2003-01-05 - 4:58 p.m.

Okay, so, three weeks ago, I was incredibly hopeful about the way things were going with Ariel. Things seemed to be great, I couldn’t have hoped for them to be much better. Then she went home for Thanksgiving, and there was still no sign of things going badly. Well, there was one sign, but it seemed like something we were easily going to work through.

I then spent the next three weeks in hell. With Ariel always seeming too busy to see me, and the few times she was around, more interested in talking with everyone else in the room than me. Like I was a friend of a friend, a casual acquaintance, rather than someone she actually wanted to date. Worse, every time I tried to get some time alone with her, she either couldn’t, or at one point, actually told me, “I think I’d rather be alone” than have me wait with her for her bus back to school. Three weeks between Thanksgiving and when she was leaving for Italy, and all I wanted was to get some time with her. I got approximately three and a half minutes alone with her in those three weeks. I knew fairly early on something was wrong, but I tried to pretend I was just being paranoid. I do that. I make stupid, blatantly wrong assumptions about how people feel about me based purely on my own insecurities.

Turns out I wasn’t wrong.

I knew we needed to talk about things and figure out just what the hell was going on, but we didn’t manage to until the Thursday *after* she left. I called her up that Thursday night (now two weeks ago), we talked. She informed me that, over Thanksgiving break, she had decided that she really felt better, for the moment, not being tied to anyone. She liked having her independence for a little while, and also had decided that having me as a friend was much more important to her than having me as part of a potential relationship, because she didn’t feel as comfortable talking to me like that. Really, that’s about all the information I feel like going into here.

So that’s the back story, so you can understand what’s going on now, because if I didn’t explain that, it would seem blatantly contradictory to what I said in my last two entries.

Now to begin the more important story.

Begin three months ago. The week after my 21st birthday (October 9th), I was on vacation from work. Granted, I didn’t go on vacation in the sense that I went anywhere, simply that I was paid to not work for over a week. I spent most of that week working on a book. When I got bored and needed a break, I would walk over to a bookstore called the Harvard Coop and find the spot between Bonnie Friedman and Northrop Frye in the Essays section where the book I was working on then would be found if I ever finished it. That would get me working again for a bit, and all would be well.

One other thing that happened while I was there was I noticed a girl who was working there. She was incredibly cute, had those cool librarian glasses that I love, and when I first noticed her, she was standing behind the registers, reading a book of Bush-isms and laughing about them with the guy working at the register next to her. And at that moment, every instinct I have told me, “Meet this girl, talk to this girl, ask this girl out, she couldn’t be more perfect for you,” which was strange because I knew practically nothing about her, so there’s no reason I should have believed that. But I still did. And for the next month, every time I was in there and saw her, I got the same feeling that I absolutely needed to meet her, and that I absolutely couldn’t bring myself to talk to her. That’s the most frustrating thing about life. While all I want is to find someone with whom I can be truly happy with, the more I want to talk to a person who I think has any potential to be that someone, the more I *can’t* talk to that person. Seems to me to be blatantly contradictory to the laws of evolution, because by now, you’d think people with the tendency to be nervous and stupid around someone who you might some day wish to be with would have been long weeded out of the population. But instead, here again, I found myself totally unable to talk to someone because of the simple fact that I really wanted to talk to her.

Jump ahead to October 28th. I had spent the weekend rather sick with a horrible sore throat while I walked around Washington, D.C., yelling about an oncoming war in a group of a couple of hundred thousand other people. Come that Monday (the 28th), I woke up feeling far too sick to go into work. So I called in sick, stayed home, and slept. Around 5:30, though, I couldn’t stay in the house any longer. So I left, went to Harvard Square, which I do basically every time I don’t have anything better to do. I went to the Au Bon Pain (affectionately known by my friends as The Pain) with my iBook and did some writing. After a while, though, I couldn’t sit there any more, so I packed up my computer and headed over to the Coop.

As I walked in, I remember noticing that in the display window, there were many many copies of “If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a B Movie Actor” by Bruce Campbell. I thought this was quite odd because I’ve been a huge fan of Bruce Campbell for about six or seven years, and I’ve already had this book for over a year, so it didn’t make sense that they’d have so many copies out just then, even though it had just come out in paperback. Anyway, I went into the store, not thinking much of it. I tried to walk down one aisle, but it was clogged with people. I thought it was just the longest line of people I’d ever seen at the registers there. I tried going around them to the next aisle, but it was also clogged with people, so I realized there was obviously going something on here. I looked around and noticed that everyone was holding a copy of “If Chins Could Kill.” I had an idea of what was going on, but I couldn’t possibly bring myself to believe I could be so incredibly lucky as to have *accidentally* stumbled on a Bruce Campbell book signing. It simply wasn’t possible.

Then, in the crowd, I saw my friend Luke. Luke is a student at Boston University and went to MSSM with me. I haven’t seen him since I moved to Boston, so I went over to say hi. He smiled when he saw me and said, “Dave! I knew I’d see you here.” I asked, “What’s going on here?” because I was totally unwilling to believe that it was what I thought it was. He refused to believe that I could possibly be there and not know what was going on. As much as I assured him I didn’t know, he refused to believe me, so finally I just asked someone else in the crowd what was happening. He pointed through the crowd, which parted like the clouds after a storm, and I saw, sitting at the table in the front of the help desk, was Bruce Campbell, shaking hands with a fan. I ran home as fast as possible, got my copy of the book, and ran back, taking a number toward the end of the line and waiting.

As I approached the front of the line, my book and digital camera in hand, I came closer and closer to two of the people who have fascinated me more than anyone in the last few years. Bruce Campbell and, taking pictures of people while they get their books signed, Coop Girl. I didn’t know her name yet, but everyone in my group of friends knew her as The Girl From the Coop. And now I had an opportunity to talk to her. So of course, I had no idea what to say to her, and had pretty much resigned myself to the fact that I once again wasn’t going to be able to bring myself to.

Fortunately I didn’t have to. Because she said something to me instead. I happened to be wearing my They Might Be Giants T-shirt, and she mentioned that she liked it and was a pretty big fan of the band. We only talked for about twenty seconds, but that was all I needed. We’d spoken. We’d spoken, and that meant that somehow I’d be able to talk to her again, hopefully. It was a beginning, and that’s all that was important.

So a month passed, and though I finally had a way to talk to her, I had this horrible fear that if, once again, I tried to pick up a girl who I only knew because she was cute and worked at a store I frequented, it would probably go just as badly as it had gone the time before. I was, in short, afraid. So instead, I went after Ariel, knowing the whole time that I’d probably be happiest with this girl from the Coop who I’d only talked to once. I knew Ariel, I was friends with Ariel, I knew I stood a better chance with Ariel. So, a month after the Bruce Campbell book signing, I hadn’t talked with the girl from the Coop again, and I was going to a They MIght Be Giants concert in a Borders bookstore in Boston. And finally I had a way to talk to her, and I did. I found my way into the Coop a couple of hours before the concert, to see if she was working. As I guessed, she was, so I went up to her where she was standing, doing something with a few books and some kind of scanner thing. I never bothered finding out what it was she was doing, because frankly it wasn’t what I was interested in at the time. I asked her if she knew TMBG was playing in the city that day. She slammed the book she was holding down on the shelf and said, “YES! Thanks for reminding me!” She was smiling while she was saying it, though, so it was okay, and we started talking for about twenty minutes before I finally had to go to get to the concert, and it was full of comfortable, fun, lighthearted, kind of flirtatious banter that just ended up proving to me that we really would get along together almost exactly the same way I expected us to. I found myself, that day, more excited about the fact that I had talked with her than I was about going to see They Might Be Giants live, which I never thought would be the case.

I then spent the next month or more pursuing Ariel, and doing rather well, and actually *avoiding* talking with the girl from the Coop. Not just being unable to talk to her, but at times, even avoiding going into the store because I might be compelled to talk to her. Things were moving along, changing constantly with Ariel. First I was avoiding her because I was pursuing Ariel, then I was avoiding her because Ariel was dragging me through a lot of shit, and I didn’t know how it was going to turn out. If I’d known what was going to happen, I’d have been able to talk with her, but because I didn’t know, I couldn’t. If Ariel had just ended things with me instead of waiting weeks to finally tell me what she’d been thinking, then I’d have been able to pursue the girl from the Coop. If she’d told me she wanted to be together when she got back from Italy, then I’d have been able to talk to the girl from the Coop (and finally find out her name) as a friend. But at that horrible middle area, I couldn’t talk to her at all.

Well, finally, Ariel officially ended things with me, and it turned me brazen, and possibly a little stupid. I decided I was going to go all out and see what happened. Another decision I made was that I was going to start going to the Coop cafe for the half hour every weekday between when I get out of work and when the Coop closes in an attempt to force myself to write more. My first day of this was New Year’s Day. Whatever other reasons I may have had, my main reason for going was still to write for half an hour every day. So when I got to the Coop on the first, I managed to force myself up to the cafe for half an hour of writing, which actually went pretty well. Then I headed downstairs where I saw her working when I walked in.

I walked to the front of the store and lingered near the register for a moment until she noticed me standing there. And when she did, her face *lit up*. She waved me over with a blurred shake of her hand, and I went to go stand near the registers and talk with her (glancing quickly to the name tag that read Melissa-Ann). An hour and a half later I finally had to leave, because the store was closing, but it seemed like every minute we talked I wanted even more to be dating her. She just kept seeming more and more perfect for me. Everything she said she liked to do or was a fan of, or anything like that, would not only be an interest I share, but one that I never seem to share with anyone else. It was amazing. By the end of the conversation, I knew I had to do what I could to date this girl. I knew subtlety, dancing around the subject, all of those things I always do would not work here. I just had to go all out. And so, Friday, that’s just what I did.

When I got out of work Friday, I knew I had half an hour before the Coop closed to either ask her out, if I found the opportunity, or try to make the opportunity appear. So I went in, and unfortunately, while she *was* working, there were a couple of other people she works with right there next to her. So I couldn’t just up and ask her out without embarrassing the both of us. So instead, I tried as hard as possible to subtly convince her to come over to the Pain after work (though I obviously didn’t refer to it as “The Pain”). She seemed oblivious to the fact that I was trying to get *her* to go to the Pain, as opposed to trying to get *someone* to go to the Pain so I wouldn’t be bored. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to convince her without getting either really obvious or really pushy. So I gave up on that and decided I’d just wait for another chance in the future. A bit dejected, I left.

Walking toward the Pain to get a drink, something sort of came together for me. I knew when she was leaving work, and I knew that she was going home on the same subway line as me, in the same direction. I knew if I just waited fifteen minutes, she’d be in the train station, and I’d probably have my chance. So that’s just what I did. Into the station I went, and I waited. And, as expected, fifteen minutes or so later, down the ramp she came. When she saw me, she gave me that cool, tilted-head, “Well, I didn’t expect to see you here!” smile, and asked, “You headed home?”

I decided at that moment, I was just going to be totally honest here. At this point, there was no reason to be anything else. So I told her, “Well, sort of, but actually, I was just waiting.”

“Waiting?” she asked. “For what?”

I smiled. “For you.”

“Why?”

“Well, I wanted to know if you might want to go out some time.”

She smiled, and looked at me for a moment, then just answered, “Wow, you’re a brave guy.”

Why can’t people just say yes or no? Why? Why do you have to do these things to me? How hard is it to just say yes or no? “You’re a brave guy” could be followed in so many ways! Why put me through this he--

“I’d like that.”

*ahem* WOO! She said she wants to date me! Holy shit, she actually said yes. Wait a minute... what do I do now? I didn’t have a damn clue what you’re supposed to do after this. I’ve never said “Do you want to go out sometime” to someone and had them say yes. And I was about to say that, too, when she said to me, “Yeah, I don’t know what to do now, either,” like she was reading my mind.

We basically figured out that neither one of us has *ever* been in this situation before, so we didn’t really know what to do. But we figured out that I should get her number, which I quickly programmed into my cell phone, and that we’ll have to talk and figure something out very soon. And until then, I can just rest happy knowing that she wants to date me. And I haven’t been so happy in a while. I couldn’t have asked for it to work out better than it has. Hopefully it’ll stay that way.