Ah Spring… when a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of over-the-counter antihistamines.
I really don’t like spring, because I’m allergic to it. My allergies are less obvious in Santa Cruz, but they’re still around, probably exacerbated by the black mold problem in Swanson. (It’s hiding under the 60 coats of paint in each room that make it impossible to put thumbtacks into the walls.)
Worse yet, the pheromones are flying, and I am again seeing a phenomenon I call Senior Dating Desperation. This is where people who are on the verge of graduation think to themselves, Good Lord, I’m about to leave this college and I don’t have a spouse yet. So they ramp up the social activity to more and more bizarre levels, in the desperate hope that love might yet kick them in the teeth before they’re gone. Some might confuse it with perfectly ordinary “senioritis,” but I’ve seen enough pitiful flirting to realize there’s more to certain cases of spring-induced senioritis. I wonder how many people have chosen to enter Bethany’s post-graduate programs for that one last shot?…
I should also remind the women that men are dense. Seriously. If there’s one thing women don’t understand about men, it’s that. (Again, there are always exceptions; I’m speaking generally.) When women want us to do something, and they don’t explicitly explain it (and even sometimes if they do explicitly explain it) we won’t realize they want us to do it. We don’t take hints. We don’t read body language. We’re dense. So if women want anything out of men, they have to learn to be blatantly obvious.
If a woman wants to go on a date with me (this is a for instance; I’m not asking) she has to say so. Otherwise I will simply assume she is only being friendly, and perhaps a little grabby. It will not occur to me to think otherwise, simply because I did not come to Bethany College to date people.
Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your point of view—women recognize when other women are flirting, and sometimes they will point this out to me. But I have a sure-fire method of driving the flirts away: I talk about how I don’t have a car. When I do this, I can actually see their thought-processes: He doesn’t have a car? What kind of loser doesn’t have a car? Well, I can’t date him; he can’t take me anywhere. If he’s too cheap to buy a car, he won’t buy me stuff. And so on. And they move on. And life is good.
I really, really dislike spring.