Confessions of a Serial Dater by Adalade Brooks (learn to read activity book txt) 📕

I was sixteen years old when I went completely and utterly off the deep end. Yep. When I was sixteen years old I made the worst mistake a teenager with dreams can make. I fell in love. That love sent every dream that I had of my future out the window, and brought in a new list of goals and dreams that I have stuck with ever since. Call me an over achiever, but until I fell in love I had my life planned down right to the name of the family dog, the home address, and the color of my office. My plan was to go to college for political science and then make my way up the ladder to the oval office.

However there is one problem with being president that now, I simply cannot deal with. No one likes to talk about this problem, but just take a look at the Clinton family and we all know that it surely is unavoidable in every political family. The president simply cannot be in love. The president has meetings to attend, press conferences to hold, speeches to give, state dinners, and lots of travel. I mean let’s face it. Being president lefads to a remarkably shitty love life where your spouse is a glorified event planner and you sleep with your assistant every chance you get. No thank you.

Love showed me that I could not happily continue to be the workaholic I had been up to that point. Instead I would be the hopeless romantic who went to a conservatory instead of a traditional liberal arts school. I would be the twenty one year old on a plane to Boston to audition for a chair in the symphony. Not the thirty five year old head of state screwing her assistant to keep from being at home with her husband, two kids and a dog.

Love did to me what it does to everyone. Love opened my eyes and showed me what I was missing in my life. Unfortunately that particular love was short lived, and the stories that have followed have been more humorous then spontaneous, more tragic then sweet, and most importantly has left me with this book. I hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed living and writing it.

Note-From this point forward all names have been changed to protect the long lost innocence of the losers I have had the misfortune of dating.

The most important lesson that a guy can learn professionally before he turns eighteen is how to tie a tie. The most important lesson a girl can learn romantically before she turns eighteen is how to untie a tie. Under no circumstance should a guy with a girlfriend find himself in the position of asking a girl who is not the one he is currently seeing if she will tie his tie for him. This is especially important if the guy is going to need his tie tied with an audience around. Sadly however this is a lesson that two of my best friends and I learned one summer when we were all seventeen. Luckily leaving us three months to spare before that lesson would have been learned tragically late.

The Friday of our second performance in an annual camp scholarship recital Mark and I were walking towards the recital hall when our friend Mandy joked that Mark was the only guy walking to the recital hall without a tie on. This of course was when Mark realized that he had left his tie back in his dorm room. We turned around and walked with Mark back to our dorm where he grabbed his tie shoved it in his bag and started walking out the door.

Mandy with her quick whit and dry sense of humor stopped Mark at the door and made a failed attempt at a joke about Mark coming all the way back for a tie he wasn’t actually going to put on. This was when Mark admitted that he had somehow managed to go the first seventeen years of his life without learning how to tie a tie.

Now, as a pair of seventeen-year-old girls who had played in many musical ensembles with pubescent boys, Mandy and I had both become quite capable of tying a tie. Unfortunately by the age of seventeen this was a skill that many guys still had yet to pick up on.

At this point of discovery Mandy was leaning back against the open door clenching her mouth and eyes closed into a remarkably hilarious face as she tried her hardest not to laugh, while I completely lost it and burst out into hysterics. Mark however was not at all enthused with our little outburst.

“Seriously. Either one of you is going to figure out how to tie a tie, or we are going back to the concert hall before we are late”

“Oh, come on Mark. We know how to tie a tie. That is why we find it so outrageously funny that you haven’t the slightest idea how,” Mandy said with a huge smile and then immediately burst out laughing.

“Why on earth do you two know how to tie a tie and I don’t? Why on earth would two girls even need to know how to tie a tie”

“For the same reason you don’t know how to tie a tie. Guys are expected to wear a tie to these kinds of events, yet they never actually know how to do tie one,” I replied as I crossed the room.

“Fine. Just tie the damn thing so we can get out of here,” Mark reached down and grabbed his tie out of the bag on his bed, draped the tie around his neck and exclaimed, “There, I’m not a complete idiot. I know the first step”

“Mark, my pet turtle knows that’s the first step to tying a tie. Why on earth would anyone think that tying a tie starts with anything other then putting it around their neck?” I said as I grabbed the tie and started tying it.

“I don’t know, maybe they haven’t seen a tie before”

“Who wouldn’t have seen a tie before?” Mandy questioned as she walked over and sat on Jacob, Mark’s roommates, bed.

“I don’t know, people in Africa?”

“Mark, we don’t live in Africa. We live in America, and I am pretty sure everyone that lives in America has seen someone with a tie on.”

“How’s that?” I asked as I stepped away from Mark so he could look in the mirror on the wall opposite him.

“Really? You call that tying a tie? The length is off!”

“Hey! Beggars’ can’t be choosers! At least I know how to tie a tie! And I will redo it if you want, but that is the length it should be.”

“It should hit the bottom of my belt buckle”

“No, it should hit the middle, but fine I will retie it Madonna,” I said as I started untying his tie.

“Ah hem! What do you two think you are doing,” Mandy and I turned around slowly to see the resident advisor standing in the doorway. Mark reached up and grabbed my hands, which I had accidentally left gripping his tie as I turned around causing him to bend over into a ridiculous position.

“We were, well, we…” Mandy Stopped.

“We were helping Mark tie his tie because he is a seventeen year old boy who has absolutely no idea how to wear formal wear, and he is suppose to be playing in a scholarship recital in forty five minutes,” I said, flashing a glance at Mandy as I finished. Mandy promptly looked away, as getting in and out of trouble was not her thing at all.

“You have three seconds to get out of this room, and then I expect to see you and your ridiculous heels running for the door as fast as you can. Firstly because as girls you should not be on this floor, and secondly because your recital has already started and you are late,” The resident advisor didn’t even get a chance to finish his lecture before all three of us were out of the dorm and rushing towards the recital hall. The three of us hoped that the resident advisor would just keep his mouth shut in regards to our sub-par behavior, but apparently that just wasn’t his style.

As we were carrying our luggage out to our parents cars the following day to prepare to head home Morgann, the resident advisor for the girls floor, came up to the three of us and advised us to either keep ties tied in their knots, or wear better get away shoes the next time Mark got himself into a bind again.

Since that day we have not needed to take Morgann’s advice as Mark has since learned how to tie a tie, and aside from recitals Mandy and I try our hardest to not wear three inch heels. But that day was a learning experience for all three of us and we were grateful that it was Morgann that received the news of our rule bending and not our parents.

My biggest
fear of all time is fireworks. Now before you go rushing to conclusions, this is a completely rational fear. Fireworks are quite capable of maiming or killing a person, not to mention setting your house on fire if your neighbor is stupid enough to light them off in his back yard despite the fact that you live in a city where it is highly illegal. Being afraid of fireworks is a quite rational fear. Which is why when my junior year of high school I was asked on a date over the Fourth of July, I should