Disco's Stupid Life
Node 45 in a series of 174
The multiple-choice note
It's the 12th grade, about two months from graduation. I, being the sort of late bloomer that I am, had fallen for a girl for the second time of my life (the first being earlier in the school year). I don't know how, but I had somehow gone through my teenage years without so much as a tiny crush on a girl. I mean, puberty started on time. I was sexually attracted to women (and powerfully so, I recall), so all was fine there - I think that the whole idea of me having a girlfriend just never occured to me. It was a totally foreign concept. And so I never fell for any girl until the 12th grade - fairly late. But when I finally did... I fell hard.
I'm pretty sure that this sort of thing is hard on everyone at the outset. I, as you can expect, was totally unequipped to deal with these feelings. I'd just go home, masturbate, and lay in bed for the rest of the evening, daydreaming. I wasn't smitten, I was decapitated. And I never told anyone about this - no close confidants, no good friends to tell. I later found out that this was a bad strategy (who knew?).
So, after months of living like this (first focused on girl number one, Kimberly, then her friend, Sheena) I started getting extremely frustrated. I eventually got to a point where I absolutely had to figure out how this girl felt about me, but I was way too nervous and neurotic to tell her how I felt about her. So, I wrote a multiple-choice note. You know, the standard 'Do you like me? Yes ( ) No ( )' sort of thing.
I had no idea that these sorts of notes were made fun of. I had no idea that they were just plain juvenile (probably because I was, and still am, fairly juvenile in this arena). At the time, it seemed like the only way to ask the question, but still have some sort of an ironic distance. I made sure to write the note to Kimberly with regards to Sheena, hoping that she (Kimberly) had some idea of her (Sheena's) feelings for me. I felt incredibly nervous passing it off, and I couldn't eat lunch that day.
Kimberly gave me her answer back later that day - rather than just using the checkbox (thank God) she wrote me a paragraph explaining that she couldn't be totally sure because Sheena tended to be guarded about her emotions but that, probably, she just liked me as a friend. I thanked her, went home, and cried.
I later learned that these multiple-choice notes were famous later (I saw a sitcom make fun of them two years later) and I became pretty ashamed of the whole exercise in the first place. And, in an aside, that was the only note I wrote in all of public school.