Life Lesson #4: Hard Candy Coating, Sweet Tootsie-Roll Center: Girls are Suckers

I feel that DVR has got to be one of the top five greatest inventions to come out in the past few years. That Segway thing is so overrated - it’s all about taping countless hours of 90210 reruns and The Biggest Loser. Watch it whenever you want, fast forward through bad commercials, pause to make yourself another cocktail, rewind when you realize you haven’t been paying attention for the last three minutes. Awesome.

I had gone out for dinner with some friends on Thursday night and had missed the slew of great shows the evening had to offer: My Name is Earl, The Office and The OC (I admit to watching it - although I have to say, this season is not so hot, unlike dreamy Atwood). And the new one that has been growing on me since its premiere: Four Kings.

The show is about four guys, four years out of college, living together in Manhattan. There are the usual sitcom standards that are completely unrealistic: only one of the characters can actually pull off being twenty six; their apartment is sick (which the show tries to justify by having one of the characters inherit it from his grandmother); said apartment is never messy; they run into people they haven’t seen since high school. If you grew up in New York, you know that never happens because you haven’t stopped seeing these people in the first place. I firmly believe that the East Side has been secretly annexed as a new town in Westchester. The characters have yet to be in a crowded bar. The worker at the coffee shop actually brings the orders to their tables.

And so, then, why do I like this show?

Because the characters are a lot like the guys I know (minus the large amounts of alcohol my friends still put back every weekend), who at the end of the day, are the same boys I met seven years ago. They still beat the crap out of each other. They still fight over who saw her first, who liked her first, and who’s going to get her in bed first. They abide by strict locker room etiquette. Gay jokes are the norm. And there’s always the one dude who wears flip flops way past the summer expiration date.

Now this week’s episode revolved around a vhs tape (yea, you remember those things, right?) one of the characters had made for a girl he loved back in high school. He asked her to the prom, she said no, and the result is this horrible confessional that had chest pounding, tears and all. The friends have a grand old time tearing him to shreds over it. The now grown (ha ha) woman’s reaction?

That might be the sweetest thing anyone has ever done for me!

Which got me thinking. I’ve never had one of those grand gestures thrown my way. And boy am I glad. I’ve managed to cultivate a pretty tough exterior over the years, and I would hate to have my cover blown in a heartbeat.

A quick tally of gestures that, although nothing like the blubbering sitcom video, definitely freaked me out enough to not forget them:

Seventh grade. The first boy to admit liking me. He bought me one of those clay circle charms on a black rope and asked me to be his girlfriend. I took the necklace, told him I’d tell him by Friday, and I don’t think I spoke to him again until our eight grade graduation ceremony. I was not the most mature of middle schoolers. Even today I would probably not be considered very mature, even for a middle schooler.

First ‘serious’ boyfriend in high school. Wound up being a bit of a nutcase and slightly obsessive. But when we spent our first Valentine’s together (also my first time as part of a couple on this most hellish of holidays), he took me to Rockwell’s for dinner and gave me a gift, which I don’t actually remember, and a card, which I will never forget. The front was a picture of a cat and read ‘I like you so much that if I were a cat…’. The inside read ‘…I’d be ramming my head into your leg all day long. Happy Valentine’s Day’. To this day, I have no idea what the hell that card means.

Summer between freshman and sophomore years of college. I was the lone bartender at a shifty watering hole that would be closed as a tax write-off by the fall. I fell for the biggest asshole ever. Everyone knew him, most guys hated him, usually because their girlfriends wanted him, and he couldn’t care less about anyone. We both lied about our ages and he became my summer romance/private bouncer. When I was working at night, I’d ask him if he could go next door and get me gum. ‘Fuck you,’ was the response. Twenty minutes later, he’d come in, throw a pack of Winterfresh on the bar, and go back outside. It made me feel like the hottest girl in the world.

Post-college, post-four year relationship. Started hanging out with a guy who I sort of knew from high school but was never close with. First time I leave him in my apartment in the morning to go to work, I mumble how to lock the door when he leaves and run to catch the subway. When I get home later that night, I walk into my room to find my bed is made. I almost wet myself.

The deli where I get my lunch during the week. Some guy who just started working there has taken to drawing a rose with a red grease pencil on the top of my plastic salad container. He probably does this to every woman who walks in the place, which on a given weekday, I assume is a couple of hundred ladies. Makes no difference to this girl - I walk back to work with a smile on my face every time.

Life Lesson # 4: I don’t know if it’s because most of us are not used to romantic gestures, but I think many of us women are total suckers when it comes to men. Now, I pretend I’m not all the time and get uncontrollably embarrassed if you try to hold my hand in public. But secretly, I love it.