This Is the Story of My Life

So during the spring term, I was enrolled in a 2D Design class.  Visual Arts is my minor, and my passion (if that's not too corny to say), so I was looking forward to the class.  However, I was NOT looking forward to the class schedule.  Tuesday and Thursday--4:00 to 10:00 PM.  That's six hours in one sitting!  I was already fairly swamped with the drawing class I took winter semester, and it became something of a tradition to stay up until 3 AM completing art projects during that time.  So this was something of a concern  for me.

Well, I got to the classroom early on the first day of classes.  There were only a couple of other girls in the classroom at the time.  And then another girl walked into the class.  And then another one.  And another one...

About three minutes before class started, most of the students had filed into the classroom and I came to a wonderful realization--there were only two other guys in the whole class!

The situation only improved:  one of the guys was at least 60 years old, and married.  Then, as we went around the room and introduced ourselves, I learned that the other guy was only 19 and was going to be going on a two-year mission for the LDS church soon.

So in other words, I was the only available guy for the girls in the whole class.  Ka-freakin'-ching.

I decided to strike up a conversation with the girl sitting next to me.  She was pretty and seemed nice. 

The people you make friends with in the first couple of days of class are crucial.  Not just because they can be helpful study buddies, or even that it's nice to make new friends, but because once you get to know the person sitting next to you, you are socially obligated to sit next to them for the rest of the semester.  At least that's the way it works in my mind.

*names have been changed.

So far, so good.
We were making pretty good conversation. . . until:

Side note: do any of y'all have any idea how hard it is to draw a hand in MS Paint?

I almost blurted out "You're married!!?!?!"  But instead:

That's right, out of all the girls in the class, I made friends with the only one that was married.  

Well, Becky turned out to be pretty cool and a really good friend in class, even if she was taken.  I figured it wasn't the end of the world.  There were still another 18 girls in my class.  And, to my knowledge, they were all single.  So I would keep on hoping, even if I was now obligated to sit by Becky (which I want to stress was not a bad thing).

A couple weeks later I got a stressed email in my inbox.  A girl in my 2D Design class who we'll call Jessie sent a mass email to all of us classmates saying that she had been sick for the last week and asking if any of us could help her out with catching up on assignments.  I saw another opportunity to make a friend and potentially find a date, so I volunteered to help her catch up.

The next day, after class ended, I helped Jessie catch up on the art projects she missed by telling her what the projects were (they were color theory collages), showing what my collages looked like, and giving her some pointers on how to best create these collages.

  

I decided to try to strike up a conversation:

This is the story of my life.