If you haven’t read Pathetic Geek Stories, you should. (You’ll probably end up reading all of them in the archives, like me.) PGS are small anecdotes of your high-school humiliation, illustrated by former Onion editor Maria Schneider.
I submitted a PGS of my own, but since it hasn’t been drawn, I imagine it would be forever lost in Maria’s inbox if I didn’t post it here, so here goes:
Editor’s PGS
Setting the stage
This happened in Middle School, and I was a fairly small Asian kid in my suburb of Minneapolis. Yes, I had a bowl cut.
Gym class
Like any good embarrassing school story, this happened in P.E. We were all sitting cross-legged in columns on the floor of the gymnasium (divided into our “squads”), and the teacher was out for a minute. A pretty popular cute girl with red hair sitting in the squad next to me turned to me and asked quietly, “Are you seeing anyone?” It was the first time she had spoken to me directly.
I didn’t understand the question. I said, “What?” and she repeated, “Are you seeing anybody now?” in a sort of loud whisper. I still didn’t understand what she meant by seeing. Visually? Yeah, sure, I was. I was seeing our entire gym class. Figuring that this was, well, not what she was asking, and the fact that the gym teacher walked back in, I just kind of shrugged my shoulders and mouthed “What?” and shook my head. She didn’t ask again to clarify later.
Comprehension
It was a few years later in high school that I realized that she was talking about dating. One of her friends must have had a crush on me and asked the redhead to ask me for her. I was simultaneously disgusted with my response, but kind of excited that somebody had a crush on me (especially when I was wearing that stupid bowl cut…).
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