The Five Stages of When a Pretty Girl Talks to You

Spring is in the air, which means attractive women will be popping out of the woodwork left and right in your everyday life. Now don’t worry, most of these hot girls won’t even notice you, and the ones that do definitely won’t want to interact with you…however, the law of averages says that at some point a cute gal is going to need you for something (like doing her math homework or giving up your place in the movie theater line so her and her friends can see Spring Breakers, etc.), so in order to give you a fighting chance when that situation arises, I’ve written a brief guide to assist you…

Wait…why is she looking over here? Oh God, her mouth is making sounds at me, OH GOD SAVE ME!

The Five Stages of When a Pretty Girl Talks to You:

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Twenty for Twenty: Trax on Trax on Trax

Are some of you 20 years old out there? Nice! Would you be interested in hearing about a show that debuted the year you were born? Well you’re in luck, because I just had a totally original idea to take the 20th of every month to celebrate something from 20 years ago, which is in no way a cheap repurposing of the 10 for 10 gimmick that I came up with along with hundreds of other people.

The year was 1993, electricity had just recently been invented, and with it, came the advent of something called televised-vision (or television, for short). Along with an endless stream of gameshows, talk shows, and soap operas, televised-vision (or television for short (or TV for SUPER short, because acronyms hadn’t been invented yet)) came original, fictional programming.

Nineteen-Ninety-Thrice produced several breakout TV hits in this genre, but the one that was dearest to my heart while simultaneously being the most obscure reference I could make in this post is: Time Trax! What’s that? Never heard of Time Trax?! Well as Mister Rogers would say, “STRAP THE F*** IN, NEIGHBORS, IT’S TIME TO TAKE THE PARTY TROLLEY TO THE LAND OF MAKE-BELIEVE!”

The year 2193: where we finally replaced “cks” with X, just like you always knew we would.

The Name Game

All my life I’ve told people that I’m bad with names when I can’t remember theirs.  This isn’t entirely true.  But it’s not entirely false, either.

The “problem” — if one can characterize something so relatively trivial as a true problem in a world flush with famine, poverty, economic woes, WMDs and the constant threat that Robert Pattinson’s acting is lurking around every corner — is that people tend to fall into one of three categories for me: 1) uninteresting, unattractive, not ambitious…in a word, average.  And average isn’t good enough to get your name remembered in the sea of people that we all meet randomly throughout our lives.  If that sounds cold, maybe it’s time to stop listing Nickelback and “hanging with friends” as your only interests when I ask you about yourself.  2) People I pretend to not really remember in order to either sound aloof, secure a higher social footing, or to avoid an awkward situation where I remember them, but they have no recollection of me.  These are usually either people I’d like to avoid and forget altogether, or people that I think should remember me and do the initiating (the implication being that I’m “too good” to start interactions with them…I know, I know, I’m a bastard).  3) The final group is everyone who meets or exceeds that value quotient (e.g. people I look up to or respect, successful peers, fun people, attractive women, etc.) but for whom I still feign ignorance of because I don’t want to come off as the creepy-stalker type or someone who’s overly into them or whatever.  3a) In fairness to myself, I should point out that I do genuinely forget people’s names sometimes even if they don’t fit into any of the aforementioned categories.  Same is true if I’m being introduced to a group…once you’ve said more than two names in a row, I’ve started flushing them to clear out the mental space I need to make a herpes joke.  And herpes jokes take the most mental energy of all the STD jokes.