This Bud's For You (Love, Part 2)

Love, The Metamorphosis II: The College Years

Feed the Fire - BoDeans (mp3)
Capital Letters - Ned's Atomic Dustbin (mp3)
I'm Burning - Jesus Jones (mp3)

If my high school years introduced me to the concepts of love and romance, then college mostly just scrambled 'em.

I was a sophomore before my second-ever girlfriend revealed herself to me. Like Shoeless Joe from the Iowa cornfields, she walked through a hedgerow to enter the all-campus fraternity party my buddies and I were stumbling around. I spent most of the night trying to figure out ways to subtly introduce myself without making it seem spooky or weird. Eventually I got drunk enough that I just kinda stumbled into her. I'm pretty sure my first words to her were "Oh, sorry."

How prescient.

She was an absolutely adorable freshman. I'd never claim she was particularly beautiful. But she was one of the cutest girls I'd ever laid eyes on, and she glowed with an aura of get-along giddiness. Yes, some of that was the kind of high school girl giddiness that drives adults bonkers, but it was thrilling to run across someone whose general state of being was just as happy-go-lucky as my own.

Naturally, it was doomed.

Anyway, following that lovelorn failure, I fell into the realization that:

1. I was looking for True Love;
2. But not for, like, right now... more, like, for later;
   
3. I was horny as hell and needed to get laid but, as Chet from Weird Science said, "I couldn't get laid in a morgue";
   
4. If I couldn't get laid, what chance had I at finding love?
5. Most of the guys and girls I knew who were in relationships made me not want to be in a relationship. They had lots of sex, but they didn't really do much of anything else fun, and even when they went out to act like they were having fun, they were mostly just acting like that until they could leave and go have more sex. Rinse and repeat until break-up;

No need glorifying all of the sordid details of how these realizations played out during my four years. Mostly I just made friends with a lot of very attractive, adorable and fascinating girls and watched them date other guys and then come back and commiserate on my shoulder. With 18 years of hindsight, I'd still rather be the friend than the temporary lay... but it's not, like, 100%. More like 55/45.