Dang it, Shawna! <hug>

Moderators: Bookworm, starkruzr, MrFireDragon, PrettyPrincess, Wapsi
Very few teenage boys are mind readers. I think the largest number ever recorded in a psychology experiment involving several thousand boys in dozens of high schools was approximately Zero, plus or minus a statistical margin of error of Two.Drakkenmensch wrote:It really doesn't help that she has feelings for a silly boy who appears completely oblivious to love.
I've always heard that this was a quotation from Mark Twain, but apparently it hasn't ever been tracked down to a specific source, and the attribution to Twain isn't regarded as authentic. It may be an old piece of American folk wisdom. Maybe even older... human behavior hasn't changed much since the late Stone Age, so the saying may be only a few hours younger than the first invention of the barrel. I wonder what the Beaker People had to say about that topic...oldmanmickey wrote:Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns and shake sense into them. My daddy used to tell me at puberty boys should be nailed up in a barrel and when the hit the teenage years drive the bung in.
Heinlein - The Rolling Stones.Dave wrote:I've always heard that this was a quotation from Mark Twain, but apparently it hasn't ever been tracked down to a specific source, and the attribution to Twain isn't regarded as authentic. It may be an old piece of American folk wisdom. Maybe even older... human behavior hasn't changed much since the late Stone Age, so the saying may be only a few hours younger than the first invention of the barrel. I wonder what the Beaker People had to say about that topic...oldmanmickey wrote:Sometimes you just have to grab the bull by the horns and shake sense into them. My daddy used to tell me at puberty boys should be nailed up in a barrel and when the hit the teenage years drive the bung in.
{Approximate, from memory.}Roger Stone maintained that boys should be raised in a barrel and fed through the bung.
At eighteen, you'd drive in the bung.
And much the same here on the forum.Alkarii wrote:I noticed that none of the characters have asked him how he feels about Shawna, and instead are expecting him to reciprocate just because she showed an interest in him.
Agreed.The thing is, he really shouldn't be "required" to feel that way about her, and given how easily he forgot about saying he'd hang out with her, he may have actually just thought that's all it would have been, and not something more. Just because he may have put Shawna in the friend zone doesn't make him a bad guy, though.
Castela, Timothy and Scarlet?Warrl wrote:The simple fact is that while he apparently hits all the right buttons in Shawna, she doesn't have the same effect on him. There's a word for this sort of situation; it's "life". Shawna needs to understand that this says absolutely nothing about her as a person, or as an attractive female, or in any other regard. In fact, at that age the buttons are still moving around, so it's possible (not expected, just possible) that in another month he'll be pining over her while she's mooning about some other guy.