I’ve heard somewhere that the most unproductive and detrimental semester in a BYU student’s career is the one just after they get engaged. My first reaction when I heard that was to think to myself, “Yeah right, if I ever manage to get engaged, it will be such a weight off my shoulders that school will be a cinch!” However, as I’ve tried my hand at introspection each time I’ve had a minor crush on some boy, I’ve come to realize it’s not going to be that easy. Not that I’m saying I’m going to get engaged anytime soon. I can’t even get a boy to ask me out on a date, let alone ask me to spend the rest of my life and eternity with him. But despite all my big talk about not needing a man, being too busy with school work and/or waiting for the man to step up to the plate, I find myself caught in that old familiar trap of crushing on some boy. And despite all my attempts to approach the situation with a practical and emotionally level head, I still find myself stuck in the same silly quick sand of day-dreaming in the weirdest fashion about said boy which leads to a profound lack of productivity on my part, thus proving that statistic I heard somewhere.
Let me start off by saying, I blame Lynette. You see my current squeeze, who has been dubbed Jake for the time being, has been in the ward at least as long as I have and I remember being introduced to him within my first week in the ward. He’s a really nice guy and very attractive (so much so that I recently heard it said that every girl in the ward at some point or another has a crush on good ol’ Jake) and I’ve thought many times in the past that I could be interested if he ever seemed inclined to be interested in me. However, I would watch him interact with other girls and then compare that to how he would interact with me and decide that he couldn’t possibly be interested, so I moved on. Come to find out, he’s my home teacher this semester. Given that I’ve already decided he’s not interested that shouldn’t be a problem right? Wrong. After his first visit, Lynette says to me, and I quote: “Jake is totally into you!” The power of suggestion being what it is, my mind took off with the numerous possibilities emanating from the potential truth of that statement. That’s when the trouble started. Thanks Lynette!
As Lynette has already recounted she and I shared a delightful evening on what she chose to call a “swap date”. This meant that she found a guy to go on a date with me and I found one for her. And who should she choose for me, but the one and only Jake. The date was great fun, but it left me in a very unpleasant (at least for a die-hard stoic such as myself) state of twitterpation. Ever since then, every move I make is carefully scrutinized by myself, my mother, my sisters and about 10 other people both before and after I make it; and, every move he makes undergoes the same strict regimen of scrutiny until I’m so tied up in impossible knots in a desperate effort not to trip and mess this up. I find myself over-thinking every little gesture he makes, even though my rational mind keeps screaming that he has to be nice because he’s my home teacher. What can it mean that he chose to walk on the same side of the middle railing on the stairs down off campus when he walked me home from the library late at night? What sort of message is he trying to send when he responds almost instantaneously to texts that I send him? What coded message can there be in a seemingly innocent invite to watch his intramural soccer game? AHHHHHHHHHHH! What does any of it mean?!
Having overly suggestive roommates who are prone to girly squealing at the slightest provocation doesn’t help matters either. It seems there are two sides of me that are fighting the ultimate battle for supremacy here. There is the calm, cool and collected left-brained side of me that craves logic and pragmatism in all things which usually enjoys the top spot in the pecking order. Then there is the carefully closeted hopeless romantic side which likes to play games with my nerves by allowing perfectly disgusting bouts of girly giddiness to slip through the cracks a little too often of late. The constant bickering between these two sides of my personality leaves me in a terribly unstable state resembling a slight case of paranoid schizophrenia and leading my roommates to not completely unfounded doubts about my mental health. I’m afraid that until something definitive happens with Jake, I’m going to keep serving as living proof that “love” and homework don’t mix.
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