Friday, October 08, 2004
”Let’s go get the shit kicked out of us by love”
The other day, during an internal debate on whether or not I should call a boy I met last week and ask him out for a drink, I realized that the last time I actually asked a guy out was in the seventh grade. There’s good reason for that, as it was one of the most horrible moments of my life.
I had been nursing a major crush on my friend John for the better part of the year, and I’d decided that the time had come to finally do something about it. The last dance of the year, the Spring Fling, was coming up. I was determined to ask John, but I decided to throw in an “as friends” to give the implication that there wasn’t any pressure, although I don’t know why I bothered—everyone knows that, in seventh grade, there’s no such thing as going to a dance “as friends.” I guess I was hoping that John was somehow unaware of this particular rule in the middle-school social code.
I carefully penned the question on yellow notebook paper, making sure to include the requisite “yes” and “no” boxes for him to check, folded it up in one of the intricate origami designs that were so popular with seventh graders in the early ‘90s, and gave it to my friend Erin with explicit instructions to hand it to him as he was headed for the bus. Apparently, she misunderstood me, because she handed it to him as we were all sitting back in homeroom, listening to the afternoon announcements. Everything started to move as if in slow motion as I saw the note being transferred from Erin’s hand to John’s, as he opened the note and digested its contents, and as he looked up at me with a shocked expression on his face. As soon as the bell rang, I bolted out of the classroom.
The next day, in homeroom, John passed my note back to me. A vast departure from its pristine condition the day before, it had obviously been crumpled up (I assumed out of sheer embarrassment upon receipt), then smoothed back out and folded into a crude square. I opened it up slowly, hoping to delay the inevitable, but there it was—a big black check mark in the “no” box. I was devastated.
After such blunt rejection at an impressionable age, you can see why I was so hesitant to repeat the whole process. But eleven years is a long time. Maybe things would turn out differently this time. And if they didn’t, at least all I had invested was one brief meeting, not a year of desperate pining in homeroom. I simply had to do it.
So I did. And this time, I got a check in the “yes” box. However, I also was a little more ambiguous about the whole “as friends” thing this time around, so I’m not sure where that stands. (After all, after seventh grade, it becomes possible to actually go out “as friends” with a member of the opposite sex.) I guess we’ll see. If nothing else, I was able, after a mere eleven years, to get over my fear of rejection.
The other day, during an internal debate on whether or not I should call a boy I met last week and ask him out for a drink, I realized that the last time I actually asked a guy out was in the seventh grade. There’s good reason for that, as it was one of the most horrible moments of my life.
I had been nursing a major crush on my friend John for the better part of the year, and I’d decided that the time had come to finally do something about it. The last dance of the year, the Spring Fling, was coming up. I was determined to ask John, but I decided to throw in an “as friends” to give the implication that there wasn’t any pressure, although I don’t know why I bothered—everyone knows that, in seventh grade, there’s no such thing as going to a dance “as friends.” I guess I was hoping that John was somehow unaware of this particular rule in the middle-school social code.
I carefully penned the question on yellow notebook paper, making sure to include the requisite “yes” and “no” boxes for him to check, folded it up in one of the intricate origami designs that were so popular with seventh graders in the early ‘90s, and gave it to my friend Erin with explicit instructions to hand it to him as he was headed for the bus. Apparently, she misunderstood me, because she handed it to him as we were all sitting back in homeroom, listening to the afternoon announcements. Everything started to move as if in slow motion as I saw the note being transferred from Erin’s hand to John’s, as he opened the note and digested its contents, and as he looked up at me with a shocked expression on his face. As soon as the bell rang, I bolted out of the classroom.
The next day, in homeroom, John passed my note back to me. A vast departure from its pristine condition the day before, it had obviously been crumpled up (I assumed out of sheer embarrassment upon receipt), then smoothed back out and folded into a crude square. I opened it up slowly, hoping to delay the inevitable, but there it was—a big black check mark in the “no” box. I was devastated.
After such blunt rejection at an impressionable age, you can see why I was so hesitant to repeat the whole process. But eleven years is a long time. Maybe things would turn out differently this time. And if they didn’t, at least all I had invested was one brief meeting, not a year of desperate pining in homeroom. I simply had to do it.
So I did. And this time, I got a check in the “yes” box. However, I also was a little more ambiguous about the whole “as friends” thing this time around, so I’m not sure where that stands. (After all, after seventh grade, it becomes possible to actually go out “as friends” with a member of the opposite sex.) I guess we’ll see. If nothing else, I was able, after a mere eleven years, to get over my fear of rejection.
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