Dance Dance

April is the cruelest month. But let's not talk about the subject I've been blogging about constantly this past year.

Let's talk about my second favorite topic: prom!

Anyone who knows me relatively well should be able to detect the sarcasm of the previous statement. If not, I'll state it plainly: I am not too fond of prom season. Besides the calorie counting and bargain hunting for dresses, there is the lovely tension and gossip swirling around. Guys complain about nobody worth asking; girls complain about nobody worth going with. Blah blah blah.

But I do have to say, my interest in the prom season has increased a great deal this year. Why? I just realized yesterday that it's a lot of fun helping out a guy ask a girl. I used to have sour impressions about the tradition of asking in a creative way -- the courter is pressured to do something amazing (often costing even more money on top of the tickets) while the courtee could be pressured to say "Yes" just because the courter put in so much time and money. Not really fair, right? Well, I never considered the "fun" factor.

So yesterday in AP Stats (I love how my best ideas unrelated to statistics always pop up during that class), I was talking to C and Duckie about Senior Ball. A few days ago, C brought up how the guys were starting to talk about Senior Ball, and I, being the ever up-to-date one, said,"What?? Why are they already talking about that now?"

Well, what I did not realize was that Senior Ball is in less than two months away. Whoops, my bad.

So then I found out Duckie was planning to ask G, so we started talking about ways Duckie could ask G to Senior Ball. Duckie decided the only two possibe locations would either be at his house when she went to work on their project for Amercian Gov't, or at the beach (supposedly a group is planning to go next week). At first, I kept insisting on my ingeniously cheesy "letter in a bottle" idea for the beach -- okay, I was joking, but you have to admit it would have been awesome. Instead, we decided on making a fake version of their powerpoint project.

So Duckie and C came over to my house yesterday and we planned it all out in two hours. Their project topic was "Child Labor in China", so we followed the exact same powerpoint format but gradually changed the topic to "Gender stereotypes of social courtship." Since Duckie is such a wimp, we added a twist to the traditional method of asking a girl to a dance and made it so he asked her to ask HIM to the dance. Here's how the powerpoint turned out:

--------------------------------------------
Slide 1: Title Page - standard "Child Labor in China"
Slide 2: Geographic Location - we went to Google maps and took a picture of the place where Senior Ball would be.
Slide 3: Overview - standard, nothing out of ordinary
Slide 4: History of the problem - with nice clipart of a guy holding a gigantic bag of money

• Problem: Gender stereotypes of social courtship
• Males traditionally expected to do all the work
• Spend $$$ on: flowers, tickets, dinner, dates, other tokens of courtship

Slide 5: Consequences - gigantic list of different health problems including nausea, vomiting, and "FEAR OF REJECTION" in bolded capital letters
Slide 6: Case Study - did a case study on Duckie, added a funny picture of him

• One Asian Male
• Height: 6'0"
• Weight: 145 lbs.
• Name undisclosed to protect identity
• Diagnosed with acute case of terminal wimpiness

Slide 7: Case Study (cont.)

• On the ninth of April, Chinese boy toiled through seven hours of labor at a remote educational facility
• Suffered near-fatal wimpiness attack during his afternoon shift in the statistics department
• Symptoms determined to be the result of extreme pressure stemming from impending spring festivities

Slide 8: Solution - another funny picture of Duckie

• Flip-flop the gender stereotype in order to give females a chance to take the initiative
• Fulfill gender equality to the fullest extent
• Pick up the prepared flowers from under the bed and ask the shuai ge to LHS's Senior Ball =]]

Slide 9: Contact - all his contact info
Slide 10: Bibliography

• Sophelia. Origin of Wussies. Hometown: Matisse Press, 2009.
• C. Dewussify: The Secret to Grow Some Balls. Hometown: Elephant Inc., 2009.

-----------------------------
With something that good? C and I were probably 99 percent confident that G would say yes.

THEN this afternoon, after watching my brother's tennis match, I listened to a voicemail C left on my phone about ten minutes earlier. She was completely freaked out. "Crap! Duckie just told me that it went really bad. G didn't even laugh when she was reading it. She said no, and then she left his house early. He has no idea how they're going to work on Senior Project together, and he says he doesn't want to go the beach next Friday anymore. Shit! What are we going to do??!!! CALL ME BACK!!!"

So I called C back twice, and she didn't pick up. I told my mom about what had happened, and she exclaimed with much surprise, "WHAT? Why??" I felt horrible because I thought G was super mad at C and me, if she was angry enough to leave his house early. My mom told me to go call her, and if it was necessary, she would invite all parties involved in the whole business to have dinner and resolve the conflict.

So I called G, wondering if she was going to screen her calls and not bother answering. As soon as G said "Hello", I unleashed a verbal diarrhea of apologies. G started cracking up and explained that she had said yes, and that they wanted to play a trick on C. Unfortunately, C hadn't bothered informing me after she found out they had played a trick on her, so I ended up feeling like a complete and relieved idiot.

So now my next client in this whole asking business is C. I must confess, I have never been this excited about a dance in my entire life. Although I do not "have the balls" -- to use C's phrase -- to ask anybody, I just realized that coming up with ideas for someone else is a ton of fun.

I should start a business and start charging for clients. Earn some money to go to Duke!