I once had several classes with a beautiful girl named Trisha while in college. We had gone to high school together, but I never knew her then. Trisha was always way out of my league. She had just gotten married by the time we became friends in college. We studied together, sometimes at her house, and her husband, Jay, would make us strong coffee while we worked. Whenever we went into the computer lab we'd end up sitting side-by-side on the PCs working away.
Trisha was blonde, about 5’8” or so, and a part-time model. She instantly lit up the room when she entered. She'd attract a crowd in a flash. She was beautiful.
Trisha got hit on constantly. In college we had several classes in a row together. In the computer lab she'd be working away like mad, completely focused on her work, and out of the corner of my eye I'd see some Star Trek geek suddenly spot her. It was unmistakable when it happened. His brain would go into hyper drive, his eyes would grow as big as basketballs, and his heart would nearly pound out of his chest. You could actually see his little ribs just heaving from the beating they were taking. But despite his terror, animal instincts would compel him to approach her.
Of course, he had nothing to say once he’d stumbled over to her. He’d invariably end up just standing there next to her for a long, awkward moment before finally attempting to speak.
“Eeep.”
Trisha was so used to this that she had already sensed his heart attack before he even got to her, but she didn’t want to talk to him so she’d pretend not to notice. Sometimes he’d lose his nerve, sometimes he’d pass out before he reached her, and sometimes he’d make it over, but never figure out how to speak and so have to walk away, now defeated and gasping for air.
On the rare occasion that he did manage to both reach her and speak, the conversation would invariably go something like this:
Geek: “Err, umm, wha … wha … um … Ahem .. Hi, don’t I know y…. Didn’t we have Calculus together?”
Trisha: “Mmmm? What?” she would half smile, but never take her eyes off the computer screen, “I don’t think so. Maybe.”
Geek: “Oh, I thought I knew you. You look … uh … familiar.”
[Long awkward silence while Trisha said nothing in hopes that Geek was all out of words and would walk away. Geek, meanwhile, was trying to breathe and thinking fast.]
Geek: “Soooooo … um .. watcha workin’ on? Maybe I could help you.” (Translation: let me do your homework.)
Trisha: It’s my CS499 project. (this was our senior project and it was highly unlikely that he had taken the class yet or else he’d be graduated and gone.)
Geek: (very disappointed) “Oh.”
[Long silence.]
Geek: “Sooooo …. um … want to … um … want to hear a … um … why do blondes …. why do blondes … um …. wear panties? Heh heh. This is a funny one.” (Geek would then smile a horrific smile.)
Trisha: (still half smiling, still working, and still not taking her eyes off the screen) “mmmm, what?”
Geek: (growing frustrated) “I said, why do blondes wear panties?”
Trisha: “Mmmm, I don’t know. Why?”
Geek; “hee hee, to keep their ankles warm! Get it?! Hee hee hee!”
[Long silence]
Trisha: “Mmm, that’s funny. I hadn’t heard that one before.”
Yes she had. I’d told it to her and heard a hundred other guys tell it to her after that. But the truth was that she hadn’t actually heard him speaking at all and wasn’t actually processing anything he said.
From here various things would occur. Generally at this point the geek was all out of gas. He wasn’t making any progress. There was no way he was going to get up the nerve to ask her out. There was nothing more to say. And the best that he could usually come up with was some lame quote from “Monte Python and the Holy Grail”, which everyone in the world had already heard 1000 times before. Plus, by this point he was desperate for oxygen and needing to pee really badly. And his knees were wobbling and about to give way. Worst of all, Trisha had not once taken her eyes off the computer screen to look at him. The only reason he’d managed the courage to stay for this long was because of the smile on Trisha’s face, which was a very pretty, reassuring smile that made you feel incredibly warm and happy inside. It was like a drug and once she’d flashed it for you it made you an instant addict.
Yes, I was hooked on her, too, but I was engaged, she was married, and I was too much of a chickenshit to even really flirt with her. One time, and I think she was just fucking with my head, she turned her ass to me and asked, “do you think my butt is getting big?” I couldn’t figure out if it was OK to look at her ass with her staring me right in the eye or what. I nearly shit my pants.
She was one year ahead of me in high school and her husband was a football player who had been two years ahead of me at that same high school. I sympathized with the geeks who had even less of a shot than I did, but they entertained me nonetheless. I saw myself in their desperate and feeble attempts to win her attention and was thrilled at the opportunity to study this phenomenon from an observer’s view rather than from the shaky guy’s view.
One night while we were studying at Trisha’s house, her husband had brought us some extra strong coffee to help us focus. We were both flying so high on the caffeine that we actually couldn’t study at all. We ended up talking for 3 hours at 90 mph. I found out her entire life story and she found out mine. We had both grown up with the usual engineer father who offered little emotional support and the teacher mother who was frustrated at the lack of emotion from the husband. We both had one older brother and some sisters. She had twin younger sisters and I had 3 older sisters. Her twin sisters were two years behind me and almost as hot as she was.
The biggest difference in our families was that everyone in her family was unusually smart (and good-looking.) Trish told me that she had learned to smile and act like she was listening to the geeks who bothered her from growing up with her twin sisters, Fran and Kay, who would always stir up all kinds of crises at home and then come running into her room to pour out their hearts while she was trying to do her homework. She would smile, nod, and even respond as if she were totally in tune with the conversation, all the while reading, writing, and comprehending the work she was truly focused on.
Her older brother had some sort of problem with epilepsy when he was very young and had to take medicine. But the medicine had affected his personality, taking the life out of it. But he was a genius. Trisha was sad about the effects of the medicine and said she’d always wondered what sort of person he’d have been if not for the medicine subduing his real personality.
Trisha herself was a genius, as I quickly found out from trying to keep up with her while we studied. Every time we studied, no matter what it was, she ended up explaining everything to me. I felt so embarrassed and stupid. She’d tried to reassure me by explaining, “that’s OK. It helps me to learn it better by having to explain it to you.” Yes, and now I feel like a total loser times ten.
That night, while pouring out our life story to each other, I asked her about being so smart and yet blonde and having everyone assume she was a ditz. She told me that in middle school she had been labeled a “brain” and didn’t like it. Apparently it is the most horrible thing in the world for a beautiful girl to be labeled a brain at age 13 or so. So Trish had tried to shake the label by acting dumb, sort of putting on the Marilyn Monroe routine. It worked. Everyone loved her again and all was right with the world. But, she told me, somehow she just got stuck acting that way. She wasn’t dumb, but she found that she really didn’t have to try very hard to pass her classes and got more of the right kind of attention by focusing on being pretty and fun. So school was a breeze and life was good. She was really popular. I knew this to be true from being in high school with her. She was REALLY popular.
When Trish got to college she made a lot of Cs and Bs and wasn’t really any more focused than she’d ever been. But eventually she’d met and married her husband, a very smart guy himself who graduated in engineering. Now that this part of her life was in order Trish was ready to graduate and get on with things. So now she was focusing more and more on school. And now, in the hardest classes of her entire college career, she was making As.
To get a BS in computer science at this college you had to minor in math. I don’t care what the feminists say about the president of Harvard’s remarks, almost everyone else believes he was probably right. Generally guys have a better aptitude for math than girls, with plenty of exceptions, of course. Trish made As in the senior level math classes that we had together. I would sweat and study my brains out to pass and Trish would make an A with one arm tied behind her back. During her final term before graduation her mother got very sick and had to be hospitalized, her father-in-law had a major heart-attack and had to be hospitalized, and her husband was diagnosed with a genetic flaw in his heart which was found to be the cause of his father’s heart-attack and could easily cause him to die of one, too, at any time. All of this fell on Trisha at the exact same time. She was going to school in the daytime, and spending every single night at the hospital, studying here and there when she could. And this, I kid you not, was when she did her absolutely most astounding work. It was so good that her professors started to accuse her of cheating by getting her husband to do her work for her.
In one of her computer architecture labs Trisha had breezed in, read the lab, figured it out despite the guys hitting on her, and finished it, all the while thinking about needing to get to the hospital to see her family. She was completely focused and not talking much to anyone. No one else in the class could figure this particular lab assignment out. Not me, not the Chinese students, not the Indian students, no one.
So we ALL copied Trish’s lab. Guess who got accused of cheating by the lab instructor? And how could we explain the truth?
“You see, Professor, that’s not how it is. She didn’t cheat off of us. We all cheated off of her.”
No way could we confess to this. So we had to stand there and agonize over her taking all this verbal abuse, and all the while she was smiling that involuntary smile that she did when she was under pressure, and seeming pretty and blonde and not at all likely to have been the actual source of the information rather than the recipient of help. I was so mad that I went to our professor and complained loud and long about the lab instructor chewing her out when I had sat beside her and watched her figure it out and knew for a fact that she had not cheated.
I got the lab teacher in big trouble. In the very next lab he came over to her and apologized.
Sorry, Mr. Indian Grad Student Lab Man, but you should never, ever rip apart a beautiful blonde girl in front of a bunch of guys who are in love with her. If we can’t beat your ass for fear of being flunked out then we’ll get you fired. You’d better think about that before you jump down her throat.
If there is one thing Trisha will never have a shortage of, it’s people who love her and will fight for her.
After Trisha graduated I heard she went to work for TRW programming in Ada for some government contract. I had hoped to follow, perhaps even working side-by-side with her and enjoying myself each day with the incredible warmth of her beautiful charisma. But it didn’t work out and I never saw her again after that.
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