Nerdy Punk Rock Anime Hair

Like I say at the beginning of all my support meetings, I am a nerd. I have a favorite comic artist and writer, and can give you in-depth reasons why I've chosen them. I write poetry. I perform said poetry in public. I've even done a couple of low-level national tours with other poets. I spent several years working at a renaissance faire. I liked it. I am a nerd.

I am also incredibly attracted to nerds. Sure, the midwestern farm boy look is kind of hot. And who can resist a buff surfer boy. But give me mussy hair, glasses, and an IQ high enough to bake bread at, and I'm in love. And if they're multi-lingual...

Pardon me, I have to go change my pants.

Ahem, so...I was at a convention in Chicago. A friend of mine and I were staying at a hostel to cut down on the cost of the convention. It was the middle of August and the hostel had no air conditioning, and the free fans they supplied didn't work. We made plans to crash on the hotel room floors of other convention goers.

Why was I not whoring? Did I have a boyfriend? An STD? A sudden attack of morals? Hells, no. But in the five years I've been attending this convention I have never had the opportunity to stretch latex. Shit, I've never even been kissed by someone that I had a desire to be kissed by.

During the first day of the convention a good friend of mine reintroduced me to one of her gay friends. He was a hottie. Very punk nerd. Huge animé hair. I'd met him the year before and developed a mini-crush...until I caught him making out with my doppelganger (I have one...it's a story for another time). Note, I didn't stop crushing on him because he was making out with my doppelganger. The crush stopped when my doppelganger told me that Animé Hair was a terrible kisser.

At any rate, I spent some quality time hanging with Animé Hair and my friend (who might also have been referred to as Animé{e?} Hair), and decided he was a likable guy, but I refused to go all crush woozy. I was in fact chasing after a cute frustratingly straight attention whore who knew I had a crush on him.

At the end of the night, some friends and I ended up at the main hotel drinking and spitting words (see, it doesn't mean to speak poetry, it means you're drunk, and you're hurling slurred words at people)  in the hotel room that contained, among other people, Animé Hair. As far as I could tell, no sparks were flying. Attention Whore left the room, to watch a couple of bisexual girls make out in one of the other rooms.

Over the course of the night, I had tried to get blitzed. Alas, I have a high tolerance for alcohol, and no love of beer, so getting blitzed can be expensive, even when the fairly unkind bud began being passed around the hotel room. Eventually, though, jet-lag, lack of sleep, alcohol, marijuana, and my interaction with Attention Whore made me dizzy. So when Animé Hair took my hostel room key and slid it into his pocket I was confused. Fairly soon after he took my key, his roommates decided that 4:28 in the morning was a good time to get some shut-eye, so I asked Animé Hair if he was coming to the hostel with me. He looked confused as I was, and said "Sure."

We took an uneventful cab ride from hotel to hostel. We shot some shit and coy glances at each other. When we reached the hostel he said, "Well, I'd better get back to the hotel. I'll see you tomorrow."

"But" I stammered, as I fiddled with the door handle, "you have my room key."

"Huh?"

"My room key. You took my room key out of my hands back in your hotel room." I pulled the key out of his pocket. "See?"

"Oh. I'll come with you then." It made sense at the time. Really.

As I stepped from the cab I tripped a bit, and my canvas bag dropped to the pavement, spilling all my belongings. While I was collecting the books and papers, Animé Hair was snickering at me.

"What?"

"Progaine Shampoo?"

I turned crimson as my hair. "A pre-emptive strike against impending baldness."

He laughed some more. We went up to my room. I found out later that my roommate had crashed on Attention Whore's floor back at the hotel. We had the room to ourselves.

I'll spare you the coy boy flirtation ordeal and cut to the chase: he started talking about his boyfriend back home. Having a sense of morals that does not allow me to date people who are involved with other people, I terminated flirtation. Or so I thought.

Animé Hair was spread out on my roommate's bed (which my roommate never got around to sleeping on). After every other sentence or so, he'd give me this incredibly flirtatious smirk. Finally, I could bear it no longer.

"If you've got a boyfriend, why do you keep looking at me like that?"

"Cause, hon, your dick is hanging out of your boxers."