It’s the favorite question at family gatherings, slumber parties, awkward run-ins with your parents’ friends,…
It’s like the Brady Bunch, but with skinny jeans and minus the weird maid.
I’m so sorry that my life isn’t seasoned enough with juicy romances for your liking. Let me just drop everything and get right on that.
So to buy some time I’m going to tell you a little story.
a.k.a., Let me blind you with my sense of humor so you’ll calm down.
An interesting thing happens in grad school. Take thirty people, let them swirl around in a plethora of stressful situations, mix in a string of poor decisions, and–voila!–you’ve got yourself a crop of budding romances.
I wrote earlier about how the first-year gents were hitting on me like a hammer at the beginning of the year. I worked it to my (very selfish) benefit for a little while, but that was just mean. And also what am I seriously going to do with a free drink.
But you really can’t blame me for what happened.
Hanging out with a group of fun kids on a late summer night, I suddenly felt a very strange something.
I didn’t know what to do! It was such an awkward thing! This person I’d known for about six days (we’ll call him “Romeo” because, funny enough, that is his actual name) was totally coming on to me by latching on to the fact that I looked cold.
And meanwhile I was SWEATING TO DEATH.
But Miss Manners never wrote a column regarding the situation in which one perspiring young woman finds her arm the subject of attentive and uninvited arm friction. So I naturally bore it with grace and poise, of course.
Not awkward. At all.
(The thing is, there’s really nothing wrong with Romeo. He’s actually a very nice guy. But I wasn’t interested.
And I don’t let just anybody paw my arms.)
But wait! The story gets even better!
Undeterred by my literal shrugging-off of his advances, Romeo continued to stalk me and my desk and my drawings and my everything for the next couple of weeks until suddenly…
Romeo found his Juliet.
And it wasn’t me.
But she wasn’t single.
Until she out-of-the-blue dumped her boyfriend OF FOUR YEARS to start hanging with Romeo.
And suddenly, whenever Romeo passed my way, his smile began to show some unprecedented smugness around the edges.
So you can imagine my surprise when, two weeks later when Juliet ran back to the ever-lovin’ arms of her former beau, Romeo was once again lurking around my desk.
But the thing is, I could NEVER actually say any of these things.
Which is why this is what is happening right now:
Mercy.
