Chronicles of a College Guy

Mark Twain (1835 - 1910)
The difference between truth and fiction is: fiction has to make sense.

I got a call from Steve on Friday night, and he tells me to come on over to his place at Bouquet for the usual "party" (I say "party" because I consider parties to have loud music, dancing, and not just alcohol). I guess it would be more appropriate to just call it hanging out. Anyways, he calls me about 8PM, and after screwing around on the computer for a while, I got a shower and I go to head on over to Steve's place about 9PM.

I get into Steve's place to find the usual people plus a few extras. Steve hands me a mixed drink that no one had drank yet (Pretty tasty pineapple mix), and I get to talking to people who are hanging out. A few people are playing beer pong, so I watch that game and wait for a chance to join in. Steve was carrying his team (Which consisted of Andy and Steve), but they still lost because Andy cannot hold his liquor at all. Give him a few beers and he is gone for the rest of the night. Two guys I did not know were in the next game, so I was still stuck on the sidelines.

It was about this time that I find out that they had started drinking at 5PM. The Pabst and Labatt Blue that they had bought were pretty much gone by the time I had arrived, but I did manage to grab a Labatt before they all disappeared. I will admit that Pabst never has tasted very good at all, but Labatt made Pabst taste like rhino piss. It was not hard to beat down the competition, but Labatt is definitely some quality stuff. Basically, I was not going to be getting a chance at playing any beer pong that night.

Despite the fact that I had arrived a bit late to get even a buzz, a few people had been there for quite a while, and from those few, Dave and Lindsey had had enough to get drunk (Okay, more Dave than Lindsey). I nursed my Labatt for a while, chatting with people and watching the last game of beer pong get rocked by JD and his partner (I still forget the guy's name, even though I have seen him more than a dozen times). About 10:30PM, three girls came over, and I had never seen them before. Aileen, Julia, and Hailey seemed pretty nice and all, but no one really knew them. Chris was chatting it up with Aileen and Julia for a bit, but nothing serious (I am guessing that he is looking for a new girlfriend).

About a dozen of us were just chilling out, talking it up, and Julia suddenly runs off to the bathroom. Aileen apparently knew what was going on, because she followed Julia closely behind. They come back about ten minutes later, and it is obvious that Julia had been crying. I later learned that she had been crying because she saw Dave giving Lindsey all of the attention. Now, I will be up front and say that I do not know how to identify guys as attractive simply because I am not attracted to guys in any intimate way, and thus, I do not have particular features that I am looking for to define my own meaning of an "attractive guy," but from what I gather, Dave attracts the ladies.

The story is that, sometime during the previous weekend, Dave had gone to a party and had found Julia there completely plastered like it was her job. Sometime during their brief contact with each other, they messed around (Dave's words, so I do not know nor do I want to know the specifics) and Julia got it in her head that they had something going when that was not the case at all. It was a fling, but I guess Julia had never done anything like that (I was once in the same situation before, and I understand Julia’s plight to an extent). She expected a relationship, but was shown the reality of the situation when she saw the way that Dave and Lindsey had been acting towards each other.

Later on that night about 1AM, Steve went off to bed, Koop went out to see what was going on with Brooke (His quasi-girlfriend), Chris and Andy had gone home, Lindsey had left because of her official boyfriend, and I was left in Dave's room to just chill out some more. Whoever else had been there had already left, and the party was pretty much dead. I was watching some of David Chapelle's new show on Dave's computer while Dave was lying on his bed, and Dave asks me, "Eric, what should I do with these girls?" His question was so far off my perception of who Dave is that it definitely altered my perspective of him forever. Dave was not the kind of guy that asked other people for advice involving women.

I already said before that Lindsey had an official boyfriend, and Dave is sort of her unofficial boyfriend. Basically, Dave is in love with Lindsey, Lindsey's boyfriend is in love with Lindsey, and Lindsey herself is in love with both Dave and her boyfriend. This creates quite a difficult situation. In monogamous cultures such as the majority of the United States, we are taught to love one and only one person in an intimate way. However, I have trust in that both Dave and Lindsey are telling the truth and are simply not leading each other on.

Dave so desperately wants Lindsey to love him and only him, because she is the first woman in his life where he can be himself around her and not alter who he is. She sees Dave for himself, and not some altered "bettered" image of Dave, and I can truly respect that. However, even though she thinks of Dave whenever she is with her real boyfriend, she does not want to break up with her boyfriend. It is an awkward situation for both of them. Probably the one piece of information that made it much easier as to why she should just break up with her boyfriend is that she had only been going out with him for a few months longer than she had known Dave, and the simple fact that her boyfriend has absolutely nothing going for him.

I forget how Dave explained it, but it was something along the lines of how he keeps reaching for her, but he can only get so close and never any closer. I re-explained it to Dave in another fashion by relating it to those old Looney Tunes. In some episodes, there would be a character that would get a stick stuck to their back or head, it would hang over top their head, and there would be a piece of bait out in front of their head so that they would constantly run around trying to get it. The problem with this is that the harder the cartoon character runs, the bait is always right there to keep on running away from him as fast as he is running towards it. In essence, nothing is accomplished except that the character is exhausted from chasing something that he can never have, that is, unless they wise up and go about solving the problem in a different fashion other than being straightforward about it.

At the same time, Dave has two other women who are chasing him: Arleen and Julia. I already explained Julia's problem, but Arleen is entirely different. She is easily one of the hottest women on the entire campus at Pitt; however, she suffers from lack of self-esteem. No matter how many times you tell her that she is smart, beautiful, clever, could make a million dollars selling dirty water, or whatever, she will always think that she is not good enough. She thinks that Dave's rejection of her is because she is not good enough for him, and so, she gets depressed about situations very easily. My hypothesis: her parents did not hug her enough as a child, her parents hugged her too much as a child, or her parents beat her as a child. That may be oversimplifying things, but the general gist is formed: she is one screwed up cookie.

Dave wants Lindsey but does not want two other girls. I even told Dave myself, "Heh, I am jealous of your situation, but I am also happy that I am not in your shoes." I am jealous of the fact that I would probably enjoy having women chase after me, and then I could pick which one I wanted (I guess it is that whole American "shopping" mentality). However, I would not want to be in Dave's shoes because he has to make decisions that are going to affect people's lives and emotions, for better or for worse.

I think Dave and I talked for at least a good hour until we had down everything that needed to be accomplished: he needed to get rid of Arleen and Julia, and he needed to find a way to get Lindsey to become his real girlfriend so that they could stop messing around behind her boyfriend's back. Maybe they will find a compromise somewhere along the lines, or Dave will just be forced to live the rest of his life knowing that he could have had the perfect ying to his yang. I hope it is not the latter. Maybe the problem is more than just what it seems, a "what is not said is more important than what is said" situation. Whatever it is, a problem like this cannot keep going on.

I doubt that even Mark Twain could ever write such a story similar to Dave's situation; people would not believe it for a second, unless they knew it was real. Reality suffers from the standpoint that it does not have to make sense, only that reality continues onward without hesitation.

I still need a girlfriend.