As a Sophomore, I earnestly believed that convincing a girl to come back to my place after meeting me just once would be like finding a treasure buried in her jeans. I believed the key to such a trove may lie in a perfectly executed pick-up line, and as such, I had been practicing. 'You come here often,' is the only one I still come back to. So simple in its construction, so effortless in its execution, so typical was the response. Laughter, without variation was the song she would sing. This was the thesis of the pick-up line: That if you were to rely upon them, you would perish. In the vernacular of evolution, pick-up lines were the least fit of all memes.
So when Karen still let me buy her a drink after I said, 'What does a 9,000 pound polar bear do?' and she had chuckled because she already knew the punch-line I didn't know what to do. I just froze in time, startled that all those months of being satisfied with swinging and missing, I hadn't even thought to practice my follow through.
"Vodka tonic," she said, reminding me of my mission. She had to hold my hand through everything that night, and I tried to lead with my elbows. "You're cute," is how it ended. That and a phone number.
