This week’s post is about an ex-roommate of mine, and one of my favorites. When I met Chloe, it was the middle of the school year at USU and I was moving in and taking her best friends old room. I walked in and she looked at me and walked straight into her room without saying anything. At first I was a little bit concerned… Later I learned, it was just who Chloe was. Throughout the semester we became friends, I helped her with her vegan movie project, and listened to her play her guitar (she is amazing). I had never been friends with someone like Chloe, she introduced me to true awkwardness. I thought I was willing to talk about anything or do anything, but she definitely one upped me there 🙂 I will warn you this post does have “bathroom” talk, but is worth the read. Chloe knows how to be herself through and through! She majored in English at USU and is currently working on her Masters in English.
Here is Her Unknown Story:
There is, within all single people, male, female, gay, straight, trans, and so on, a subset of people who, regardless of past romantic success, personal appearance, and vastly different personality traits, all label themselves as “perpetually awkward, un-dateable humans.” Yes, I just made up that particular phrase, but I think it adequately covers the basics of this as-yet unorganized group (though if they start having meetings, I would love to sit in.) Basically, these people, for whatever reason, have decided that they are not capable of gaining romantic favor. Usually, their reasoning boils down to “I’m just like, so awkward. And like, so weird. No one likes the same things that I do, and no one ever will, cause I am so weird.” Inevitably, months or years down the line, each of these people discovers they are not the only person in the world who likes cosplaying and watching cartoons (or whatever else they like to do), and they’ll settle down with a person they didn’t think existed. Then, later in life, these people will look back at the time they were convinced they were #foreveralone and they will roll their eyes. I know this because I am one of these people, and this is my tale of redemption.
It all began a week into my freshman year at Utah State. One of our neighbors, a boy named Sean who wore skinny jeans cuffed at mid-calf and who was, by my estimation, a “bad boy” became the object of my interest. It was lucky for me that we were as good of friends as you can be with someone after only knowing them for a few days, and my roommates hung out with his roommates pretty consistently. It was on one of these occasions that we all decided to take a walk around campus. During the walk, Sean got talking about Geocacheing. I have no idea how the subject came up, buuuut it did. Apparently, Sean, who was from Chicago, had geo-cached in his high school gym class. Just to clarify for those of you who might not know, geocacheing involves searching for hidden items with something similar to a metal detector, then digging those items up and re-burying them, or at least, that’s how Sean described it. He had found a little plastic horse while geocaching, and I asked him whether or not he’d kept the horse. Sean said no, he’d had to bury it again. Now, the subject could have been completely dropped at this point. I could have said literally anything else, and it probably would have been socially acceptable. However, what I chose to say was something along the lines of “oh, if it was me, I probably would have taken a dump on it. Then the next person would be like, ‘oh wow, I found something,’ and it would be covered in poop.”
Needless to say, I did not date Sean. The incident, which lives in the lore of room 401E, is hilarious in hindsight. At the time, however, it propelled me into the world of perpetually awkward, un-dateable humans, henceforth referred to as PAUH’s.
It was as an active believer in my PAUH status that I got my first kiss when I was 18 years old, almost 19, in fact, sometime in February, in the dorm room that four years later became my little sister’s room, a fact which she found “super gross.” I used to know the exact date because I had it written down in my phone like some kind of appointment reminder. Unfortunately, I dropped one of those gushy stress balls, the kind that you can get for free from booths at summer fairs (usually the not-so-fun booths, like booths set up by banks) onto my phone, shattering the screen and erasing a bunch of the data that wasn’t saved to the sim card, just a few months later. We were watching CSI on his computer, and when he went to the bathroom, I snooped through his open browser tabs and was shocked to find an eHow article entitled “How To Get The First Kiss.” I would venture to say he did not follow the advice given in said article, because it took him thirty minutes of sitting, his forehead pressed against my forehead, me subtly hinting that he should kiss me by saying “you’re going to regret this later” and then not answering when he said “regret what?” to finally kiss me. It was much, much more wet than I had anticipated kissing would be, and I started laughing while our lips were still touching. He did not take it well, and our kissing days ended shortly thereafter. He wrote Star Wars fan fiction and watched lots of How I Met Your Mother. I had been, until that time, convinced he was the only person in the world who could appreciate my weirdness.
After Star Wars Fan, I was interested in a long string of boys. There was the boy with the degenerative eye disease who I guiltily stopped seeing after he called me “babe” in a facebook chat (even PAUH’s have standards of awkwardness, and “babe” was where I drew the line), the short, pompous boy whom my sisters affectionately called “The Bridge Troll,” and the boy who had recently lost about 100 pounds and had long, black back hair. Inevitably, though, no matter how awkward the boys seemed, they weren’t ready for this jelly. So it was that I wallowed in my PAUH-ness, waiting for someone to come rescue me like I was a princess stuck in a tower, or something.
On my first date with James, we were supposed to go see Logan Out Loud, a local improv group, with some friends. I think we were both in the too-scared-to-ask-out-on-an-official-date phase. Come to think of it, I don’t know that we ever really became the type of people who ask each other on official dates. Anyway, I had gone to see my friend Hillary, and she and our friend McKay convinced me to come to dinner with them at Buffalo Wild Wings instead, a set up that worked much better, in my opinion, because it seemed more date-y. Besides, James was running late. At the time, he lived out in Trenton, and I didn’t realize just how long it can take to get into town. Dinner went pretty well, with the exception of an awkward appearance by the friends we left behind at Logan Out Loud, who sat down and made sure we knew that they were not pleased with our coup d’etat. We made a quick exit, and in the parking lot I invited him to “come over to my house and see my guitar.” *Note: asking a boy if he wants to see my nice, Taylor acoustic/electric guitar was one of my only effective flirting moves at the time. James said he would like to come and play my guitar, and I told him to follow me home. I watched him from my rear view mirror, in fact I probably should have been looking forward more often, to make sure he didn’t get lost. Then, right before we got to my street, he turned right at a stop sign. At first, I thought that maybe I had been watching the wrong car, but then, after half an hour at home by myself, I had to concede that he had not followed me as planned. I was a little irritated, to say the least, so I texted him to let him know he had not, in fact, made it to my house (as if he didn’t already know.) He told me not to worry, he just had to do something and he’d be there soon. Then he asked for my address.
It took James over an hour to get back to my house. I can’t remember exactly what I thought he was doing. Dealing drugs? Having a date with another girl? Whatever it was, the truth was far, far better than anything I had imagined. When he finally came in, I, of course, immediately asked where he’d been. He kept telling me he “just had something he had to get done.” Of course, his statement made the whole situation so much more interesting to me. Whatever he had done, I figured it had to have been pretty bad, since he wasn’t willing to give me a straight answer. Finally, after about 5 minutes of prodding, he told me. He had gone to Smith’s to go poop. For whatever reason, Bdubs always makes James’ stomach a little sick, and the night before, he’d had Betos, which is notorious for passing through a person with great force. It was the perfect poo storm, and he had been sucked into it despite his best efforts.
Now, normally, this might not be the type of statement that would endear you to someone who you don’t know very well. In my case, however, it was basically the most perfect thing he could have said. I am the girl who, through no fault of my own, ends up talking about poop on the daily. I mean, here I am, blogging about poop (kinda.) And now, here was my PAUH counterpart: the boy who had pooped for an hour in a grocery store because he was afraid I would be grossed out if he “wrecked my bathroom.”
On May 27th, 2014, James and I celebrated our one year anniversary. We went to Buffalo Wild Wings, where we had our first date. The staff got a little confused about what we meant by “anniversary” and brought us paper crowns that said “Bride” and “Groom” on them. We also got free chocolate cake. Unfortunately, we had not thought ahead, and we’d eaten Taco Bell for lunch. In a ridiculous repeat of our first date, we spent the night sick on the toilet.
Is this too much information? Maybe a little bit. The point is, I am so grateful to have found my human, my person who doesn’t care that I talk about bodily functions and plays Dungeons and Dragons with me on the weekends. The person who will have long discussions about everything from The Lord of the Rings to our favorite novels to what outfit I should wear to work. This is my message to past Chloe and all the other PAUH folks out there. Tis a message of hope. I want to assure you all, PAUH status does not exist. It just means you haven’t found your person yet. But you will. When that day comes, you can talk about poop all the time. It will be beautiful.
(C)LVB2014
Mrs Birds Words 
This is wonderful.
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