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Dating and the Animal Kingdom
09/01/06
by Stretch

When Clay emailed me and asked me to think about contributing a column, my first thought was “oh heck no.” I didn’t want to be the Yoko Ono that disrupted the Beatle-esque nirvana of Shaw, JT, Clay and DJ. However, time has a way of bringing a man around, and after the second or third day of sitting in front of the computer and not being able to add anything of value to my next book project, I relented.

So, where to begin? Do people even know who I am? For starters, I am years of training away from being anything close to a hippo. So what am I?

Have you ever heard someone start a conversation by asking, “if you were an animal, what animal would you be?” I hate that. Answers will typically range from dolphin to unicorn to dove, or some other kind of silly mammal. And then it’s my turn, and I tell the truth. I would be a giraffe. A girl will invariably ask why, and then I tell more truth. “Oh, I don’t know. Mostly because I look like a giraffe.” That usually ends the game, which is always fine by me.

Anyway, much like DJ, I readily confess that I am a goofy looking guy who scored a smoking hot wife. However, unlike DJ, my goofiness was always compounded by an utter lack of tactfulness in dealing with the opposite sex. My hapless encounters with the pretty girl at high school were well chronicled in Sacred Shoes, so I won’t rehash them. Instead, I offer my most spectacular dating collapses from college, because, hey, what’s better for the old self esteem than laughing at someone else? And for continuity’s sake, I will classify each girl as a species of animal.

Becca (Penguin)

During my freshman year of college, I could have best been described as an aroused monkey wearing a blindfold. Armed with nothing but a sweat suit that proclaimed I was on the basketball team, I dove headlong into the class of freshman co-eds, confident that I would be loved by all.

Did this happen? Not so much. Unless you count the large girls, but then again I was 6’8” and barely 195 lbs. It is a commonly known fact that large girls love them some skinny boy—the Jack Sprat Principle. But I digress.

I had designs on a very conservative, very proper, very HOT (hot hot hot) girl named Becca. She was the kind of girl who showed up for breakfast every morning at 7:30 wearing a Sunday dress and hair that was never less than perfect. She had a body that was, by all accounts, laden with potential (the most skin she ever showed was an arm here or an ankle there). To top it off, every morning she wore a different colored ribbon tied into a bow in her golden brown hair.

Becca was so proper that she always sat with her legs crossed, always called boys by their full name, and always used her hands to talk. Despite being such an upstanding girl, she was known by a rather crude moniker:

The Verbal Orgasm.

I coined this name for her because she had a rather distinctive habit of getting excited when she spoke, and sometimes her voice would fly higher and higher as she talked. Every once in a while, if she was truly stimulated by her word choice, she would do this thing where she stopped abruptly, shrugged her shoulders, and rolled her eyes into the back of her head. It was little more than an animated tic, but every time she did it my mind went straight to the gutter. Which was pretty amazing, because I was imagining her experiencing something that I had never actually…uh…seen…um, moving on,

To make a long story short, I asked Becca to go out for a night on the city with me and a group of mutual friends. I had been hanging around her for a few weeks trying to get to know her, and due to the fact that I was an athlete (it should be pointed out that the season had not begun, and therefore I had yet to suck), I had at least a qualitative edge over the other guys angling for her attention. She said yes, and all of a sudden I had a date for the weekend.

Or so I thought. In a moment that would define my dating identity for years to come, as our group began loading into the cars to drive to Chattanooga, Becca wavered and climbed into the back seat of her friend’s Taurus. Her friend was the girlfriend of one of my buddies, and this left three people in my buddy’s car, and no one to ride with me. As I stood there trying to reacquaint my faculties, another one of my friends sidled up to me. “Dude, you coming?” he asked.

Had I possessed any of the moxie that I do now, I would have waxed Cartman and given a hearty “Screw you guys, I’m going home” address, complete with double finger-salutes all around.

But I didn’t, and I didn’t. I followed Becca for the rest of the night, for reasons not entirely clear even to me. Throughout the evening, I attempted to talk to her, which she oddly reciprocated. I paid for nothing; she rode back to campus in the same car she came in.

Later I learned that she was still in love with a boy back home. Apparently she had had every intention of dating me, until the exact moment came to get in the car with me, at which point she fled to the safety of her friend’s backseat, and cried uncontrollably.

So what was her deal? It is actually quite simple. Becca was a penguin. Girls who are penguins are polite and clean and sweet, but they are loyal to a fault. Just as a penguin has a tendency to mate for life, a girl who is a penguin never really gets over her first boyfriend. For girls like Becca, the first flame always burns a little brighter.

Claire (Otter)

Claire was different. She was a Trick Girl. I feel like the subject of Trick Girls is something that JT has written a column about in a past life. I am certain he knows what I am talking about, and I’ve never even met JT. There are several types of Trick Girls, such as The Girl Who Appears Hot Because She Puts On Too Much Makeup. As intelligent men know, this is nothing more than a ruse—she really isn’t that good looking. Well, Claire was a different kind. She was The Girl So Top Heavy She Appears Overweight.

Based on her face alone, Claire was a very cute girl. However, the sheer mass that protruded from her frontal column was enough to convince most young men on campus that she was substantially overweight. To be fair, she was overweight, but it wasn’t because of an unhealthy diet. It was because she was genetically equipped to nurse octuplets.

Contributing to her lack of suitors was the fact that Claire was weird. She was the kind of girl who would go out to the bar, flirt up a storm, then leave early, come home and watch Mystery Science Theater 3000 alone until dawn. Generally speaking, guys don’t know how to deal with interesting types like her.

I wasn’t like most guys. I had a lyrical soul, and I was inward and sensitive in a way that other jocks were not. I wrote, I played music, and I spoke intelligently. If there was one guy that Claire could feel comfortable around, it was me. And as it turned out, she did. It wasn’t long before she merged into my circle of friends and began to cast longing glances in my direction. When I skipped class, she skipped class. We sat in the commuter parking lot and I listened while she talked about life. While all this was happening, my sensitive, lyrical, romantic brain was working overtime to produce the right phrase to show my feelings for Claire. After a few weeks, my brain encapsulated my thoughts in a very precise way.

Boobs!

Things came to a head when I asked her out for dinner. I dressed up and picked her up at her apartment, and immediately I realized something was amiss. I guess you could say I had a Ron Burgundy moment before there was a Ron Burgundy. (When he jumped into the pit at the zoo and looks up and says “I immediately regret this decision!”…that was me.) When I saw Claire standing in the doorway of her apartment with that forced grin on her face, well, I immediately regretted the decision to ask her out.

For the remainder of the date, and forevermore afterwards, Claire rejected my advances. What gave? As far as I could tell, I had done nothing wrong. The misunderstood girl who flirted with me disappeared as soon as I showed interest in her.

Here’s why: Claire was an otter. The difference between otters and beavers is that beavers build dams, while otters swim around all day and play. When nice guys try to build dams with girls who are otters, they usually run the other way—it’s much more fun to swim around and play.

Sarah (Lemming)

Somewhere around my sophomore year of college, I made the decision to completely ignore the personalities of girls. Instead, I would focus on dating the girl with the highest combination of height and hot. After the requisite search through the student body of my small college, I was left with one option: Sarah, a six-foot freshman tower of blond tresses and perfume. Single? Check. Hot? Check.

I think it would have worked, except that problems began to occur whenever Sarah opened her mouth. The voice that flowed from her full pink lips could best be described as “fettery”, and I’m not even 100% sure what that word means. But golly, she was fettery. It is generally a bad sign when you hope the girl you are hanging out with doesn’t speak in front of other people. Nonetheless, I made the classic guy mistake of asking her out once…just to be sure.

On the way to pick Sarah up, I ran over a chipmunk. This was an omen, a sign, my personal “Warning! Warning! Dr. Smith!” moment, but unfortunately I drove on. When I met her at the dorm, she was laughing. When the waiter brought her a glass of water, she giggled. She asked questions like “Do you think there will be ponies in heaven?” She talked about high school for 20 minutes. She laughed during the scary movie I took her to. When I dropped her off, I knew less about her than I had three hours before.

Later that night, as I absentmindedly pawed at the chipmunk guts on my tire with the toe of my shoe, I pondered where things went wrong. Sadly, I didn’t even know. It took me a couple more weeks of hanging around her, attempting to forge some kind of meaningful bond with her, to realize the nature of Sarah. It was this:

Sarah was a lemming. Lemmings wander around bonking their heads on things, and sometimes they do fun stuff like eat dirt and jump off of cliffs. The point is, no one understands lemmings—that’s why they’re called lemmings. It’s impossible to know what a girl who is a lemming wants from a relationship (or life in general) because she probably doesn’t even know that herself.

Well, that’s about it. I had as much chance with these ladies as an actual giraffe would have in the wild of hooking up with a penguin, otter, or lemming. All in all, being a giraffe isn’t so bad. It may not hold the same kind of allure as being a hippo, but it’s close. Sometimes, when people try to make me feel better by telling me I really don’t look like a giraffe, I whip out the old trump card and quote wikipedia:

The giraffe defends itself against threats by kicking with great force. A single well-placed kick of an adult giraffe can shatter a lion's skull or break its spine.

This really doesn’t have anything to do with dating, I guess. It does have a lot to do with my distrust of lions, but that’s another story for another time. I have to go now—the Mrs. Giraffe is calling me to go take her to Target. You don’t want to make a giraffe mad.

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