In honor of Valentine’s Day, Sue over at Navel Gazing at its Finest is having an awesomely hopeless romantic moment week. Since I have nothing else to blog about, and a plethora of embarrassing romantic stories, I thought I’d play along, add my link, and give you all yet another glimpse of the glamour that is my life. Lucky, lucky you.

I graduated from Boston University, and BU is located basically on top of Fenway Park. Hence, it was a very cool and relatively easy thing to go to Red Sox games if you were a BU student. If you went the cheap route, you could get seats in the “bleachers” for 10 bucks. Bleacher seats had lots of students, beach balls, and beer. It was also a prime spot for catching home runs. I was once on a date where the guy jumped over 3 rows to get Ken Griffey Jr.’s homerun ball. He also ditched me after the game to go see if he could get it signed, which should tell you how emotionally invested he was in the whole “date” thing.

I spent a fair amount of time my freshman year trying to get that guy to notice me. Let’s call him Home Run Boy, because really, he was more than just a casual baseball fan. He was a dire hard, and the fastest way to his heart was tickets to the ball game. Or so I figured. So that year, I bought tickets to games thinking that he’d fall in love with me while watching the Red Sox. I did other, more embarrassing things as well, which all added up to a very cordial friendship. When I found out he was dating a good friend of mine, I came to accept the fact that Home Run Boy would never be anything more than a friend.

A few years later, he and I went to another ball game. We went to dinner first, and then sat in seats more glamorous than the bleachers. We were having a good time, actually, relaxed and easy. You know, like friends do. And then he looked at my mouth.

“Why is he looking at my mouth?” I wondered.

I swiped my lips with my fingers, making sure I didn’t have something on my face. Nothing. But he kept stealing looks at my lips, and it made me begin to think that maybe, just maybe, after all this time, he WAS finally interested in more than friendship. I leaned in just a little closer, just to make sure that I didn’t miss any opportunity for canoodling, if he should choose to go that route. He didn’t, but he just kept looking at me. I was sure that the night would end with some smooching.

It didn’t. He dropped me off at my dorm, and I went into my room, dejected. My roommate was there, along with another male friend who, come to think of it, had been hanging around a lot lately. We’ll call him Breakfast Boy, because he often came to our dorm for breakfast, claiming our cafeteria had the best breakfast around. He often invited me to go with him, and the first time I told my roommate I was going to breakfast with a boy, she snorted and said, “Well, he must be cute, because only a good looking guy can get you out of bed THAT early.” He WAS cute. He also used to call me Sunshine, which I thought was pretty sweet.

“So, how did it go?” my roommate asked, and I told her how I was SURE that after all these years of friendship, Home Run Boy was finally ready to move on, that I thought he was going to kiss me, but that I was getting all kinds of mixed signals, and I didn’t know WHAT to make of it. I grilled Breakfast Boy about male behavior, and he answered mostly in shrugs and grunts and an admonition to dump the jerk. I sat down on my bed with a sigh, and caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror.

I had a big, green piece of broccoli stuck in my teeth.

Mixed signals, indeed.

Breakfast Boy excused himself, and left. I found out later that he was there to ask me out, that he told my floormates that HE was ready to move things to a different level, but ditched that idea when I came back mooning about Home Run Boy. He started dating somebody else instead, who, I might add, was a total twit. He called HER “Cutie”, which, in my opinion, is not nearly as endearing as Sunshine.

But it means that at the end of day, a perfectly good romantic opportunity was ruined by my cluelessness. And poor dental hygiene.

Home Run Boy and I are still friends, by the way. I got a Christmas card from him this year with a picture of him and his gorgeous wife and his gorgeous kids. It’s nice to still be in touch. But I do wish the movie “He’s just not that into you” had been around when I was in college. It would have explained a LOT.

I have no idea what happened to Breakfast Boy. Perhaps he and Cutie have gorgeous kids, too.

Anybody else with the embarrassing moments? ‘Cause I could go on all.day.long.