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This working story is entitled, "What makes a Ladies Man"

I first started taking a real interest in girls when I was ten years old.  Desperate to get one of them to like me, but I didn't know how.  Very shy and reserved in general, around girls I was even more awkward.  However, as a somewhat intelligent kid, I knew that almost any question could be answered if you found the right person to ask, so certainly the most sensible plan of action was to ask a girl what girls were interested in.

Well, due to my intense shyness I was unable to work up the courage to ask any of the girls at my school.  My sister was only eight, so she didn't know anything about anything, and my mom would just harass me about it, so that seemed pointless as well.  At some point I realized that my grandma must have once been a girl, and maybe she would know what I could do to make a ten year old girl want to talk to me.

When I finally asked her, she told me that the best way to get girls to like you was to always be yourself.

My grandma has always tried to help me learn, and always gave me good answers to any questions I had.  If she didn't know the answer she would always try to help me find out.  If I asked about a word she didn't know, she wouldn't make something up or just say she didn't know, she would take me over to the bookcase and struggle to take down my grandpa's giant dictionary just so she could look the word up with me.

She told me she had once won a beauty pageant when she was 18, and had placed first of 500 girls, so she should know what a pretty girl would like.  I had no reason to doubt my grandma.  Yet, here I was a ten year old boy, who was intensely shy and into all the typical ten year old boy things.  I liked catching frogs in the yard, playing Atari, and throwing acorns at trains, and if anyone spotted me doing any of these things my intense shyness would cause me to freeze up like a deer in the headlights.  As I said earlier, I was a somewhat intelligent kid... so after only three years of intense failure with the young ladies I decided that this was a terrible way to try to get a girl.

So now I was thirteen and about to enter high school.  For the most part my grandma, mom, and sister were still the only three girls I was talking to, but I had started to at least be able to be in the presence of girls and not stand there mute and motionless like a statue.  Fortunately my older cousin, who had just completed his senior year of high school, had been dating a 16 year old girl for about a year now, and I had become comfortable enough with her presence to be able to answer her questions.

Her: "Can you pass the ketchup?"

Me: "Here." {I just talked to a girl!!! Oh my God oh my God!}!

In spite of great successes such as the conversation above, she would sometimes tease me about not having a girlfriend.  I pretty much just sat there and took it, because I figured I deserved whatever torment she chose to dish at me.  You know, seeing as she was right and all.  Her boyfriend, my cousin, who by all accounts has been a complete asshole all his life, eventually got annoyed with her treating me like garbage (I can only assume this was because he figured treating me like garbage was his job and he didn't like anyone moving in on his act.)  One day he told me I needed to stand up for myself when his girl made fun of me, and told his girlfriend she should help me rather than just make fun of me.

Well, his girlfriend looked remarkably like Brooke Shields in that movie about the dolphins, and he never liked to leave her alone with another guy, but as soon as she started giving me advice on girls he rolled his eyes and left the room while groaning.  A wiser man than myself might have taken that as a sign of something, but not me, I was enraptured.  Advice about girls from a smokin' 16 year old girl!?  Surely this advice had to be pure gold.

*to be continued*