I’m a fool in love. Always have been. I don’t know where I ever learned it, but I am all about preserving and growing my love relationships to the point where even I go, “I did that? What was I thinking?!?!”
Introducing the former Crown Prince of England who abdicated the throne for a girl, and the girl he did it for.
Case in point, I’m living in LA. Me no like LA. I was happily living in the San Francisco Bay Area basking in the love of friends and family and a decidedly eclectic career, when lo and behold! A man loves me with all his heart and all I have to do is move to LA and live in his big house and dress like a bunny rabbit sometimes. (Just kidding. About the big house part.) But I have done some shameful things for love. For example: I stalked a boyfriend. We were in college at UC Irvine, he broke up with me after I had moved my entire life across the country to be with him (I moved to IRVINE for gosh’s sake, you’d want to kill someone too!), so I made it my duty to sit outside his house in my Toyota and watch him go in and out and see if there was another girl with him. And when I found out who the girl was, I stalked her. (She was a biology major and I just happened to work at the Science Library so it was easy to monitor them on an almost regular basis.) So yes. I was crazy. (And in hindsight, I understand now why he broke up with me.) So yes, some call it romantic, some call it SICK. (And I see it as both.)
What crazy thing have you done for love?
ROGER: My freshman year in college I met this nice girl. For some reason, I fell really hard for her. So, after a few casual dates to Subway, Ben & Jerry’s, and Dunkin Donuts, I decided I needed to do something really special to show her my authentic love. So that’s when I did it – I gave her a dozen roses made of cafeteria napkins! Not only that, I took red nail polish and highlighted the rose tips with them so that they were a dozen almost red roses (not my nail polish, if you’re wondering). And not only that, I spritzed it with my Christian Dior cologne (which smelled very much like a toned down Chanel No.5). After finishing my bouquet of napkin roses, scented with my man musk, I then proceeded to tape them on her dorm room door with a love note on it. It was rad. Until, of course, all my guy friends saw the love bouquet on her door before she did. I was caught. My man-dude friends totally roasted me for this action de emasculation for months. It was a great shame for me from a man perspective. But an incredible victory for me in the romance department. Anything for ruv, right?
Roger, the job is yours! You can make all my bridesmaids’ bouquets!
ALFREDO: Roger! You can’t leave us hanging! How did the girl react? Tell us about the “victory” part. Did she run for the exits or melt in your palms? Details, man! When I was 15, a short lived mod nightclub (mod = vespas, parkas, 60’s threads, The Jam, The Specials, The Kinks, The Who) opened near the suburb where I lived. I met a girl there named Cheryl. She, too, was a mod – modette – who was cute, sweet, and had a withered arm. We talked for all of ten minutes, I’m guessing. But as a kid attending an all boys Catholic school, it was enough for me to develop a full-on crush. I didn’t have her phone number, but she did mention she went to Burbank High. Good enough. So here’s what I did: I made the saddest, most pathetic flyer in the world – something about “let’s have mod days,” where us mods would go to scooter rallies, concerts, shop for vintage records, etc, and left a bunch of tags hanging at the bottom with my phone number. I taped them up all around Burbank High, hoping that she would see them, recognize my name, and call. She never did, nor did anyone else – to this day I don’t know if she saw them but chose not to call, or never saw them at all. The final humiliation came when my mom complimented me on making such a “nice effort” to meet new friends. (we had just moved to sleepy Glendale from sketchy Hollywood, and I was car-less, miserable and lonely). File this one under “missed connections – more pathetic than usual.”
Mod Girl you missed out! This could be all yours, but NO! You don’t read flyers!
DHH: Once, to impress a girl in London, I swallowed a big lump of hash, claiming it would have no effect on me. I had dinner scheduled later that night with a major film producer. Of course, the hash did kick in, and I spent the entire meal barely able to string together a sentence, trying over and over again to cut the same piece of meat. Needless to say, the producer never hired me for anything, and the girl ended up far from impressed.
PHILIP: I’ve done a number of crazy things in my youth but as I’ve already blogged about many of those instances here already, don’t want to repeat. But this got me thinking–back in the day, one of the things you did to show a girl you were interested was make her a mixtape/mixCD–filled with songs you think she’ll dig and expresses your feelings. Do people still do that in the digital age?
IRIS: I was just thinking of the mixtape as well. I think that was the thing to do back then. The more embarrassing part of that for me was actually singing on the mixtape. Ugghh, that was a bad move. At least he didn’t break up with me…right away.
DAVID: I made a homepage/website for a gal I wanted to be with… didn’t work. Chicks don’t dig nerdy gifts.
Love says, “Click on this, baby!”
QUENTIN: I wrote poems for the first few guys I used to have crushes on and gave them my poems when I was still “undeclared” in college. No wonder I became an English major and loved Romantic literature. I mean the big R not the small “r.” I had no shame at all.
EMMIE:
I wouldn’t call it love, but I was very infatuated with this guy. He was the kind of man who turned heads of hot women while strolling down the street with his shorts nearly falling off his svelte, tall, muscular body. I met him while learning to scuba dive in Australia. We hung out ever so briefly, and then I went off to New Zealand to explore for 10 days. I was supposed to head back to LA at the end of the the NZ trip, but I kept thinking that I should give the romance a chance. So I charged money to my credit cards that I didn’t have and flew back to Oz for another month. The relationship crashed & burned, but I learned a lot and had a lovely time (I was in Port Douglas – a beautiful town with no traffic lights, 1 main street, friendly locals, a warm ocean, tropical setting, cheap delicious beer, etc). I gladly opt for the big failure – much better than to later wonder if I’d let something amazing slip by. Of course, I did spend the next year or two trying to earn back the money I’d spent.
If your Aussie looked anything like Hugh Jackman, I’d give up my American citizenship too!!!!
ANSON: I’ve written poems and made mix tapes for school girl crushes which didn’t work but probably the craziest thing I’ve ever done was did a solo act of Jodeci “Come and Talk to Me” at summer camp in front of everyone. I think it was so embarrassing for her that her initial reaction was to run off and cry. Go figure.
BEVERLY: Freakin’ A, ROGER! Did the girl like it or not?!?!
@Emmie
Port Douglas has now more than one traffic light… and more streets, and restaurants… and crazy pricy real estates… Happy to tell you that it’s still beautiful. Very. About that guy, where did you say you found him?
From aussieland (where 2m crocs are ‘a little thingy’
@Emmie
Sorry, my mistake! I mixed Port Douglas with Port Macquaire in terms of traffic lights (everything else is correct and accurate). Can you believe still no traffic lights and no parking meters in Port Douglas?? You got to love it! Can’t wait to scuba dive with my girls in the great barrier reef… another one for the ‘must do’ list.
Hello Azucena from Oz! The hottie was my scuba dive instructor in Cairns. I would totally give you his digitz but he’s happily married now.
So true about the extra streets in Port Douglas. I was referring to Macrossan, the commercial strip (felt like the main street in town to me – I went to a dinner party once and then coincidentally came across 6 out of the 8 people at different times and places on Macrossan the next afternoon. One at a swimsuit shop, one at the gym, one at a cafe, etc. It was almost like living in Sesame Street and knowing everyone’s name).
Have fun diving when you go! What city do you live in?
Hi Emmie! I live in Brisbane, the capital of the sunshine estate, but I’ve been scuba diving in Port Douglas -well, more specifically from that huge platform in the middle of the ocean. I was still living in Spain, but spent my honeymoon in Oz!! It’s a shame I didn’t have that instructor, although my hubby wouldn’t have been very happy ;D
Next time you’re here, don’t miss dinner in the Daintree Rainforest. Just a delight. And give me a call!
We fell in love with the country (as much as Oprah and Joel from Good Charlotte) and we decided to move in the following year. Eight years later and no regrets.