Prelude to Project PANDORA
First, allow me to thank you all for your intense interest in this affair; the response to the initial "Prelude" post was overwhelming and deeply encouraging. Second, please excuse the interminable delay since that first frenzy-fomenting post, this adventure is of great significance to me and in such matters I have yet to overcome my tendency to dilly-dally before setting down in words my thoughts and feelings. Third, the convergence of the first and second points has resulted in Dylweed, The Guy, and Skeeter all contacting me individually, specifically inquiring as to further developments. So, enough with the preamble, let's get down to the meat and potatoes.

I have been twice thwarted, but not yet defeated. I declared that I would ask Jessica—henceforth codenamed The Most Dangerous Game, inspired by something she wrote on her Facebook page and Richard Connell's classic short story—to accompany me on a date "on one of the next two occasions I see her," but this has not come to pass. The class we share meets once a week, on Wednesday afternoons, for two hours forty-five minutes, generally bifurcated into roughly equal halves by a ten- to fifteen-minute intermission. I declared my intentions on Wednesday, 22 July, having made up my mind in the afterglow of the conversation I shared with The Most Dangerous Game while leaving that afternoon's examination: Wayback Machinelink. The end of the next Wednesday's lecture, 29 July, could best be described as jagged: instead of one collective exodus, the class drifted out by twos and threes. I was engrossed in a series of bedeviling problems that I wanted to finish on-site and hand in for grading so as not to have to bother with them over the weekend, causing me to miss The Most Dangerous Game's exit, and with it my chance. The fault was mine. The following Wednesday, 5 August, I was robbed of the opportunity to act; I left the lecture room during the intermission to use the W.C. and returned to find The Most Dangerous Game's seat empty and her possessions absent. She'd been present during the first half of the lecture, and I'd been psyching myself up for the asking, but ran afoul of Harold Macmillan's bête noire, "Events, my dear boy, events." That which I claimed on 22 July to be "set in stone" turned out to be built on a foundation of sand.

But this changes nothing. I spoke with her before and during lecture on both days, but did not use those specific moments to propose our date as we were in the presence of and sharing our conversation with several of our classmates. It might seem an inconsistency on my part, as I am discussing asking out The Most Dangerous Game in so a public forum as a password unprotected bloggy blog, but I hold that such transactions should be conducted in private; this need not mean one of former Vice President Cheney's undisclosed locations, merely the privacy and propriety of two people engaged in a confab outside of anyone else's hearing. She and I have had regular interactions via Facebook over the last fortnight; I decided to take the chance of "friending" her after the lost opportunity of 29 July, and that choice seems to be paying dividends. In all our interactions, I am striving to be charming, but in no way false; I'm being myself, the effort is in trying to be the best version of myself, to put my best foot forward while not putting a foot wrong (nor in my proverbial mouth). I've been blind in the past, I've needed to be hit over the head to notice what's right in front of me, but painful experience has yielded at least a modicum of wisdom: she likes me, this I know to be true. I cannot say for certain that she likes me the way I like her, the way I wish her to like me, but she likes me. She finds me interesting, if not outright fascinating.

Now, let's return to your favorite topic: you, specifically, the counsel you generously furnished in response to 22 July's "Prelude to Project PANDORA": commentarylink. Again, I thank you all for your suggestions and advice†. I have been shunted off into the Sargasso Sea of "being friends" all too often and all too easily; I daren't permit any ambiguity. Unless I trip over my tongue, I intend to include the word "date" in my proposal. I mean to ask her out to dinner, yielding to the wisdom of counsel and eschewing any specific activities until subsequent dates. I prefer dinner to drinks on three grounds: {a} Again, I daren't permit any ambiguity, and simply getting together for a drink might leave her the wiggle room to convince herself we're just "hanging out." Nein! {b} I don't begrudge anyone a drink, but I take a dim view of drunkenness. My legendary tolerance, which amounted to practical imperviousness to intoxication, is not quite what it once was, but I can still drink like a fish with minimal ill effect. The Most Dangerous Game has mentioned her own ability to put it away, and I don't dispute her claims, but the fact remains that she is a thin girl, tall and by no means skinny, but thin. Were we to drink, surely she would be more impaired than I, and where would that leave me? I could not trust anything she said, I certainly could not make a physical move, not with her in a reduced state. No, the sauce will have to wait until I know where I stand. {c} This last bit is slightly embarrassing. I do not know The Most Dangerous Game's precise age; there is a chance that in seeking to date her I may be violating the pop cultural half-plus-seven rule of thumb, which at thirty dictates I may not date any girl younger than twenty-two. (And I do not use "girl" to ascribe any particular trait of youth, I consider girl to be a highly complimentary way to speak of any woman, derived from usage in "the girl of your dreams.") Though she drinks, I cannot be sure that she does so legally. Those wishing to pillory me as a creep are potentially on solid ground doing so, and I shall bear them no ill will.

The long and short of it is that tomorrow's the day, there's no getting around it. Nothing ventured, nothing gained; fortune favors the bold; and all that rot. I have been so long out of the game, so long in self-imposed semi-retirement, that in merely asking her, regardless of her answer, I will have advanced my cause. It would be ludicrous at this stage to think of The Most Dangerous Game as a candidate for Project PANDORA, and thus these posts are titled as preludes, but for Project PANDORA's eventual success I will need skills and expertise I have heretofore never possessed. And there's no other way to acquire them but through the accumulation of experience, the hurly-burly of trial and error. Tomorrow I ask out The Most Dangerous Game; only time will tell if she recognizes her good fortune. On that note, wish me luck. Wish me luck, damn you!

"Who dares wins."

The Rebel Black Dot Song of the Day
The Puppini Sisters, "We Have All the Time in the World" from The Rise and Fall of Ruby Woo (T.L.A.M.)

†As a thirty-year-old virgin who has kissed only four girls, gotten to second base with two, the shortstop position with one (beyond second base, but not as far as third), and never dated any girl longer than a couple weeks, I am in no position to refuse any aid, advice, or admonition. A more thorough, but still awkwardly prudish, discussion of my preposterously limited experience is in The Secret Base's future; you can't say you weren't warned.