him. It might have been his stiff posture, or the elegant way he held his pen. Maybe I just associate any beautiful guy with Edward. But if there’s one way into my heart, it is to remind me of Edward the vampire.
Edward Cullen exists in the dense, rainy forests of Forks, Washington, in a popular teen book series called Twilight. He is a perfect example of what men should be like. There’s something intangible about Edward that has made millions of teenage girls love him obsessively. Even my mom loves Edward Cullen. Suddenly, we all have higher standards in men after we read the Twilight series. We need our men to be gorgeous, protective, mercurial, seductive, mysterious, funny, intelligent, and a little bit dangerous. If a guy like Edward exists in our real world, I haven’t heard about him yet.
But from time to time, I sense some Edward in a random guy I encounter. With this Creative Writing guy, I couldn’t shake the comparison, so my crush grew. I wrote poems about him instead of listening to the guest lecturers. I gazed at his profile as long as I could without letting my friends know I was doing it. That would be awkward. I was aware that it was ridiculous to be so infatuated with someone I had never spoken with. It’s such a shame that looks attract, was how I would always end the poems about this guy. It wasn’t fair for him to win all my attention like this. How did other guys have a shot in my over-romanticized world? I would look around him at the other guys, the nondescript boys that I would never notice, and it seemed absurd that I had such a strong preference for one over all the others. But attraction is a strange phenomenon, and it isn’t really worth your time to ponder it.
One Wednesday, about midway through a forgettable lecture on fiction writing, my mystery boy made a sudden movement and caught my overly-aware eye. He reached for his backpack and pulled out a Nalgene full of water. He untwisted the cap and brought the water bottle to his lips. He took a sip of water and my shoulders shook with silent laughter. He was not Edward Cullen after all, for vampires cannot drink water. Silly me.
This guy didn’t look anything like the other guys at the University of Minnesota. He was sharply handome, romantically handsome. He looked like he belonged in another time period. Black hair, strong jaw, dark eyes, pale skin. My dream. He would notice when I looked back in amazement. I must have done it five times in those fifty minutes. His eyes would meet mine and then go back to the lecturer, no annoyance visible on his angelic face.
Several days later, I discovered with a falling face that he wasn’t in my discussion class. I would only get one hour a week to ogle this boy. But I did well at ogling during that hour every Wednesday. By some miracle, he ended up sitting directly in my line of sight every single lecture. If I was to look towards the lecture podium, there would be my dream guy, waiting to be admired. He wasn’t exactly hot like other guys were hot. He wore weird clothes and didn’t speak. I doubted that he had this kind of effect on any other girl in the room. Beyond acknowledging his good looks, Tara never mentioned him again. I guess I saw potential in him. I could picture him in a new black leather coat that I would buy for him, walking next to me around campus and looking achingly handsome.
It became a habit on Wednesdays to dress a little nicer than I usually did. It was silly, really, to get all worked up about some nameless guy in one of my classes. But I never found boys that reminded me of a literary character, and the romantic in me grabbed at the chance to swoon over someone.
And remind me of a literary character he did. He shouldn’t have reminded me of Edward Cullen. Not physically, at least. Edward is supposed to have bronze hair, not black, and golden eyes rather than brown. But this mystery boy had something Edward-ish about him. It might have been his stiff posture, or the elegant way he held his pen. Maybe I just associate any beautiful guy with Edward. But if there’s one way into my heart, it is to remind me of Edward the vampire.
Edward Cullen exists in the dense, rainy forests of Forks, Washington, in a popular teen book series called Twilight. He is a perfect example of what men should be like. There’s something intangible about Edward that has made millions of teenage girls love him obsessively. Even my mom loves Edward Cullen. Suddenly, we all have higher standards in men after we read the Twilight series. We need our men to be gorgeous, protective, mercurial, seductive, mysterious, funny, intelligent, and a little bit dangerous. If a guy like Edward exists in our real world, I haven’t heard about him yet.
But from time to time, I sense some Edward in a random guy I encounter. With this Creative Writing guy, I couldn’t shake the comparison, so my crush grew. I wrote poems about him instead of listening to the guest lecturers. I gazed at his profile as long as I could without letting my friends know I was doing it. That would be awkward. I was aware that it was ridiculous to be so infatuated with someone I had never spoken with. It’s such a shame that looks attract, was how I would always end the poems about this guy. It wasn’t fair for him to win all my attention like this. How did other guys have a shot in my over-romanticized world? I would look around him at the other guys, the nondescript boys that I would never notice, and it seemed absurd that I had such a strong preference for one over all the others. But attraction is a strange phenomenon, and it isn’t really worth your time to ponder it.
One Wednesday, about midway through a forgettable lecture on fiction writing, my mystery boy made a sudden movement and caught my overly-aware eye. He reached for his backpack and pulled out a Nalgene full of water. He untwisted the cap and brought the water bottle to his lips. He took a sip of water and my shoulders shook with silent laughter. He was not Edward Cullen after all, for vampires cannot drink water. Silly me.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
