The Evolution of Stev Part II

So NOTHING exciting happened to me this weekend, spent all of Saturday out in the nice weather at our regional track meet and just watched SNL Saturday night, which was hilarious. On Friday I followed my crazy friend Ryan around to Bel Air MD, which is a place that Black people don't hang out at, and eventually he played a benefit concert and I got tired and came home. So thus here is the story of the next phase of my transformation.

So the last post was really the background to my first transformation. While I did get a core group of friends from eating the worms, I didn't actually get any more social or outgoing or any less weird. In fact I spent all of middle school and my first year of high school screwing up interactions with every girl I met or liked, and getting nervous when I was around them, and eventually just acting mentally challenged. While I continued to write poems and give them to girls, I was never able to do anything to capitalize on the situations I would set up. It was then I discovered my first tool to success, AIM. Now most of us should remember the AOL Instant Messenger days. It pretty much consumed my entire home life, anytime I was home I was on my computer talking to any and everyone I could. I actually had a  lot of interesting interactions between people because of my screen name : "VioletRose4u" ALOT of guys thought I was a girl, so they would often IM me asking the simple "asl" "age, sex, location" that was common those days. Sometimes I would joke around with them and pretend to be a girl, but most of the times I would just ignore them because I didn't want to be considered a predator (this was really before things like "how to catch a predator" were big so no one really knew what to expect when they got online and joined chat rooms and such). I was an internet nerd, and actually met all kinds of people online. I eventually went on to meet one of the best friends of Bettie Wade, the UM muti-event queen, that made for a fun conversation freshman year ha ha. Anyways the point is that this is where I first started to do my cyber flirting. That included everything from "you're beautiful" to cyber sex....yes I did a lot of cyber sex, not sure why but it just seemed logical. So while I was a virgin in real life, I was a cyber whore, guess it was foreshadowing or something.

Eventually as my freshman year of high school went on, I sophisticated my cyber flirting game and everyone knew me as the "sweet" guy who would always compliment the girls but would never get them. This continued pretty much all year into my sophomore year. At this point, football season to be exact, I think I underwent my first physical transformation. I don't know why but all of a sudden girls started talking to me. I mean they would go out of their way to strike up conversations with me, but of course being the werido that I was, I didn't realize that they were flirting so I got a lot of "friends" that year. Anyways I was a captain of the football team that year (JV of course, and weighing a whole 115lbs) and thus a lot of the girls our age began to recognize me. One of these girls was my eventual first, Laura. I'm not sure how we met exactly, but one day while stretching, a buddy of mine said "Steve, you see Nala over there" (Ok so at this point I let everyone call me Steve instead of Stev, mainly because they thought my name was pronounced Steven and not Stevann as you all know it to be. Also we were in the habit of nick naming every girl we knew, so Nala was because she really looked like Nala from Lion King ha ha. A cute little lion cub). "Yeah" I responded, "Well she gave me her number to give to you and wants you to call her." Yup, just like that I had my first real number and advance from a girl. So clueless I was but for some reason I actually called her, don't know where I got the courage to do it but I think I eventually just sucked it up, picked up the house phone (didn't have a cell till junior year summer) and called. After an awkward conversation I had my first date, and eventually my first REAL girlfriend (My first official was the girl from middle school who dated me because she "felt sorry" for me). 

The first few months of our relationship were rough, I mean I took all kinds of verbal abuse, because I didn't know any better, and she was a wild little thing. She had smoked for awhile (which you know I HATE) and had even drank before, where I had done nothing of the sorts. At one point she wrote a 4 page letter, two pages front and back, telling me everything she didn't like about me and I needed to change.....yeah that happened and I STILL didn't break up with her. I was such a chump back then. So this went on for two seasons and then outdoor track rolled around. At this point I was known to most people as "Stann's little brother" and it was really annoying. I decided that I needed to do something to distinguish myself so I decided to run hurdles, something he didn't do (it was literally the only event he hadn't tried). So by sophomore year I was pretty good at them and making a name for myself in the state. It was this season that I met Ryan, my eventual best friend and the one person responsible for me breaking out of my weird quiet shell. Ryan was a chubby short kid who wanted to run hurdles. Everyone laughed at him as he first couple attempts ended with him falling all over the track. I mean he was 5 5 or something like that and the hurdles were almost taller than him, pretty amusing I must admit. However, I knew what it was like to want something so bad, so I took him under my wing. I would work with him after normal practice for a couple of hours and we became best friends. That summer he decided to run summer track with us, and was 1 of 2 white people on our city track team, the other was a distance runner of course. Eventually the little bugger got himself into great shape and the ladies started to notice him. Ryan was a  bit of a loser before this. So we went to the beach with his family after the summer track season and we had our first real talk. Don't remember how it started or why, but the end result was that we would never let ourselves feel "awkward" again. We all know that there are social norms in the world, and when people do something outside of those norms it creates a weird environment for everyone else. This awkwardness, we found, could be avoided but simply not letting yourself believe that there was anything odd going on. It was more a state of mind then a true emotion, as we made ourselves believe we were uncomfortable when we could easily tell ourselves everything was fine. So with this new theory in mind, we set out to conquer the beach. With every girl or group we met, we made it a habit to create awkward situations just to mess with people. We had an "awkward meter" that was on a scale of 10. We would say stuff like "its def a 5 in here right now, lets turn it up to a 8." As you can tell, gaining confidence didn't make us any less weird, it just gave us the ability to be ourselves without caring about what other people thought. THUS a new Stev was born, and I do mean Stev as I told everyone how to really say my name Junior year of high school. We were in the best shape of our lives and brimming with this new found confidence and thus the real high school experience started for both of us. I gained 40 lbs that summer, almost all muscle, and Ryan was now a fine tuned short kid, he never grew but he got those six pack abs the girls seem to like. I continued to grow and now stood 6'1. 

That summer we got ourselves into a lot of "no business" situations. A "no business" situation is exactly what it sounds like, a situation you find yourself in that you really have no business being in. Whether it be the two of us in a house full of greek people hanging out in a hot tub, to us house sitting a mansion and having 7 people shower together in a giant shower. We would continually get ourselves in ridiculous situations just to do it, we were like extreme sport junkies without the extreme sports. We had a lot of good times that summer and made a lot of friends, but most of all we now considered ourselves to be real catches, and that showed in the coming years of high school.

So here I was, a new person, Stevann. I considered myself good looking, I was having the best year of my life in track and football, I had "tamed" my girlfriend Laura, and by tamed I really mean we had started to come to a compromise on things and I became the one that was bad and she became a good girl. Most of you should know my Laura story so I'm not really going to get into it. But the point is now I was the talking, take action, get things started, HATE downtime Stev. This persona I still carry with me today, although I've learned to have a little more tact in certain situations. So thats it, all it took was a conversation and a mental note to abandon the notion of awkward for me to change. I don't know if it really was that easy, or if it was a combination of me getting physical and mental confidence that led to the change, but in either case it happened. I'm not a conceited person or anything, but I swear junior year EVERY girl that I had liked once upon a time decided to START liking me. I was getting all kinds of advances, but none as prominent as the girls on the track team. Those long meet days and long bus ride made for a lot of temptation that I'm proud to say I avoided pretty well. It seemed like girls actually joined track, just because Ryan and I were on the team and wanted to hang out with us. For those of you who think this is unbelievable, remember I went to a TINY high school compared to most of you. With a graduating class of 216, most people knew everyone else and I guess people tend to recognize when you go from being a quiet nobody to a prominent athlete and a decently looking one at that. Ryan and me were a dynamic duo, if you guys thought that Wheeler and I were inseparable in the early years of college, we had nothing on Ryan and I. There wasn't a social situation that we got involved in without including the other, I would take Ryan to the city and hang out with my Black friends (when I had them) and he would take me to the country to be around, well that type of White people. I showed him the lower spectrum of society, and how Poverty was still a thing of the present, and he showed me that white people were rich, very very rich. Either way we both went into every situation with open minds, and came out with more experience and knowledge we ever thought possible. Till this day, there's not a situation where we don't feel comfortable inviting each other. Two nights ago Ryan invites me to chill with a "friend" of his that happens to be a millionaire and he didn't give it a second thought. His words were that he "knew I wouldn't act like a crazy person and marvel with the fact that he was a millionaire" and more importantly I wouldn't "ask for money" ha ha you would be surprised how many people act a fool when they're around wealthy people. But I digress (a Mike O line).

So that sums it up, my first transformation into the Stev that I am today. I should mention that all this craziness happened WITHOUT a drop of ALCOHOL. We just genuinely had a good time and were high on life. I didn't even consider what getting drunk would feel like and we avoided all the kids in high school whom we knew were out getting trashed and doing stupid stuff. I even made it a point to avoid senior week, a time when all the seniors in the state head to Ocean City Maryland to get drunk and swim and get MIP's. Instead I went down to Myrtle Beach and hung out with some college kids there ha.

I wouldn't really change my personality again for some time. This time it would come from a combination of hardships that had me thinking I might not be able to graduate college at all. It took a painful illness for me to hit "rock bottom" and finally decide that another overhaul was due and this second change made me the best self I could be....To Be Continued.