Melissa Mooney and the confidence of a thousand idiots

A random old story brought on by an old basketball buddy from college recounting his own missteps.

Embarrassing, but I can beat that. And I'll name names. Melissa Mooney, my freshman year. She was a junior - psych major, tall, stunning, and remarkably, incredibly elegant. I remember my buddy Mysen was able to pick her out from a crowd just from my description of her - specifically that she moved as if a halo of light made her impervious to all the nerd, dork, pansy, and Bing that abounded on that Carnegie campus.

She was in my tiny Calc 2 class, but I actually met her outside it, as I was lazily walking to a TA session already 5 minutes late and there she was walking out of it, just 5 minutes in. Clearly then, we were fated to be together, as she smiled a lovely smile and I conveniently ignored the significance of her leaving someplace just as I was arriving. Inexplicably, over the next week, I actually managed to get her number. Miraculously, I asked her to have lunch with me and she agreed. Ladies, that you might just enjoy eating and walking is an absolutely ludicrous idea to us when we have a crush on you, you see. Obviously, she loved me, obviously.

Now to give you an idea of where my head was at this point, I had an intramural basketball team named after me, (YBF was originally, stupidly, called Fahd) and Liz, the hot dramat, whom you may have seen as Constance Brenneman on TV, she had singled me out to say hello to, and now I was having lunch with the hottest girl on campus - a junior.  I tell you I walked around that CMU campus with the confidence of a thousand idiots.

On to the denouement, then. The lunch was cringe-worthy. At one point I asked her what her last name was, and then I told her mine, you know, just in case she wanted to know. It quickly dawned on her that she wasn't just killing time before class with some odd, lazy, child, but a particularly oblivious and smitten idiot. And particularly oblivious, smitten, and an idiot I was. I called her up, exactly two days later of course, to ask her out to dinner. She stalled awkwardly and then dropped the most beautiful lie I'll ever hear. She had a boyfriend. Problem solved. Except there I sat then in my dorm room, with my roommate, Pete, and my friend, Kelly, both looking awkwardly on as I had just been obviously rejected. It was ok, though, because I proceeded to throw a hissy fit, leaned back in my chair in the middle of the room, and in karmic slow motion tried to grab the flimsy card table upon which I had resting both the phone and one of those thick and juicy burritos from the UC that broke apart almost instantly when you took a bite.

I shot for the moon; I wound up on my ass - deafened by laughter, blinded by embarrassment, covered in burrito.

And if that's not embarrassing enough, I used to hang out with Bing Xu, trying to pick up chicks.

This has been your Pretty Boy Jacket History moment of the day. If you'll excuse me, I have a cold personal pizza and mountain dew to attend to. Nuts. to. everybody.