BRB, just going to shrivel up into a ball and not come out 'till next year.
1. One year my neighbor had a summer pool party for the kids in my grade. It was tradition for all the most daring boys to jump off the roof and into the pool, so, naturally, I got up on that roof. As I waved to my crush, I slipped off the roof and landed my left shin on the edge of the pool. An ambulance ride and 32 stitches later, he pronounced his love for me. It was worth the scar I have now.
2. I decided to print a t-shirt with his face on itand it worked!
3. She was into BDSM so I let her shoot 12 industrial staples into my butt cheeks and then beat them with bamboo spoons for an hour. I couldnt sit comfortably for two weeks.
4. I pretended I could play tennis, we went to the local court and I served a ball right into his little brothers face
5. One time I was in an online relationship in seventh grade with a 14 year old named Sid. This was before the time of digital cameras, and I was too young to get my own disposables developed because I didnt have a car, so I sent him my dance recital photos in skimpy leotards and heavy blush. I put them in the mailbox (how else would you send pictures?) and my parents found them in the outgoing mail. Im pretty sure my mom cried. Her 11 year old chubby brunette was sending pictures of herself barely clothed in a cowboy hat to what was most likely a pedophile in Ohio.
6. I was Snapchatting my crush and I wanted my boobs to appear bigger and perkier, so I told my friendwho was with meto hold them up while I snapped the picture(without getting her hands in it of course). Took a few tries, but I sent it.
7. I sat on his girlfriends face. I thought it would make me seem (Continued)
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I thought it would make me seem bold & sexual.
8. My crush once told me my hair looked pretty (I had straightened it for picture day), so I woke up an hour earlier for school every morning for the next two years and straightened the crap out of my hair until finally it was so fried my mom made me get a bob. I cried.
9. One time I jumped off the high dive to do a cannonball to impress my crush. This was a bad idea for two reasons: 1) a cannonball is the least graceful thing you could do, and 2) when I landed, water went straight up my butt.
10. I bought an iPod, created a fake iCloud account, and set it up as a completely different person. Then, I hooked my crush up with my friend (a.k.a fake me) and texted him using fake photos, etc. Well, my crush proclaimed his love to my friend, and she turned him down. Then, real me swooped in and comforted him. It worked and we ended up dating. He still doesnt know it was me fake dating him for three months. I have no regrets!
11. They mentioned how they needed their hair trimmed, so I told them I was really good at cutting hairI never cut hair a day in my life.
12. When I was in sixth grade, this boy had a crush on me. So, naturally, he thought telling me he had a third testicle would impress me.
13. As a child a few of my friends and my crush were gathered at the lunch tables. We were all discussing cool tricks we could do with our bodies. Some had double jointed thumbs, others had voice talents. I focused everyones attention on me and shouted, I can pull out my hair! and then promptly pulled out a chunk of my hair. My crush called me disgusting and left. My first tragic heartbreak.
14. I thought the boy I liked would like me back if I showed him I could fit my entire fist in my mouth. So I did (Continued)
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So I did and it didnt work. Damn.
15. In third grade I had a huge crush on a boy. He and a group of his friends had a club that would meet on the monkey bars during recess. One day I asked if I could join the club if I showed them something coolI said that I could swing on the monkey bars with no hands or feet. They were like LOL OK, so I said 1 23, and flung myself backwards. I face-planted in the dirt. The teachers LAUGHED at me.
16. One time me and my crush went on a fishing trip, and to impress him I ate a minnow. A dead minnow.
17. I had a crush on a bad boy in 10th grade. I was a sweet kid, but wanted to look tough and impress him. At a school dance when I saw him looking in my direction, I pushed my friend really hard and wrestled her to the ground to make it look like we were in a fight. For some reason I thought hed be impressed by this. I looked like a wild goof and my friend was mad at me for a week.
18. I shaved my eyebrows for an entire year because he thought cyber-goth chicks were hot. Nine years later and they still haven't grown back all the way.
19. From grade 3 to grade 5, this dude named Charles had a crush on me. At the time I was all "Eew, boys!". He did all kinds of wild stuff to get my attention. The most common was to try to "surprise smooch" me, which promptly made me chase him and scratch him (Why? I don't know. Kids being kids.) every time.
The craziest, though, was definitely this one day in music class: He asked the teacher to stop the class for a second. He kneeled in front of me, handed me a rose and sung to me a very cheesy Brazilian song which the chorus says "Honey, I love you". I have always been extremely shy and having the whole class looking at me in that extremely embarrassing situation just made me snap. I pushed him away and left.
He constantly asked for teachers to let him speak in front of the class or asked the English teacher to play songs and when she would put them on, he would point at me and say: "Hey this one is for you!".
20. I had the biggest crush on this guy in my biology class. We flirted but he wouldn't ask me out. So when it came time to dissect the frogs I decided to step up my game. I showed him, rather enthusiastically, how to (Continued)
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I showed him, rather enthusiastically, how to shave the frog's head little by little using the scalpel so you could see the brain without damaging it. As an unintended result one of the girls in my group threw up in the trash can. Ten years later and we're married with two kids!
21. To get her attention, I threw a fry directly at her forehead. I'm not joking. It worked too.
22. Walked by him MANY MANY times until he asked me if I was lost and I replied, "FINALLY you notice. I was getting tired of walking."
We then dated for two years.
23. She's in the medical field so I messaged her if she can help me identify my illness and I listed the symptoms of being in love.
24. Drunk me thought I could make my crush jealous by hooking up with a random dude in a port-a-potty during a late night BBQ party in a park. Drunk me is not an intelligent woman.
25. My then crush accidentally threw away her retainer. I dug through the trash at our high school to find it for her. I admit it made me look desperate but she seemed to like me a little more after that. We have been married for almost 10 years now.
26. Drove 225 miles to a Krispy Kreme because she said one time that she missed them so much. If she didn't know I had a crush before, I'm pretty sure I overplayed my hand on that one.
27. Took my grandma's car to drive an hour and a half just to sit outside her house. I texted her telling her I was coming over to see her she agreed. Got there she was actually (Continued)
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Got there she was actually asleep. It was 4 am during the week and I was 14 with no drivers license.
28. I gave her thousands of dollars worth of baseball cards by mistake. Here's the story: there was a girl in my class who I had a HUGE crush on for many years. I wanted to do something very special for her, and I remembered my dad saying that he had some "very special cards" in the garage. Yes, it was his prized baseball card collection. I didn't know that they were so valuable, and proceeded to take them out of the binder thinking, "He has so many! He won't notice if I take ten or so." Well, I showed up to class and had wrapped them up all nicely with a card that professed my love to her. She was actually a really sweet person, so she smiled and said thank you, but in all honesty she was very nonplused by the dinky little pieces of paper with weirdo random athletes I had just handed her. Anyway, that night my dad gets a call from her dad, and they drive by together to return the cards. As her dad hands the cards over, he goes, "He's going to make a great boyfriend some day." They had a good laugh together. Later that night, my dad scolded me for taking his property, but I could tell he was also a little proud.
- Anonymous
29. My crush and coworker tweeted during her opening shift "I'm so tired someone bring me Starbucks". I tweeted back with something encouraging about working the morning shift at a fast food place and soon she responded "aw thanks". 2 minutes later I hand delivered a frappuccino THROUGH the drive-thru window to her.
30. Switched my whole senior year schedule around so that I could have a class with her. Didn't take the class I needed to get into the university program of my choice. Had to take an extra semester while she went off to said university. She started dating a guy there and hasn't stopped ever since. I'm just on the sidelines, hoping there will be a chance one day.
-Anonymous
31. I was drawing a little cartoon on my notebook when the girl I had a HUGE crush on in college saw it and laughed. I was like, "this is my chance." So I began drawing more cartoons of our inside jokes or funny things that would happen in class or on campus or whatever. I would pre-draw things but pretend to whip them up in class, so I would spend around 1-2 hours drawing every day just to have the perfect picture done by next class. Well, we never ended up dating BUT (Continued)
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We never ended up dating, but having a class with that girl all year made me practice drawing so much that I ended up getting really into illustration and transferred to another school to do a degree in it. I saw that random girl on Facebook the other day and, well what the heck, I thought, and I messaged her to tell her that having a crush on her changed the entire path of my life. Guess who has a date next week?
-Anonymous
32. I lived about 3 miles from my high school. After school I would jog all the way to the school and back so I could passively wave to my crush during her cross-country practices. I hate running....
33. Wrote their university entry essay for them. They got in. To Harvard.
-Anonymous
34. Started smoking just to have a reason to hang out with her. I'm literally dying to hang out with her.
35. When I was seventeen, this girl that I was madly in love with asked me to drive her to Buffalo (a city 400 miles away from my home town) to visit a friend. We had just kissed for the first time the week before, and I was elated to spend a weekend away with her.
So I lied to my parents, drove all the way up to Buffalo in the dead of winter, and when we arrived at her friend's house, another guy came out and gave her a hug and a kiss.
Not knowing what to do, I said, "Give me a call when you're done." I drove off to the mall, watched The Ice Harvest, slept in my car, and picked her up the next morning.
I drove for 8 hours not saying a word, and listened to her try to apologize. Even after seven years, I am convinced that every subsequent women I've been with will do that to me.
play in my flip flops. After getting off to a great start on Afronova, I decide to get fancy and start doing spins while on the pad. And promptly fell off of it. Everyone in the student union was watching. I was known as "that DDR guy" for the first two months of school.
One of my favorite books is "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." It was a key element in unlocking what I could see with my imagination. No adolescent should go beyond sixth grade without knowing it. What else?
"ANNOUNCEMENT FOR A LOT OF PEOPLE READING THIS THREAD:"
"MANY OF THE BOOKS MENTIONED HERE ARE IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN AND IN AUDIO BOOK FORM. GO THROUGH YOUTUBE/RANDOMHOUSE/AUDIBLE/OVERDRIVE FOR ALL THE CLASSICAL GOODNESS YOU WANT."
"It almost totally eliminates the financial/time commitment that many will cite for not picking them up. I listen to books on double speed all the damn time. I am working my way through "A Tale of Two Cities" now."
Meaning
wondering simon cowell GIF by X Factor GlobalGiphy"Man's search for meaning - Viktor Frankl."
Oh Milo
"The Phantom Tollbooth."
"Maybe one of my favorite literary moments…"
"Milo: "Many of the things I'm supposed to know seem so useless that I can't see the purpose of learning them at all."
"Princess of Sweet Rhyme: "...what you learn today, for no reason at all, will help you discover the wonderful secrets of tomorrow."
- wort_hog
Johnny
"Johnny's Got His Gun. It's so intense, but it's so good. Metallica's song One is based off this book. Guy has his arms and legs blown off, goes blind and deaf, and is left to live like that. I only read it once, but it's forever engrained into my memory. It hits you like a freight train."
Brothers...
"Surprised I haven't seen it here already so I'll add it... The Brother's Karamazov by Dostoyevsky. In Slaughterhouse 5 Vonnegut said it could teach everything that we needed to know about life, except that wasn't enough anymore."
"If the only thing that book did was make you marvel at how people centuries and oceans removed from you in time and place, could experience the exact same emotions about life as you did, it would be worth the read. There's so much more to it, but Dostoyevsky had such a knack for digging deep into universal human experience. And it's just a hell of a good story too."
Classics
diva read GIFGiphy"Speaking as somebody who isn't religious, the literary value of the Bible (and the Hebrew Bible) is severely underrated."
I took a class on it in college, with a prof who'd once allegedly gotten into a bar fight over Beowulf. We would sometimes spend half a class discussing a single verse or two because there's so much stuff going on under the hood."
- dmillson
I know so many of those. And sadly, I'm already behind in my studies. I love books and I'm always on the path to find more to consume. Let me ready my already lengthy list.
WAR
War Shockwave GIFGiphy"All Quiet on the Western Front. Everyone should have to reckon with the reality of what war actually means."
- BigHern
Thanks Teach...
"Night, by Elie Wiezel. It is absolutely heartwrecking , and I hated every moment of reading it, which is exactly the effect it is supposed to have."
"Came here looking for this one. I had to read it back in high school and it blew me away how moved I was by it. Stories like his need to be remembered for all time, no matter how hard it is to get through (emotionally-speaking; it's actually quite an easy and short read). I'm so grateful that my English teacher assigned it."
West
"The Westing Game."
"A Librarian here, such a terrific book. I have gotten so many kids to read it by hooking them with the fact that the reader can play the game and has all of the clues. And good luck as it is fiendishly clever."
All the Good Crazy
"The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. Such a great book."
"Oh my god yes. I love this book for being the sex, drugs and rock and roll of the classics world. It is lengthy but has revenge, treasure, plots and schemes and drugs. There is nothing stuffy about this classic."
- skundrik
The "Good"
"The Giver- that book made my 9-10 year old mind really think about what was important in society. It was the first time the idea of "good" things having a negative consequence was presented to me. I think what makes it work is that we are learning how this whole society really works along side a character who has lived in it his whole life."
"As the facade of the utopian society begins to fall away to show devastating consequences of the "perfect life and society" the reader not only feels their shock but the main character's shock. This was a book I read in school 4 times- once in 5th grade and once in 10th for English and then in both high school and college sociology classes. This book written for 9-13 year olds made for great discussions."
Good and Bad of Life
read ford GIFGiphy"The Grapes of Wrath and/or Of Mice and Men. Both are heartbreaking, but not for the sake of being heartbreaking - instead they provide a glimpse of how freaking hard life can be, but also how beautiful it can be."
That is a lot of good advice. And a lot of great storytelling and advice giving. Did anyone miss anything that should be there? And make sure you read anything by Harlan Coben, he's a fav.
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