Everything is worse in high school: your hair, your taste in music, your grasp of how bad you have it, your ability to have a meaningful conversation with a girl that does not revolve around how awesome Nine Inch Nails are. But especially worse is your ability to maintain a relationship of any kind, which is why most high school romances end in whatever is the emotional equivalent of watching a bus full of orphan blind baby koalas go over a cliff in a bus on fire. Let’s go back to school now with, uh, me:

“I’m A Cold Heartbreaker Fit To Burn And I’ll Rip Your Heart In Two”
By Jeff Vrabel

In spite of an unfortunate decision by my parents to hold off on getting me braces until late in high school, and a general disposition that led to a running joke involving my similarity to Paul Pfeiffer on The Wonder Years, I actually had a girlfriend for the better part of my senior year, though I had absolutely no idea what was going on most of the time, and was, as I recall, so deliriously happy that someone was paying attention to me that I implicitly, and gleefully, consented to dating a girl who was pretty regularly flirting heavily with several dozen other dudes at any given time of day, especially Gabe, the new trenchcoat-wearing long-haired tortured poet-type who could draw really well, was a good listener and liked the Smiths. Fucker. (more…)