Upon Geeks and Goddesses Part I

Being 14 and discovering the opposite sex was really tough.  I was undersize, completely insecure, a bookwork and pretty much a model child.  I went to a middle school where I was a little white kid in a tough Hispanic area.  We were decently well off as I grew up, meaning we always had enough, but we lived on a developing side of town, so while my neighborhood was really nice, it was at the far outside edge of the school district, and the core of the school district was in… a much tougher neighborhood.  I looked the wrong way at the wrong kid my very first year, and the school bully tagged me out as a target on that day and gave me very little rest in that year or the two years that followed it.  So when I got to grade 7, I had ZERO knowledge of the opposite sex, girls – women – or otherwise.

I was emotionally immature and entirely unready.  My old man, bless his heart, had done very good at instilling discipline, great homework habits, a really good work ethic, and had really helped develop my “gifted student” brain.  He wasn’t real good on the birds and the bees thing, though.  My last year of grade school, someone said the “ F “ word at school, and when I asked him what it meant, he went on about two dogs fighting or some nonsense.  When I pressed the issue, he got me this little book with paper cut outs, like grade school.  He told me to read it and ask him if I had any questions.  What was I gonna ask?  The darn thing didn’t even show the male or female sex organs, I can’t remember it even using the word “Sex”, and the closest thing it showed to the real deal was a  top view of a paper cut out man on top of a paper cut out girl, on a paper cut out bed.  Like, WTF??  Dad knows I read everything, so he figured that 100%, this was his way out.  Now I am even more confused and unprepared for that facet of life.  So here I am, and when I actually notice a female for the first time as something other than a thing to tease or ignore, I totally get an insane puppy crush, can’t stop staring, can’t stop smiling at her, (she’s in the same Church Choir), and after probably two weeks, I actually get the nerve up to go talk to her and by now she is so exasperated and amused at this little buck tooth puppy crush child in front of her (she’s only a grade or so ahead), that she asks me in a very scornful tone to leave her alone, and quit staring at her.

Picture the WWII bombers in the night sky over Germany, the flak shells exploding around them.  In the background, you always see one take a major hit, the sparks, the smoke roiling out into the strobe lighting gray sky.  Then the pitch, the roll over, and the flaming dive as it disappears from the screen, headed to the ground in an agonizing explosion of fiery fury.

Yup, that was me.

It set the tone for five or six years of HELL.  But I was young.  I bounced back quickly.  I bounced back right into the next devastating failure that would haunt me for years and set the path of my life with respect to relationships so far askew that it’s a wonder that I even recovered.