Fuck you, Gaiman
I used to be called a nerd back when that meant something.
School at the time was organised exactly according to the Hollywood cliché: the popular boys were good at sports, the popular girls were good at being pretty, then there was a large mass of ordinary kids, and at the bottom of the social hierarchy were the nerds, who existed only to be made fun of.
I was firmly in the nerd category, and I knew it. Oh, I knew. I may be socially awkward but I have never been stupid.
Adults have a tendency to believe that nerds somehow exist outside the conventional hierarchy in a world of their own, as if we didn't care about our place in society and purely worry about our Dungeons&Dragons characters instead. (And a hearty fuck you to Paul Graham, while I'm at it.) I assume this is a comforting idea for them that helps them sleep at night.
I knew exactly what my role was in society. I knew I was gangly and awkward, I knew my clothes were unfashionable, and that my giant square glasses and asthma medication weren't doing anything to help. I understood all of that with a heartbreakingly painful clarity. I just didn't have a clue what to do about it. I did not even know that anything could be done even in theory.
Thus the situation persisted for the next several decades.
With that as background, you will understand that when at the age of twenty-nine I found myself sharing an office with the most beautiful woman in the world, I found the situation a little difficult to handle.
You can keep your Marilyn Monroes, your Helens of Troy, your lost Lenores. When I first laid eyes upon her in a dingy office in a sleepy provincial town, I gazed upon something out of this world.
Not only was she absolutely perfect physically and did she have the voice of an angel, whatever god created her must have been in a generous mood on the day, because she was kind and charming as well, a beautiful person inside and out.
And that's not all.
In the world's most unexpected plot twist... we actually got on quite well.
She even said some things to me that might be considered mildly flirtatious, and I know they might be because I relayed them incredulously to various experts including my psychiatrist, who said "It sounds like she's being mildly flirtatious, why don't you just ask her out?"
Reader, I asked her out.
It was not just the inevitable rejection, it was the awkwardness that I clearly made her feel that haunts me to this day. I wish I could tell you I handled the situation with a poised maturity, but instead I behaved in various ways which were... embarrassing. Even now, some seventeen years later, I am cringing in my seat as I recall them. I changed jobs soon after.
It gets worse.
Fast forward to ten years later, when I actually through another miracle happened to meet a wonderful woman who I ended up in bed together with. We were sharing various intimate details of our lives before we met, as you do, and I mentioned some of the above, and I used the phrase "out of my league".
Yeah.
I used that expression to the gorgeous naked woman lying next to me who, God bless her, actually found me attractive, and did not consider herself to be in fact, "out of my league".
(This was even before I discovered weight loss and the gym.)
Truly, I am the world's biggest loser.
I am forty-seven years old, I have had all of one sexual partner in my life, and she is long gone.
And yet.
I have never manipulated anyone or lied to them to get them into bed with me, or to do anything they did not want to do.
It's like they sell leather jackets and sunglasses to just anyone these days.