ON OVERPLANNING

I was really struggling to figure out what to write about today. I considered finding an old email and sharing my creativity again...you know, because my other poems have gone over so well. Instead of finding something worth sharing, I found out how ridiculous I am.

Here is what happened. I was interested in a girl. She was in the Masters' cohort in front of mine; that is, she would be graduating in May 2005 (and I in May 2006). I had seen her a few times around campus but hadn't really talked with her. Sure she was cute, but what really intrigued me was that we were out with a big group of people at a bar and she prayed out loud. Yeah. One night, during a game of sand volleyball, I ALMOST asked her out, but chickened out at the last minute for reasons I'm not clear on. An unrelated note - playing sand volleyball with your mobile phone in your pocket is a mistake.

In any event, rather than simply asking her out, I decided it needed build-up. So I thought it would be a GREAT plan to get flowers for her - but didn't want to make it too obvious to everyone else that I was sweet on her (apparently I have the mind of an eighth-grader). I'm pretty sure at this point I had told her I was interested in her, if this one old email to other friends is to be believed. In any event, I decided to get flowers for her AND her two friends who worked in the same office and would send them a message that was quasi-anonymous (or quasinonymous, if you will).

I bought the flowers and found they didn't fit in the vase I bought. I opted to cut down the stems to make them a little shorter and less likely to tip over...turns out a pizza cutter isn't enough to cut through certain flower stems. After finding sharp scissors, which cut much better, I spent about an hour getting the message on the card correct - the message which ended up being 22 words long. I got an RA to take the flowers over to the office they shared with instructions to tell them whom the flowers were from only if they asked - but then to say that he wasn't supposed to say. They did not ask.

The goal was that all three would think I was sweet, and that the one I was interested in would be encouraged by the other two to date me. Sadly, the girls had trouble figuring out who sent the flowers and involved many other people in their discussion of the two clues, so my desire for quasinonymity failed.

As, of course, did my plan. The girl in this case has been happily married (probably) to some other guy for a few years, and I've gotten a new pizza cutter since then. So really, we're pretty much even.