“Do you want to make out?” is a GREAT icebreaker, Brando. Incidentally, this was not even the first time in my 26 years that a boy has seduced me with that exact phrase. Long long ago, when I was a senior in college, I had had a crush on this one punk rock star since meeting him in the dorms freshman year. He was cute and smart and a drummer and had had the same girlfriend since high school.

Well, one night at a party where everyone was wasted and sweaty and slamdancing to, like, 80s Guns N’ Roses, he asked if I wanted to get out of there and hang out somewhere else with him. I jumped on it. Once outside, he told me that he had broken up with his girlfriend and was missing having someone to make out with, and he had always thought I was cute, and he knew I was single, so did I want to walk to my apartment and make out?

Well yes, yes I did.

I should furthermore say that this is all against the backdrop of this class we sat together in at the time - The Psychology of Human Sexuality. It was all about the importance of intimacy and communication and honesty in your relationships, so of course all night we were joking about how the professor would be so proud of us in our whole “open, honest hooking-up-thing,” and maybe we should tell him about it and possibly get extra-credit? Of course we did not, but it jazzed the whole thing up a notch.

Subsequently, of course, I fell for this guy HARD CORE, and continued in our Honest Thing by telling him so (which was excruciating). He of course was in no position to be dating someone else, having just gotten out of a four-year thing, which I understood. But then in the next months I fell the fuck apart, you guys.

I eventually had to go to a few sessions of College Counseling, which helped a great deal, and I learned that I had somehow linked not having him with being really anxious about my upcoming graduation, and did I get everything out of college I should have, had I made the most of it, was I ready to be out in the real world, why was my family so hard on me about everything from my choice of major to my choice of hairstyle, etc etc. And that my depression was only about him a teeny tiny bit.

So I guess the moral is, if you have to go through a bout of depression, try very very hard to time it to while you are in school, so that you’ll get free counseling.

And…there you have another chapter in the Days of My Lives.

PS – I very much hope that I do not fall the fuck apart quite so spectacularly after this, increasingly similar, hook-up situation.