Tales of a Teenage Twit

In conversation with my two adolescent sons the other night they asked me a pivotal boy question. “Mom, are all girls crazy?”

Let’s be specific here, we were talking about teenage girls in particular and the fact that they tend to be “stalkers”. Now the term stalker is serious and should rightly be treated with the levity it deserves. What we were referencing was normal teenage girl attention and twitterpation towards individuals of the opposite sex. So for my purposes I’m going to call them Twits.

These are regular Twits and not the Twits on Twitter, although it is possible to be both. I was a Twit before it was cool. I can only image what I would have been like if social networking had been available back then. (Head on desk.)

My personal journey on the road to Twitdom began in the 8^th grade with a poor boy named Beau who I called and hung up on 4,758 times in 2 month period. I just wanted to hear his voice and never had the nerve to actually speak to him. This was just before caller id, *69, and cell phones came into being and ruined that activity for girls everywhere. I still remember the phone number… his poor family. 

With the kibosh put on the ring-and-hang-up, my friends and I moved on to covert operations. This included stealing corrected papers out of the school boxes of some of these guys, as well as carefully documenting their daily movements through school, work, church, and athletics so that we could just happen to run into them as often as possible. “Wow, I can’t believe I’ve seen you, like, 12 times today. What a coincidence.”

At the end of every day we would spend hours either in person or on the phone going over every detail of what had happened in regards to our targets that day. “He asked me to hold his sunglasses at band practice, he must like me!!!”  

The weekly church dances were another opportunity for contact. We would move in flocks back and forth from the gym to the bathroom to either revel in the joy of being asked to dance by the flavor of the month or cry on a sympathetic shoulder when snubbed. The bathroom was also our hideout when one of us was experiencing the same kind of attention we were dishing out.

Later on as driver’s licenses began being obtained the twitting included driving past the homes of the boys we liked at regular intervals. Every Friday & Saturday night after we had concluded the goings-ons for the evening we would drive past the home of someone that one of us was currently obsessed with, just in case he might be getting in at that exact moment.  

My dear friend Shauna had a particularly long-lasting crush on a boy and we made a habit of buzzing his house 2 or 3 times before going home. One night on our way back from seeing a movie with some other friends we realized that Shauna had fallen asleep in the passenger seat. Like clockwork we drove to the house and pulled to a stop, I leaned over and pulled the door open and several of us shoved Shauna out onto this boy's front lawn. We then quickly pulled the door shut and roared off into the night, laughing hysterically.

Don’t worry, after a quick turn around the block we went back and picked her up. I’m not sure I’ve ever been completely forgiven for that but she was a terrific sport about the whole episode.

Luckily the rotating roster of boys that we followed around never seemed to be too interested in us. I can’t imagine why. Age and maturity eventually set in and we finally adopted a philosophy that was summed up in a song Shauna’s mom taught us.

Here’s to the boys the we love

Here’s to the boys that love us

But the Boys that we love

Aren’t the boys that love us

So to heck with the boys here’s to us!

So the answer to your question my sons is yes, teenage girls are crazy. And what a fun and exciting time of life it is.

Cheers,

Brenda

Do you have any tales of your own?