Recently at work my boss was telling me about how his son has just started dating and how the "big thing" right now is to come up with creative ways to ask someone out. Anything from the entire football team lining up shirtless with a letter on their stomach spelling "Will you go to homecoming with me" to breaking into their room to decorate was mentioned. As you can imagine, this brought back so many memories for me. I decided to blog today about one of my experiences back in college......
As a sophomore in college I had decided that I was older and more mature than I was as a stupid freshman and had moved off campus to make a statement. Now, instead of going for a large apartment complex to live in, I decided that I wanted to be in a small complex in a quieter area where hopefully more people were normal. I had heard quite a lot of negative things about the large apartment complexes so I was hoping I had made a smart choice.
As it turns out, this was a HUGE mistake! The people around me were not normal! The guys were all almost 30 (to a 19 year-old sophomore 30 seems insanely old) and the girls were so rude. I decided that I could deal with older guys because I didn't want to date them because I already had someone that I liked and even though we weren't in the same state we were still close. The girls I just couldn't deal with, they were awful. So in an effort to avoid the rude girls I didn't talk to any boy that I knew the girls liked, I didn't want them mad at me for "trying to steal" their man! I only talked to the nerdy guys the girls ignored.
This of course came back to bite me because as you know, nerdy guys have a different perspective on the female species. Since girls rarely talk to them, the second one actually does these nerdy boys automatically think this means "She loves me! She talked to me so that must mean she loves me!"
There was one in nerd in particular that I always made sure to talk to be nice. Just to be nice is the key there. He was just so shy all the time and I felt like I could just say hi. Of course this was taken WAY out of hand in his mind. So the worst day of the year (as has been my mantra since the 8th grade) Valentine's Day was coming. I had, of course, called my sister and begged to watch her adorable baby boys on that day so that she could go out with her husband and I would have the perfect excuse to turn all dates/offers down.
The day before Valentine's Day I left the apartment in a rush and tripped (of course since I have horrible ankles) over a flower pot. I was furious that someone would put a flower pot right in the way of our door. Seriously, who does that? So I kicked it, then at a closer look I saw that it had my name on. I got the familiar sick feeling in my stomach that I get when I know someone is going ask me out and I don't want to go. I also saw all of the signs of a "creative date ask out." I remember physically shivering and dreading what I saw.
I came in and threw the dreaded flower pot on the table. I then proceeded to call every guy I thought could have possibly done this and accused them of trying to be all cutesy to ask me out! Each one of them told me that they knew I hated Valentine's Day and that they wouldn't dare do something like that because they knew they would face my wrath. So while I was trying to ignore the detested flower pot my roommate decided to dig into it and see what was in it. She eventually coaxed me into helping her.
The flower pot was full of chocolate pudding, Oreo cookies, gummie worms, a small baggie with 86 random letters, and a note that said "will you be my Valentine? If you say yet, meet me at my apartment at 8 on Valentine's Day." After finding this note I once again felt sick to my stomach and kept wondering what kind of idiot did this to me!!
We searched and searched for anything else that would tell us who this flower pot came from and just what apartment the note referenced. We got totally messy as we dug and dug around this flower pot! We dumped it out, and went through the whole thing with our hands! We found nothing, nothing at all. So we turned to the bag of letters hoping there was a clue in there.
Boy were we disappointed!!! There were just 86 totally and completely random letters in the baggie. There was no clue at all!! You can spell anything with 86 random letters! Some letters were in red and some letters were in black. So just to amuse ourselves we spelled words like "idiot" and "moron" it just made me feel better to spell those words out.
After not being able to solve the mystery of who and where on Valentine's Day I couldn't even call whoever had sent it to tell them I had plans! I had no idea what to do, so I ended up doing nothing. On Valentine's Day no one showed up at my door or called me to tell me they were the one who left the flower pot there. I was still furious!!
After the incident about a month passed by with still no word. I got caught up in school and work and stop thinking about my fury. One of my other roommates let a small crowd of nerds into our apartment to hang out while I was at work one night. I got home exhausted and was not happy to see the small gathering in my apartment. As I walked in she was telling them about the flower pot and the nerd that I was always nice to turned bright red. It was obviously him who had given me the flower pot! It was VERY difficult to contain my rage and not just fly off the handle at him!!! I looked at him and said, how in the world was I to know that it was YOU!!! He said that the black letters in the bag spelled his name. I told him as nicely as I could that there was no way in the world that I was going to get that, that I had no idea who it was and couldn't even call to tell them that I already had plans. I neglected to tell him that my plans had been to babysit because I decided it was best if he thought that I had a boyfriend! Hopefully that would keep him from asking me out in the future!!
So that is the end of the story. As I look back on this experience I feel bad for the little nerd, but then again not really because there was nothing I could do! I'm sure that this wasn't a very good experience for him either. But the whole "creative" thing just killed his chances!! So that is my story about the "creative ask out" going completely awry!
