TEAM LAST CALL

My wife and I found out a few weeks ago that we are going to be having a baby boy. Since that time, I’ve been busy making a mental list of all of the things I need to teach him about being a man, including how to blow a good snotrocket and how to wear blue socks with black pants.
Then I need to teach him how to properly woo a woman, which is something I know a thing or two about, what with me being an English major and all. English majors, if you didn’t know, have been proven by science to be the world’s single sexiest demographic, thanks in part to our way with words and in part to the fact that we can put total lies into print and make them look like actual facts.
I decided to major in English for the same reason that all young men major in English: zero upper body strength. But I also had a desire to pick up women, and I figured that one way to go about that was to learn the seductive art of language. Because everybody knows that nothing’s a bigger turn-on to a college girl than having her grammar corrected.
I could hardly wait to make the ladies swoon with my masterful grasp of semi-colon usage. “Come over here, baby girl,” I’d say. “Daddy is going to punctuate your sentence in ways you never dreamed of. You heard me right, sweet thing. I’m about to parse this verb from the infinitive all the way down to the subjunctive. Trust me when I say that as long as we’re together, my participles will never dangle.”
Pickup lines like these never really “worked” on high school girls, but I always chalked that up their own lack of sophistication. If they couldn’t appreciate some well executed iambic pentameter, then that was their problem. Except for the part where they wouldn’t make out with me, at which point it became my problem. But in college, it would be different. In college, the girls would recognize genius when they saw it.
In college, the girls did not recognize genius. It didn’t take long for me to discover the ugly truth that an English major is about as attractive to college girls as a lip fungus. We are simply not cut from the same cloth as people like McDreamy and McBulge-pants, or whatever his name is, with their “chiseled physiques” and their “salaries that are big enough to live on.” And that, I’m sorry to say, is the kind of man that college girls go for.
English majors, on the other hand, tend to be introverted, lumpy, melodramatic Beta Males who, generally speaking, aren’t considered to be “hunks,” except for in the following sentence: “Once the team captains had selected their players, all that remained on the gymnasium floor were a discarded jock strap and the English major, a blubbering, asthmatic hunk of dough in navy shorts and tennis shoes.”
We do have our good points, though, including our soft, uncalloused hands and our ability to weep openly during that one scene when Frodo gets stung by the giant spider and is carried off by the orcs into the castle of Cirith Ungol. Or maybe that’s just me.
But no matter how hard we try, we English majors will never be the objects of lust for those young college women. We will never be able to titillate them with our gerunds. And our writing, while eloquent and emotive, has zero alcohol content, rendering it virtually useless to nine out of 10 college girls. And the tenth probably has a unibrow or wears Crocs.
But Darwin be damned: in the end, we somehow always find a way to get the girl. I personally succeeded – and this is something I recommend to every English major I meet – by making fart jokes.
Women love it when you can make them laugh. Which is something we English majors rarely do, or at least not without getting naked first. But through the magic of fart jokes, I found a way to use my otherwise useless degree to attract a beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird girl who under normal circumstances would have always looked at me like I had just stepped in a big pile of caca-doodie.
Fast-forward 10 years, and here we sit, awaiting the arrival of our son – who, by the way, has already been proven by science to be the single most beautiful, intelligent, awesomely weird baby ever. And that one’s no lie.