I had a crush on Meghan.
She was a sophomore resident assistant on the second floor of my dorm. Short, blonde and witty, with an easy smile and an understated sense of humor. I really liked her.
The problem was, I couldn’t stop making an ass out of myself in front of her. Whether it was jokes that landed with a thud, awkward encounters or my own general self-sabotage, it just never seemed to go well. Yet she still tolerated me.
While I was getting accustomed to living at school that first year, juggling classes, new friends and easing into the responsibilities of adulthood, I had a minor crisis: my dorm had undergone a “refresh” over the summer, and my room must have been one of the last because I discovered the wood stain they’d used on the dressers hadn’t fully dried.
I came home from class one day to find my roommate wearing a pair of my boxers on his head like a hat and a bunch of my friends laughing at me. All my boxers had sticky, stinky wood stain on them. T-shirts too, which proved I wasn’t soiling myself, but my roommate and friends had a field day with it nonetheless.
I removed all my clothes from the drawers, did a cycle of laundry and was dismayed to see the wood stain stuff hadn’t washed out. I don’t remember how many cycles I did, just that after several attempts the clothes appeared to be clean, finally.
So there I was in the laundry room late at night, crouched in front of an open dryer door, trying to determine if I needed to do one more wash. I reached in, grabbed a fist full of clothes and took a deep huff to make sure I couldn’t smell the wood stain any longer. Was I still smelling the stuff, or was it my imagination? I inhaled deeply again, my nose pressed against the fabric.
That’s when I heard someone behind me. I turned, saw Meghan the RA giving me a half wave with a strange expression on her face, and that’s when I realized the fistful of clothes I’d pulled from the dryer, the clothes I’d been deeply huffing a moment ago, were mostly boxers.
So now Meghan didn’t just see me as a joke-bomber and an idiot. I was also a weirdo who liked to sniff his own underwear.
“Hey Meg, it’s, uh — My clothes. The wood stain wasn’t dry in my room, and it got on my stuff so I, uh…” Ah, @$%! it, I thought. There was no way I was going to explain my way out of this.
So I just accepted she would see me as a weirdo, which she most certainly did at that point, and banished any thought of becoming more than friendly with her.
Sadly that is not my most mortifying moment in college, and there were some comically awful low points, but that one felt particularly shameful. No one wants to be known as a pervert who sniffs his own underwear. No one wants to be that guy.
The lesson here, ladies and gentlemen, is to make sure the coast is absolutely clear if you’re sniffing stubborn dirty clothing after a wash. Or maybe the lesson is not to put your clothes in drawers that have been recently treated with wood stain. Or maybe it’s just about not caring what others think of you. Regardless, it’s a misunderstanding I don’t think I’ll ever forget.
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