Tales from my childhood = riddled with awkwardness and epic fails

I remember distinctly the first time I realized that girls were attractive. All of a sudden, this girl that I had known for years, looked different. I just had this unexplainable attraction to her face. I just "liked" it. It was the weirdest thing, and also the most awkward thing. I found out a few hours later that one of my male childhood friends was "going out" with another one of my female childhood friends since the day before, and I told myself that it was OK to feel that way. With this in mind, I "manned up" and told the girl I had a crush on her and she admitted that the feelings were mutual. (Awww.) The next day she told me she didn't like me anymore because she told her mom about how she was feeling and her mom said, "Why?He's got a big butt."
Middle School and High School, at least to me, are the cruelest and toughest years of people's lives. In these stages, you are so impressionable, so vulnerable, especially since they're crucial time periods in which people are figuring out who they are internally, as well as who they are socially. I can not think of anything worse than a mixture of hormones and insecurities to fuel your interactions with others as well as how you feel about yourself. It's just so brutal, especially in the earlier middle school years where kids don't really have a sense of throttling back the intensity of their opinions of others, or how they say it. It isn't their fault, they just haven't learned how to speak to people in eloquent, gentle, "nice" ways.

What Kindlon and Thompson discuss in the article, I can agree with. This notion of competition and survival of the fittest can still, in a lot of senses, be applied to boys as they get older. There are still those unspoken rules of not feeling, or at least not revealing, emotions, especially of pain and weakness. There is still that desire/necessity to perpetually prove yourself in the endless pissing contest (I was going to use a much cruder metaphor but it would have been too punny). I can get on moral high ground and say I am immune to these expectations placed upon me, but that would be severely hypocritical. When I think about it, in this "race to impress," who exactly are you trying to impress anyway? And for what reason?

I think it's safe to assert that the majority of "men" these days are really just older, bigger boys from preschool, middle school, and high school. On the flip side, the same is true for the female perspective. Correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure that there is this "race to impress" for women as well. When I first read the article, it reminded me of that scene in "Mean Girls" where the main character is at the mall and they all turn into animals that are savagely hunting and killing each other. Survival of the fittest.

Let's switch gears a little bit as I'd like to take this opportunity close with another "coming of age" story that was utterly humiliating. Sure, during those moments of humiliation, and the short period of time following it, were pretty painful. I personally don't have a problem sharing them now. In fact, I think those are some of my best stories and I love laughing at myself and realizing how ridiculous, although legitimate, my thought process and what I thought was most important was at that age. I hope in the future, I can say the same about myself today. Anyway, back to the story. How I managed to come out of it relatively unscathed by my classmates at the time is still a mystery to me.

So imagine this: seventh grade,  Valentine's day, a version of me that is so much more awkward (think bowl cut, "hip" 90s clothing, and my voice at the peak of breaking, so I squeaked a lot.) The internet was a relatively new thing, and computers were still on the rise. I had a great idea of personalizing a Valentine's card on the computer, printing it out, and giving it to one of the hottest girls in my grade. If I pulled it off and gotten her to go out with me, it would have vaulted me to the apex of social standing. (Kindlon and Thompson would have had a field day analyzing me.) Mind you, I had never really talked to her outside of class, so obviously I had no idea how she felt about me. It never occurred to me that my bold admission, in size 52 cursive font, that "I love you Nina" may have been a bit much, exaggerated, borderline inappropriate even.
Now let's go back to me being awkward. I liked her, and I definitely did enough innocent stalking (and this was prefacebook, so I did it the old fashioned way) that I knew where her locker was and that I got to school before her. I thought the perfect way to surprise her was to slip the note into her locker so that when she got to school to put her backpack away, she'd get the note. The way classes were scheduled that day, I knew I wouldn't see her until third period because we were in different home rooms. However, I knew we would be in the same classes until the end of the day. Third period happens. It starts, it ends. Nothing. I am confused, maybe she's just playing hard to get. Fourth period, the same thing. Fifth period, I am racking my brain confused, but I do give her a bag of Hershey's Kisses which she seemed to appreciate. Lunch. Recess. Sixth and Seventh period. Nothing. At the end of the day, I went to her locker as she was getting her stuff out and was like "well? any response?" and she goes "about what?" and I said, "well I like you, will you go out with me?" and she just looked at me confused and said "sorry, but I'm kind of with this other guy, I thought everyone knew that" and she closed her locker and walked away. I stood there for a second, baffled. To add insult to injury, the girl whose locker was next to hers goes "Leo, I think this was meant for someone else" as she handed me the card I had made.