My First Crush, and How Facebook Ruined it

It's bad enough that Facebook won't let you pretend your exes are dead and that the people who tormented and bullied you in school are not only still alive but also usually having a much better life than you are. And they have less thigh fat and get laid more often. But even when your memories of people are fond ones, Facebook can still make you kind of depressed about them anyway.

As shitty as my memory is, I still remember a few names from Way Back When (TM) and among the names I actually remember is the name of my first really serious crush. His name was Daniel and we were in the sixth grade. Our last names were similar so we tended to end up near one another when seated or ordered alphabetically. I'm sure it wasn't any fun for him because I was incredibly weird back then and even more of a complete social retard than I am currently. (Which is definitely saying something.) But I could stare unabashedly at him easier that way. I thought I was being smooth and sly about it but in reality I'm sure he and everyone else in the northern hemisphere was aware that I was staring and swooning and totally had a massive crush on this guy. We didn't really even talk too much except when we were assigned projects together, which wasn't often. Not that I didn't want to, of course. I would sit and stare at him in the classes we shared--math, PE, homeroom--and try to come up with amazing opening lines for conversations that, in my embarrassingly cliched and unrealistic overactive pre-teen imagination, always inevitably ended with him falling in love with me. I rarely ever plucked up the courage to talk to him, which in retrospect is probably really fortunate for me, because most of my fantabulous fool-proof opening lines were about Pokemon, horses, or were terrible 'random humour' that is universally accepted as being the most obnoxious shit in the universe that appeals only to kids between the ages of ten and thirteen. You know the ones I mean--the kind that resulted in 'inside jokes' with your friends that were overwhelmingly loud and almost invariably included cheese, chickens, or wordless high-pitched squealing. Sometimes all three at once.

Yeah. I am probably pretty fucking lucky I didn't talk to Daniel whenever I got the urge to do so. I have a feeling it would have resulted in a worse school experience than the one I ultimately had.

I remember Daniel being quite good-looking. Like me, he was from an Italian family--and, like me, he was olive-skinned but a very light olive. He had jet black hair and, rather unusually for being of Italian descent, very light blue eyes. It was a striking and very attractive combination. One that I still quite fancy. I'm pretty sure that's where it started.

He also dressed a lot like a miniature adult. Back in the late 90s and early 2000s, out of a decade of grunge fashion, there arose a vogue for teens and adolescents to dress as adult as possible. Gone were the days of overalls, plaid flannel, Doc Martens, and general unkempt aesthetics--girls weren't quite so adult, but boys who could afford to would come to school dressed in slacks and polo shirts, blazers, loafers, dress shoes, dress shirts, and expensive-looking watches. Wearing a t-shirt with a cartoon character was completely unacceptable, a tragic loss in my youth for which I am trying to compensate as an adult by wearing shirts with cartoon characters well past the age where that is in any way acceptable. Boys started spending more time on their hair than girls and happily, enthusiastically followed the trend of the day that involved hair gel applied by the bucketful. For a good five or ten years, it was actually possible to puncture tires on the spiked and gelled hair of America's adolescent population.

And Daniel was one of the most grown-up and stylish of them all.

Cologne/aftershave/body spray were popular for guys, even when they were too young to have to shave yet. Axe and all its equally potent brethren had yet to be invented, but that didn't stop boys from applying enough smelly stuff to the point where they emitted scent fumes so intense they were actually visible to the naked eye. And Daniel, every the showmaster, was the most cologne-drenched boy around. You could smell him coming across the freaking school. It was a bit much, in retrospect, particularly as that was about the time I had started to develop my mysterious asthmatic cough--I was set off by other triggers back then, and intense artificial or chemical scents like cologne could make me erupt into a violent and very loud coughing fit.

No freaking wonder Daniel wanted nothing to do with me. I was a socially retarded freak with a terrible obnoxious 'sense of humour' I thought was comedic genius, and an impressive unibrow, and who had horrible dress sense (I was one of those dweebs that wore their pants a couple of inches too short in a style often scorningly and mockingly called 'high-waters' or 'flood-waters' for which I was teased--I don't know what it is, but it seems like there's a requirement for dorky, dweeby, nerdy, awkward people to wear pants that are several inches too short even through adulthood... does anyone else notice this??)--on top of which I would stare unabashedly at him in ways that were probably pretty creepy. And I was often hacking and coughing like I was about to drop dead right on the spot from plague.

I was not, in other words, anyone's idea of a catch. I'm still not. And I did know this back then, despite having all those daydreams about Daniel falling deeply in love with me for my inner beauty and my personality which was actually even less attractive than I aesthetically was. So I was aware that I was probably not going to have what I wanted. And a bit of angst was born. Daniel was never actually explicitly mean to me, which actually went a long way to encouraging my crush to intensify--when you get treated like shit by your peers, you start to expect that treatment all the time from everyone and it essentially becomes normal to you. You get so used to it that it warps your perception and interpretation of how people behave around you and someone who is polite but not friendly seems like the sweetest person in the world who must obviously like you a whole lot because they didn't dump tomato soup in your hair at lunch. It didn't help that I wasn't treated a whole hell of a lot better at home, either. Lifetime movies have jack shit on my upbringing most of the time.

Over the next two years the crush ran its course and by high school it had pretty much waned completely. My high school was enormous--2100 students--so the odds of being around any one specific person regularly were pretty freaking slim and I don't think I had another class of any kind with Daniel again. I would still see him around every now and then, though you couldn't smell him coming anymore, and I still thought he was really cute--probably just because in general I found the fair-skinned, dark-haired, light-eyed combination really attractive on pretty much everybody--but the pangs of longing and the sighing and the daydreams were long gone.

Years later, in an Anthropology class at college, who should turn up on the student roster but Daniel. I knew straight away it was him because his last name is very distinctive and not one likely to be shared by anyone else. I was a bit surprised when I saw him (not that I was anxiously looking or anything like that...) because he'd put on a whole lot of weight and was sporting kind of a greasy-looking goatee. He was still dressing like a sophisticated adult in tailored business-casual clothing and expensive leather shoes and a Rolex--except now it wasn't novel or interesting anymore because he was an adult by then. His hair was still gelled solid, but he didn't stink up the whole room with his cologne. It was more just a curiosity to me that we'd ended up in the same class since I almost never saw people I knew from old schools. I guess he was still cute but to be honest the intensity of my reaction was limited to thinking, 'Oh, lookit that, it's Daniel. He's changed. I wonder if this professor is going to punctuate every other fucking sentence with 'um' and 'all right'? That'll get annoying...'

(I did end up parking next to him in the car park a few times. Not in any way deliberately--it was the kind of place where you got there early and had to take whatever parking spot you could find--but I was sort of mildly surprised when, after class one afternoon, he hopped into the shiny new Lexus next to my classy ancient Jetta while I was swapping books. I have no idea what he was doing at the time that let him afford a car like that, but it's possible his parents paid for it. Equally possible is that he was up to his designer glasses in debt just because it was an expensive car. One thing I did learn about Daniel over my years of staring and swooning was that he really liked to portray an image of being very sophisticated and well-off. It wouldn't have been out of character for him.)

Funnily enough, I did catch Daniel staring in my direction a few times over the course of that semester. By then I looked a bit more like a person and nothing like I had as a kid. I wore girl's clothes and makeup and wore my hair down a lot. So it's likely he didn't even know who I was. I don't think he fancied me or anything. He was probably just trying to figure out if he knew me or something. We didn't talk except casually in that class, either.

So where the fuck does Facebook come into this?

In following links provided by 'People You May Know', I ended up at his profile. I really haven't thought much about him in years but I recognized the name straight away. Even though I don't have any really negative memories connected with Daniel--apart from adolescent lovesick pining--it still managed to be kind of a depressing experience for me to see this guy that I used to so intensely fancy so long ago.

This sounds terribly shallow, but the first thing I noticed was... Daniel got fat. He'd put on weight when I last saw him in college but now he's just pretty robust. He's about as chunky as it's possible to be without really standing out as being 'fat'. His face is very round, his neck has a muffin-top in his collared shirts, and in general he looks like a guy who hasn't quite realized yet that he no longer has the metabolism of a hummingbird. He still tries to look good but he doesn't do too well with it. Possibly because he dressed so much like an adult as a kid, he doesn't seem to have bothered to sort of let his sense of style grow with him. So he still dresses exactly the same but now he looks pretty dated and not especially handsome or stylish. And he seems to have also taken to dressing like a teenage rap-musician wannabe. The backward hat thing looks stupid even on teenagers, when it's acceptable; on men pushing thirty, it looks pretty freaking sad. The goatee is still there but he looks really bad with it. The hair gel still seems to be his primary choice of weapon--I'm sure this guy has singlehandedly kept the hair gel business thriving over the last eight or nine years.

I didn't even think he was cute anymore. Just sort of... blah. And I'm someone who finds just about everybody attractive. I guess those ice-blue eyes weren't enough on their own to hold my attention. I can't say whether or not his personality balances that shit out--I didn't know him back then and I definitely don't know him now. Kinda glad Facebook doesn't let you see who looked at your profile recently. I'm sure nothing good would happen if he saw that I'd tracked him down. If he's remembered me at all, it'll be because I was a bit on the creepy side.

It's a bit of a disturbing trend for me--the people I hated are all doing fabulously, and the people I fancied or just liked aren't. Almost without exception, the people I had crushes on (that I can remember having crushes on, anyway) seem to have grown up pretty unfortunate-looking. It sort of makes me wonder if I don't have really bad taste in people. Like, if I fancy someone it means they're not going to age well.

Well, oh well. All I can do is hope that won't be the case with Max. Of course, I adore him inside and out so I like to think it wouldn't matter to me. In his favour, he does have yellow eyes. Which is awesome and sexy at the same time. Weird eye colours are my thing.

And he doesn't wear any cologne at all.

Or have a Facebook.