Four Reasons Why I Don’t Want a Secret Admirer

Let’s start this off with a confession: When I was writing out my college bucket list last year (things I wanted to do before graduation), I almost added, “Have a secret admirer.”

Because, admit it, that sounds cool, right? I could just picture it…I’d get a note with letters cut out of a magazine…in a code based on the Gettysburg Address…with flowers arranged according to the art of Victorian floral language. (Because if a guy was willing to go to that much trouble, he’d totally be leaving me an anonymous note.)

Then I thought about it for another five seconds and realized that this was not something I actually wanted. This became especially true this week when a “Secret Admirers” Facebook page for my university popped up, where people could leave anonymous notes of love, dramatic tributes to a secret crush’s good qualities, or ridiculously obvious jokes.

Content issues and general creepiness aside, most of the posts are harmless and pretty entertaining, even if you know half of them are written by the person’s roommate as a prank. Still, it made me think about secret admirers again, and why I don’t want one. Here are a few reasons:

One: It’s too easy. 

I think I’ve said this before (wait…I know I have—here): I can sometimes be extremely awkward about accepting compliments. Or giving them. But, in general, things that are hard for us are also really good for us. So maybe venting our emotions anonymously on a Facebook page really doesn’t do much as far as developing our personal character, especially in areas like courage, honesty, and self-control.

Along these lines, a lot of people on the Secret Admirers page will post or comment about the fact that people should just muster up the bravery to tell the guy or girl about their undying affection in person instead of posting anonymously. And I see their point. But I think you can take another angle on this too: in some circumstances it might be better to not tell the guy or girl to their face OR post on Facebook.

Let me explain (and also give the warning that this may sound somewhat heartless). Many of the posts are to people who are already dating or engaged, or from people who say the guy/girl is “out of my league,” so they’re clearly not ready to be in a relationship with that person. If you know that, why not have the self-control to keep your crush to yourself? Or better yet, stop pretending that puppy love is this irresistible force that makes you dream about a guy or girl who is not yours to dream about. It’s not. Just because we have the capability to anonymously post our every emotion on Facebook doesn’t mean we should.

Graduation and the Dead Letter File

In my desk at home, there is a file labeled, “Unsent Letters.”

Near the end of my senior year of high school, I started a list of people who I wanted to thank. I wrote brief notes about how they had impacted me, some of them without even knowing it. Most weren’t fully written out, but all of them were sincere.

There are no envelopes in the file.

I never sent them. I’m not even sure I ever intended to send them. It was a portrait of me, a helpful exercise to see who I was going into college, and what had made me that way.

Some of the compliments found life in comments in people’s graduation cards or in their open house guest book or with actual words to the person’s face. There weren’t very many of those. Sometimes it’s hard for me to tell people what I admire about them.

To me, “unsent letters” has the same sad ring as “if only.” It sounds too much like regret. It’s the progression from “I could have sent them” to “I would have sent them if….” And, of course, there’s always the quiet, nagging wonder, thinking about those dead letters, if “I should have sent them.”

How will other people know what they mean to us unless we tell them?

My Last Semester Plan

I am going to be a cautionary tale.

That is my actual plan.

Most people end up being a cautionary tale by accident. They go through life doing stupid things and racking up the inevitable consequences. Then concerned mothers point to them and say, “Now, remember, children, don’t do X, Y, or Z, or you’ll end up like that person.”

It follows, then, that someone purposefully doing something stupid with the intent of teaching others a lesson will be much more effective because they have the end goal in mind.

That’s why I’ve decided to make everyone hate me.

Most seniors live their last semester in the shadow of the looming reality of graduation. They gradually pull away from the general population of campus, stop trying to meet new people, and slowly fade from the memories of underclassmen before they’re physically gone.

This is a totally normal coping strategy. “It won’t hurt as much to leave if I won’t be missed,” the thinking goes. “Why bother investing in others if I won’t be able to keep up with all of them after graduation?”

Therefore, I have decided to take this reasoning to its logical extreme. “It won’t hurt as much to leave if I am actively hated. Why bother interacting with others in a positive—or even a neutral—way if I won’t be able to keep up with them after graduation?”

Four Steps to Being a Hobbit

I decided, in a flurry of motivation yesterday, that I will make a New Year’s Resolution after all.

Therefore, in the presence of these witnesses, I hereby resolve to be a hobbit.

If you wonder what this involves, or if it just sounds so intriguing that you want to join me in this year-long adventure, then read on. Here are four ways I’m going to be a hobbit in 2013.

Go Shopping, Fight Nazis

Today, I went Black Friday shopping. And guess what? No Nazis tried to threaten me to stay away from certain stores.

What, that’s not surprising to you? Maybe I’m just sensitive to the issue because I’m reading Eric Metaxas’s biography of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor and theologian who joined a plot to assassinate Hitler. Suddenly, I’m expecting to see swastikas on every street corner, especially because of my favorite part of the book so far, a story about Bonhoeffer’s grandma.

It was early 1933. Sometimes I think that Hitler just kind of exploded on the world scene when the war started in 1939. But that’s not usually the way history works. Things change slowly, quietly, through subtle propaganda and redefined terms and committee meetings.

Most Germans didn’t really know what was happening. They knew their hero Martin Luther, at the end of his life at least, had some violently anti-Semetic things to say. And they thought they knew, based on Hitler’s various accusations, that the Jews were controlling the press overseas and spreading lies about Germany. They didn’t see the death camps coming. All they saw was a day in April when all loyal citizens of Germany were supposed to peacefully boycott Jewish stores in protest of the Jews' anti-German attitudes and actions.

And, on that day in April 1933, 90-year-old Julie Bonhoeffer went shopping. 

Not Exactly YOLO

Today, I am sore from moving in many freshmen who overpacked in an attempt to cram their lives into a small dorm room. I have this problem of having a will and determination to help that is much greater than my actual muscular capacity to carry things, which means a lot of sweat and sheer exhaustion at the end of my four-hour shift.

In the casual chit-chat with the parents of freshmen (all slightly stressed and trying to pretend they weren’t), it often came up that I’m a senior this year. Almost all of them asked me something along the lines of, “So, what wisdom do you have to share?” or “What’s something you wish you would have known as a freshman?”

And I blurted out something mundane and trivial about the importance of not getting overcommitted or the best time to do laundry or how to open the English Hall mailboxes.

This is what I really want to say: during your four years at college, it’s helpful to pretend you’re about to die.

Fail

I began my (brief) career in politics in my high school government class. We were doing some kind of simulation where some of us were political candidates, some were lobbyists, and some were voters, each with a certain amount of money and power, all trying to accomplish different goals.

Now, remember, this was supposed to be fun. But the way I have fun is a little different than the way most people have fun.

To accomplish the goal on my character sheet (the election of a certain candidate and passing of some laws) I cooked up this ridiculously complicated scheme, based entirely on using the fine-print government procedures of proxy voting and bribing certain lobbyist groups with Monopoly money and cookies. (Legal? Yes, technically. Ethical? Probably not, which is why I decided that year that I should never go into politics.)

I remember looking up from my research of Congressional bylaws and saying, “Amy, no one does stuff like this. This is not normal. No one cares. And to get this to work, you’re going to have to talk to those popular kids who already think you’re weird and convince them to play along.”

But, for some reason, I did it anyway.

Gerig is a Scary Place

(Note: this was supposed to be a point in Saturday's entry, but it just kept wanting to be its own post. So I let it. Seriously, I lost a fight to a blog post. How's that for humiliating?)

For you non-Taylor people out there, Les Gerig Hall is a delightful little dorm right next to my own, one that I’d never spent any significant amount of time in before a few months ago. Even though it was probably twenty yards from my door, and I had several friends who lived there. Which really doesn’t make any sense.

That started to change when I got a little scolding from Psalm 1. (Don’t you hate it when dead Scripture writers do that to you? You can’t even argue with them, especially if they’re included in the Hall of Faith in Hebrews 11. Or called “a man after God’s own heart.”) Here it is, in the ESV, which is apparently more inspired than the average Bible, by the way. “Blessed is the man who walks not in the counsel of the wicked, nor stands in the way of sinners, nor sits in the seat of scoffers.”

The point of the verse is simple: be righteous. To get that point across, the psalmist makes an overstatement: not only should you not be a sinner, but you shouldn’t even walk in the same places that they do. They can’t influence you in any way if you don’t even associate with the paths they walk on.

For some reason, my backward mind took this and reversed it. I asked myself, “What paths should I be walking that I don’t?”

And right away, I thought of the sidewalk outside of the library.