Prologue

I left half an hour early from work and had to run for the train after a timetable miscalculation. I reached the station just as the train was pulling in. I reached my seat, still sweltering from the minor jog. I was preparing for an unstoppable flood of sweat, something that happened last time I ran for a train and was so embarrassing that I had to get off the train to cool down. Fortunately the air-conditioning meant that a repeat episode was averted.

I was trying to have a snooze on the train when I started listening into a conversation between two guys, slightly younger than me on two seats across the aisle. The tall, shaggy-haired one did most of the talking, and was initially reading out all the SMSes stored on his phone. Some were inane (again, I like that word), some were messages from his girl admirers eg “I like Christmas but I like you more” (puke). Their conversation was going pretty much nowhere, but I couldn't help but listen, whilst pretending to be asleep. I have hyperactive eyebrows, so I was hoping those wouldn't give my cover away.

My perseverance paid off when Shaggy started talking about his sex life, very casually I might add. He mentioned various sexual positions which I won't detail. He mentioned how this girl was shy, and how/what he did to make her comfortable. He knew that “some girls prefer x, some girls prefer y”. This didn't knowledge come from reading trashy articles in Dolly or FHM or Penthouse or whatever it is that people read, this was based on ACTUAL EXPERIENCE. What was remarkable was that he knew this based on a CONSENSUS, obviously through all the girls he's been with. There was no ego, and no crassness in what he was saying, which I admired because if it was me I would blog so a worldwide audience of 8 billion could read about it.

Epilogue

This was quite hard for me to wrap my head around. Maybe because I'm still a guy who holds his breath when someone on the train coughs, so the laws of physics would mean that he would safely pass through the cloud of germs as the train pressed forward. Maybe because I'm the guy who wore a teddy-bear (albeit an emo one) T-shirt to work. Maybe because I'm the guy who left work early so he could catch more of WWE on pay-TV when he got home.

Today I caught the train to the city. I saw a fairly attractive Asian girl, but being the insecure, low self-esteem dweeb that I am, I chose not to sit next to her, but on the three-seater in the row just in front of her. I was drifting off into my own little daydreamworld when I heard the girl behind me speak, to a male passenger who got on at an indeterminate station after mine.

To put it simply, it was a chat-up, filled with inane small-talk "where are you from, what do you do, where are you going, etc etc". She was asking most of the questions, he did most of the answering, and he did a good job to reciprocate questions as a way of showing interest. The gist of their life stories: She was probably new to town, didn't have many friends (good sign/opportunity in my book), and she did finance. He was probably new to town too, a Canadian from Toronto(?), possibly with some French background, and mentioned that he spent a couple of years in New York as if that'd impress her. Well she wasn't budging. No laughs, not even forced laughs, making it sound less like courting and more like an interrogator's court. Near the end of their respective journeys, what seemed like endless breaks of silences penetrated the conversation. Bottomless chasms of agonising silence. I was cringing for the poor well-meaning Canuck. It was sweet irony as the train was entering a dark, dark tunnel.

With his last throw of the dice, Canadian asked if they'd like to meet up:
Girl: What do you mean?
Boy: You know, meet up for [something inaudible].
Girl: Well...not alone (emphasis her's) ....
Boy: Ok, how about later on today?
Girl: Sorry...I'm busy meeting up with a friend...
Boy: How about later on in the week, catch up or something
Girl: Sorry I'll be busy too, doing [something inaudible]
~ Conversation flatlines ~

He was shot down, and crashed not with a bang but with a whimper. Oh the humanity....

There's probably not too much consolation the boy could attain in this kind of situation. He had no friends around for moral support, I certainly couldn't turn around and give him an "Attaboy" for effort. The only hope he had was that he was surrounded by non-judgemental witnesses and that this brief failure would not be memorialized by someone needing material for their blog.