a love story. part one.

This is a true story. A wonderful love story. This love story, in many ways, is much like Woody Allen’s movie Annie Hall— except much better, because in this story everyone dies at the end.

In addition. For this particular story I’ve decided to employ my artistic license and will stray away from my realistic rendering of the human form and take on a much more abstract, post-minimalist approach— which I like to call cuadrados con un corazón. I will also be straying from my usual humorous narrative, as my intentions are to make you weep with emotion. Love is not funny at all. In fact, it is quite the opposite. It’s like Sinbad. Yes, love is like Sinbad. Write that down.

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Once upon a time, a young woman was lying on the grass with all her friends. They were on a college retreat and enjoying their free time away from the responsibilities of educational attainment.  It was the 1970s so these young ladies were all fake flower children and conversing about fake flower children things:

Across the field was a young man stumbling around with a stack of books. The young woman and her friends spotted him and laughed, “Dweeb alert!”, “Nerd shit!”, and  “hahahahahaha! JERK.” The fake flower child was my mom. The nerd shit was my dad. And this was the first time they saw each other. My mother was a super hip lady, a social butterfly who was once voted “best personality” in middle school. And my father was the kind of kid that this happened to in middle school:

You would suspect the likelihood of my father and mother interacting after this first visual contact to be slim, but alas, we live in the noble country of America, where the oppressive youth social hierarchy disintegrates after high school, and social butterflies hang with nerds, cool Asians dance with not cool Asians, and athletes play Jenga with overweight theater majors. The only ones who really are excluded are a cappella kids. No one likes them.

So as fate had it, my parents’ social circles came in contact. I’m not sure exactly how their respective friends started hanging out with each other— perhaps my father’s roommate, known around campus as “Night Stalker,” was an acquaintance of mom’s roommate’s boyfriend, the albino poet. Something completely normal like that.

But that’s not important— what is important is that after being introduced to each other, my father quickly became smitten with mother. Again and again he would ask her out, but again and again she refused. My poor father was heartbroken— perhaps it was time to give up, perhaps it was time to start asking her best friend out, perhaps it was time to start suspecting she was a lesbian. But, fortunately for my existence, after a while my mom finally said yes, because as you have learned from such timeless films as Bubble Boy and Transformers, while they might not be as babilicious as the jock in your math class, it’s always better in the long run to date the nerd. They are more likely to “love you for who you truly are” and not make jokes about the WNBA.

*come back for part two- to find out how everyone dies!