[This post contains needless diversions, random comments, and strange people. Read at your own peril.]
Mike Thames is attractive; he is the most attractive person in the Mathematics Laboratory; and we are friends.
Let us examine the curious nature of Michael Thames. He says he is straight - and normally I take people’s word for it - but there is something not quite true about him. Something false.
Wednesday
I had just finished the Laboratory and was standing at a bench outside the class.
I took a swig of my water and put it back in my bag; at that moment Michael Thames walks out. I blatantly stare/glance at him.
He goes to the water fountain. I look away to put on my back pack. Suddenly he calls with a loud voice, as if talking to someone (though there was no one around), “I hate that class!”. Sensing this a ploy to get me to talk to him - and from it acquiring the impression that he is a closeted gay who is attracted to me(don’t laugh) - I respond with a disbelieving tone,
“Why?”
He hastily walks over to me, smiling. He says, “Because man, they make you do problems over and over, like I don’t already know them, and all the hot women in there treat me like I am stupid, you know what I mean?”
Feeling this would be the perfect time to <insert sexuality here> I open my mouth to respond; unfortunately the only thing to come out is a stuttered, “Yeah.”
He turns away then; I over-analyse and believe this to be a sign of disappointment; he stands off a little ways and turns back to me. I’m a honest fellow; My first impression of him was that he was an idiot by choice; so I asked him, “Are you stupid?”
“No, man…I’m not. Just - you know.” He says. It appears to me that he was slightly taken aback by that. He begins to move; I follow; soon we are side-by-side. We head down an exit I do not usually take; by now I am expecting him to ask if I am gay or not. We ARE in a stairway alone.
Nothing happens. Nothing continues to happen. Nothing lounges on a bench and watches us with interest. Finally, Something comes along and slaps Nothing with a door. The first floor door to be exact. Mike pushes it open and lets me through.
“Alright, it’s been nice…”
“I’m going the same way,” I cut in, desperate not to lose a good conversation. We keep walking. Suddenly he is all talk. I mention how he seems perpetually tired; he says lightly, “You’ve probably seem me lying on the floor, right?” but, still believing at the time that he was gay, I take it as him checking whether or not I have been paying attention to him.
“Yes.” I say. Now he goes on a tangent of his days activities; how he gets up, does this, does that, does some more of this, some more of that, some new this, some new that, and so on, into ridiculum(Think Latin). He even mentions when he takes a bath. It was very strange. By this point I am not listening anyway; I am too busy with my homosexual fantasies off to the side(and indeed I was having a J.D. moment).
We part shortly afterwards; he introduces himself as “Mike”, though having spotted him the first day of class, I already knew that. I tell him my name; he will subsequently forget it.
I tell a friend about this day. She thinks something is odd, too. Mass Hysteria, or Perceptive Genius?
Thursday
He is late. I wait until just seconds before the class is supposed to start (though it doesn’t get going until another five) and sit at my usual seat. Julius Waters sits next to me; apparently we are friends. He’s not important in this story, but I mentioned him all the same.
Five mathematical problems later, he enters with his sunglasses on. He is wearing brown; a nice choice, I noted. I wave to him; not in a hyper gay, or creepy stalker like way. I actually manage to gesture inconspicuously. He waves back, “What’s up, bro.” he calls, though we are in a room full of people and he is calling over ten of them. I say hey back, in the same loud inconsiderate way (This shocked me).
I look away, only to see him trying to get my attention. Once again all eyes are on him as he interrupts the laboratories train of thought, “HEY, COME SIT OVER HERE.”
I was thinking to myself, awesome, but I get up casually as if the prospect of sitting next to him is dismal at best. Then he spots the table he normally sits out and says, “NEVERMIND. YOU CAN STAY WHERE YOU ARE. I AM GOING TO SIT OVER HERE WITH THESE FOLKS.”
“Alright…” I say inaudibly as I sit back down. Time passes, and even though I find him attractive, he does not distract me from my work. Occasionally I do look up; I see him talking to one of the subjectively prettier tutors(female). He stares at her like she is candy to his eyes. I decipher this to be a clear sign of his sexuality. I resign myself to just being the gay friend who gets to stare at my delicious friend constantly without taking consequence.
He glances over at me a few times, too; while he is stretching, as if it is a crime to look at your friend without first stretching.
Class ends. Life is good. I stand up; so does Mike. This is where another strange thing happens, though it might seem completely normal to people used to having school friends. He dawdles until just when I am putting my folder away; now he is walking briskly to the folder drop-off. I allow him to get there and then put my folder away; I walk out.
Water take-two. I again drink from my water bottle. He walks out and starts filling up his water. I put my bottle away. He isn’t done yet. I stand there, not knowing what to do: If I take the water bottle back out, I look greedy, and he might tell the nomads in the Sahara about me. If I just stand there, though, I look like I am stalking him. I go with the looking like I am stalking him bit. He nods at me as he walks up and I start to walk, to encourage him to do the same. He does. Great!
I don’t care where we walk at this point. I am just thrilled to be walking with him <insert concerning smile here>. We’re walking to the E-services lab.
Walk. Walk. Walk.
Walk. Walk. Walk.
We’re talking the whole time of course, but I don’t remember any of it. It felt too surreal at this point to have the man that I wanted to hang out with me, actually doing it.
Eventually we get to the E-services lab. Looking back at all I have written so far, it seems I have added a little too much, so here I will try to congest it to just the bits that I found especially interesting.
At the Lab we are talking. He mentions his girlfriend that he believes is insane. He is only with her because, </quote> “She’s really smokin’.”</endquote>
Crazy vs Hot. Crazy vs Hot…AND IT IS CRAZY DOWN FOR THE COUNT. DING DING DING.
Sigh. O.K., he’s subjectively shallow. That isn’t the focus of this story. Moving on…
He shows me explicit photographs of his girlfriend. This is weird - I figure that now would be the best time to mention that I’m gay; to tell him that this isn’t a treat to me at all. I look around at the room. Diametric(Read as a creative curse word)! There are eight people in this room; eight people in a incredibly small room. I can’t tell him now. So, once again I say nothing. I passively look at the photographs, not really caring about smokin’ girl and feeling uncomfortable.
Though he asks me questions about her, and looks at my face - which by now must resemble a Mediterranean zucchini trying to poo - he doesn’t seem to register that I am not enjoying it. That is just ONE of many clues as to my sexuality. Still he seems dumb to the fact.
I ask him, “How does one ask another out? I have never dated.” He smiles, feeling full of knowledge I do not yet possess. He says in a nonchalant way, “Well, you don’t just go up to them like you have been doing. You need to find study groups - girls have been doing this more often - just wait for a girl to go like, ‘hey, want to be in my study group?’ and then you’ve got it made. THAT is a way to get to know her, and slowly make progress to asking her out.”
This actually sounds sane. I had already considered this, but all the same, I appreciated it. Fast forward to when we move to the Academic Computing Lab. We sit away from the lot of people as he puts in his flash drive. Time for homework, apparently.
But we’re still talking. We keep talking even though he needs to write out one-hundred goals for his Life Management class. I help him with a lot, giving him ideas he had never thought of. I say, “Yep, I’m useful…” and he says, “Yes, yes, you are!” in a sincere way.
We talk about weight at some point. I mention the heat and he replies with a somewhat comical, “Well if you weren’t wearing a waffle-knit shirt…who wears a…you need to show some skin a little!”. Meh. I like my long-sleeved cotton shirts, thank-you-very much. Nevermind that they barely fit me after the weight loss I experienced recently.
On to a really weird bit. Somehow we get to the subject of nicknames. I say, “I like giving people nicknames…though I never get away with it.” It is true, though few people know this about me. He says I can call him moon dog. Apparently that is his e-mail address - he even recited what his e-mail address was, and I’ve forgotten it much to my chagrin.
I say, “Alright, moon dog!” and he says, “No, no. Now you’re just being facetious. You need to be (either he said on my back or clawing on my back, either way, both weird) and pulling at my ears. Then you would be doing it right. <insert pleasure noise here>.”
I found that strange and inappropriate. It would have made more sense if he added woman in there somewhere, but he didn’t. He said you. You! So weird.
Anyway, we get on to the subject of food. I like eating fruit and I told him so. Then I mentioned my current financial status…which he said sounded like “poverty”…and he didn’t offer, but stated that he would bring me lunch on Monday. I was like - wow, two days in and already this friend of mine wants to buy me lunch. Is this normal? I couldn’t decide, but it sounded pretty gay to me. Again, perhaps just the fantasy in me.
We’ll talk about that a little later, briefly, but for now I need to quote perhaps the most perplexing bit of all.
“You know, people find me creepy.” I say.
“Well you need to stop being creepy.” He says, playfully.
“I can’t help it, I am not even sure why it is.” I say, though I’ve had a few theories. But then he was insightful,
“It is because you have this soft-spoken voice and…<long pause, big smile>…and people find that creepy. It is like you are looking at people and seeing what they are all about before they even get the chance to tell you. Like you are looking into their soul. Like you know their true self. You just need to stop figuring everyone out before you even become friends, because then it will just be a boring friendship to you. You already know everything they are going to say.”
“Um, wow, I’ve never heard that opinion before…but I am perceptive. I do have these really round eyes, too, which might add to that impression.” I say as an end.
We sit there for a while talking about more random stuff and me forgetting the majority of it as I tried, like he said I would, to figure it all out. My sister would later comment that he was, “Hinting at you…He’s obviously saying that you know his secret.”
Now we are walking out and down and around. He needs to go pee.
“I need to go pee.”
“O.K., then.” I reply.
“Well you need to take care of that.” He says.
“Um, I’m not going to urinate for you.”
“I don’t want you to urinate for me, I just know that you need to pee, too, because I do.”
“Really? That is how it works?”
“Yes, that is how it works.”
“It is just a coincidence.”
“No it isn’t, you need to go, too.”
“I do need to go, too.”
“Good. And I’ll pee on my own.”
“Good, I don’t want to pee for you.”
“I don’t want you to pee for me.”
We walk to the restroom at a different building because he is, “Used to that one”. He tries to get pass this man blocking the way; he says excuse me but the guy doesn’t budge, just keeps talking to his friends. When he does get past him he opens the restroom door and calls back at the man,
“Or not. You know, next time someone asks to get by you maybe you should move instead of making me go through you.”
Admittedly, it was rude of the man to just stand there, but I am vaguely surprised by his reaction.
“Sorry about that,” The man replies sheepishly. Mike enters the restroom and I follow, feeling strangely like a posse to a bully. I knew that couldn’t be true - it must not be true - because he was the one who couldn’t get to the bathroom, not the other man. Satisfied with my rationalisation, I go into a stall. Curiously enough he, too, goes into a stall. A different one of course.
I am used to most men going, “Heh, no big deal…” when they need to pee in a urinal. I always urinate in a stall because I am pee-shy. I guess he is, too?
He decides to start talking to me even though we are both clearly busy with something.
“Man, I am so sick of that happening…”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah, man, like, all arabs are just rude, man…”
“Oh, don’t be prejudice.” I scoff.
“I’m not being prejudice, man, because it is true.”
“No, it isn’t.” I don’t like when people apply one individual’s action to a whole group. Bad move.
“Look, man, the arabs and indians act like they’re better…and if you even try to talk to them they walk away. I don’t like it.”
“Blame the individual, not the entire race.” I insist. We get out of the stalls now. I already pulled my belt - he is still pulling his tight. He looks down at my groin area and away. I don’t know why, I just observed this.
We wash our hands, he checks himself out in the mirror…I do the same, though subtlely…and we continue on our trek.
“So where do you need to go again?” He says. I had told him previously that my piano class was two and a half hours from the time the math class is over with.
“Holt 109.” I tell him. He says he’ll walk me over there and then he has to go. He again starts rambling, and again I go into fantasy land. But this time I am thinking about telling him my sexuality. I knew, I knew, that if I did not tell him then I would be thinking about it constantly over the weekend. I had to fit it in somewhere; but where?
The reason I wanted to tell him was simple. He said he is a devout pentacostal man (though I have my doubts) and believes everything in the bible. If this is true, he may in fact hate what I am. It would be prudent now to tell him my sexuality before we became close friends and he, trying to be a good friend, kept talking about getting me a girlfriend and concocting plans to do so…it would just become a chasm of oblivion if I held it off.
But then he puts his phone to his ear - I knew immediately that this would mean I wouldn’t get to tell him - and starts up a conversation. It is an argument with his girlfriend (the girlfriend he said he was with, the girlfriend he said he wanted to break up with - and then, the girlfriend he said he sort of kind of already broke up with. Yes, he contradicted himself, but that doesn’t mean he was lying; he may have left out some details.). I listen with humour as he talks to her about how she is being rude and he won’t take it, and this is the sort of thing they keep having trouble with, and so on and so on.
It seemed fake. He mentioned how he was talking to “a cool guy he met named Stephen”, who had been hanging out with him(A.K.A., me). Eventually the phone call ends and he goes on about how he is sick of her. We walk past the place I was supposed to go as he talks. Finally he stops.
“Well, it seems we passed your building. I’ll let you go now.”
“Right.”
He shakes my hand. He says something that I don’t listen to, but I reply as if I did:
“-And don’t forget my lunch.” I say.
“I won’t. If you want to eat you need to meet me at the cafeteria at one-o-clock.”(This is truncated.)
“I’ll be there.”
“Alright, bro, have a good weekend.”
“Alright, bro,” I’m mocking him here, “You, too.”
We part. End of needlessly long story.
But Monday ticks closer. What is your opinion of all this? Can you even give an opinion?
Moreover, should I tell him my sexuality when I see him Monday? I was thinking before he buys me lunch…so he doesn’t toss it in my face if the conversation goes awry.
