I’m going to talk about a time where someone dropped hints on me that I just wouldn’t believe really. And it goes back – this all kinda ties – what a early 2000s week – ties back to my job, my first job, at the pool house kitchen at a country club on the east side of the state. There was a girl there who taught tennis lessons, she was my age, and I was smitten the day I saw her, and the more I got to know about her, the more she knocked me off my feet. And you know, it was just gonna be a thing where it’s like, “Yeah, she’s amazing, period. End of story.” She seemed so far out of my league, so amazingly far out of my league. She was so intelligent, so bright, so like weirdly funny, and she was amazing in almost every way. She was so out of my league that I just never gave anything any kind of thought. And one day we we struck up a conversation over leftover birthday cake from a children’s birthday party we hosted at the club, and I was super nervous and probably very awkward and whatever. I can’t remember really what we talked about much, but I do know that, you know, shortly after our discussion she ran into me and, you know, asked me if I was going to the Fourth of July fireworks celebration at the club, and I mentioned that I was considering that and she basically was like, “You should go with me. Here’s my phone number.” And she wrote down her phone number for me and gave it to me, and I was like, “Yeah, that’s nice of her. What a – she seems like a nice person.” And so I called her with much trepidation, and we set up a time to meet at the Fourth of July celebration and turns out she brought like four friends, and so maybe I had for a moment, maybe I thought that perhaps she liked me, but once I saw the friends show up, I was like, “Oh, this is not a date at all. That was the stupidest thing you could have ever thought. This is just a big group hangout thing.” And plus, she brought a guy too among her groups of friends. And so yeah, so then we went and to find a nice spot, nice cozy spot away from everybody else to watch the fireworks, her and me and her group of friends.
And I just felt like such an add-on. It was fun, but it was whatever. But afterwards, she invited me back to her house with her friends, and as her friends broke off to get into their cars, she leaned back and said to me about the other guy that was there. She’s like, “Just so you know, I would never date somebody like that.” And in my head I was like, “Oh, that’s interesting fun fact. I don’t know why she would share that with me.” And this comes after she spent a good deal of the night asking if I had a girlfriend and, you know, my immediate dating history, what kind of people I’m interested in, whatever. I was just all like, “She’s quite inquisitive. That’s consistent with what I imagine her to be. She’s an inquisitive sort.”
And so with that, I used my dad’s cell phone that he let me borrow that night because that’s what I did in the early 2000s, I borrowed other people’s cell phones. And I called home to say like, “Hey, yeah, I’m going over to a friend’s house, I guess.” And I went over there and, it was just a bunch of her people that I didn’t know, just hanging out in her basement, kind of a family-friendly evening. And I noticed she had like an old computer. Even for 2002, it was an old computer. And so, I didn’t know what I was gonna do with myself, ao I went over to the computer to see what was going on there, and she started telling me about this game that she loved, this very old game from the 90s, which was only three years before that, but I think she meant like mid 90s. Almost a game like Snake, I think. And she’s like, “Oh, you should totally try it, whatever,” and I tried to get the game going and I couldn’t quite understand how it worked, and I remember her coming, like, over my shoulder as I sat down and she took her hand and put it on my hand and like guided the mouse around. And even then it’s like, “Oh, she’s a good helper. Cool! That helped me play the game better!”
And so that was in hindsight. I’m not sure if there’s ever been a woman I’ve encountered who’s laid it on thicker than that, and even that was just, it wasn’t enough for me to put two and two together. It was constantly like, “Eh. If I didn’t know better, she could be kind of like sending me some signs here, but I think she’s too far out of my league. So it can’t be that. She must just be really nice.” And frankly, the signs didn’t stop and I just – she probably could have literally held up a sign saying like, “Yo, I’m interested in you.” And I’d be like, “Oh, that’s a nice sign, that – you designed that pretty well. What’s it mean?” So that’s I guess my example of a time where someone else dropped hints toward me and I could just – I couldn’t figure it out.