Believe it or not, I wasn’t always painfully awesome. It took hard work, determination, and a good balanced breakfast. A big part of being painfully awesome is to be bold enough to face improbable odds, and to be content with who you are to the point where you can degrade yourself for the amusement of others. That’s what I’m about to do. I have too. This is considered by many to be the funniest thing ever written.

I met Erica in the first week of college, when we were watching movies with my friend and neighbor Steve Balsomico.  She became a member of the tight-knit group of movie buffs who assembled every Friday night to watch bizarre films in the Earp Hall lounge. She had that wonderful whacked-out Italian hair, you know, it looks kind of wavy and greasy, but it’s not either.  She also had the most spectacular, exquisite ass that I had ever seen — and I’m not even attracted to asses — but there was something about that ass that beckoned me.  It was a truly magical ass. We’d eat brunch together every weekend.  After several months of this, I thought I would ask her out.

So after spending several days trying to amass the testicular fortitude, I finally call Erica. I get her answering machine, and left a message, unaware that they did a Seinfeld on this very subject.  Erica was the first girl that I ever asked out, and I was nervous. I go with a simple:

“Hi, Erica? This is, uh…Ryan Coons, the Yellow Hat Guy, I was wondering if you could call me back at…”

Then it hit me –I’d never even given a girl my phone number before — and that’s what killed me. I had never given it out before, hell — I didn’t even know it! I called a girl, wanting to ask her out, and left a message, and I didn’t know my own home telephone number. I totally disintegrated:

“… call me back at…732-49…um…ah…um…oh…umahblahphenadadayeaaba (continues for twenty seconds, when the machine cut me off)…”

It was horrible. I dropped the phone and curled up into a fetal ball on the cold, cold tile — and somehow, when things could not possibly get worse, somehow they did. After five days go by, I hoped that she forgot about it or that her roommate deleted the message. From the many nights that have since followed, I have replayed this scenario over and over again in my mind, and I found that everything that could have possibly gone wrong did.

As I sheepishly approach her table for Saturday Brunch, she looked up from her sketchbook and told me: “I got your message.”

It gets worse. You see — I hate this story so much — Erica was actually in her room when I called. She was sleeping because she was groggy with the flu, and I woke her up.  I didn’t wake her completely up though, just awake enough to hear me babble into her answering machine, and to make her think it was all a bizarre dream. Well, at least until she woke up and found the message. She just laughed and laughed, and told me to my face while cracking up.

I was mortified.

We were still good friends, but it wasn’t the same, the magic was gone. At the end of the semester, when I went to resell my psychology book, I saw her in line, trying to resell her psychology book.  She told me that she was transferring to somewhere in Buffalo.  There was an awkward goodbye, and I never saw her again.