i know what boys like. at least i thought so. maybe i actually forgot. maybe it's good i did.

Despite what my advancing years (and my very rude Wii Fit) tell me, I don't feel as old as I actually am. However, my mind is a little hazy on what I was like as a teenage girl hell bent on getting a teenage boy to notice me. I do have a few reminders here and there. Some angsty journals. A small pile of dogeared and smudged 3x5 index cards on which I outlined a complicated 'hot or not hot' scientific formula. Let's just say if you were a boy with feathered hair, wearing Levis 501s, and came whirring down my street on your sweet Honda moped, I thought you were hot. If your name ended in the letter Y and you should have stopped answering to it in second grade and/or only if referred to as such by your grandmother, you were not so hot.

You were so, so close to being on the hot list, Danny Wilson...

Here's the thing I wasn't, though - hot. No. I was not raising any temperatures, despite cloaking myself in huge, bulky sweaters. No one with a penchant for wearing the equivalent of a large Australian sheep around their neck (sigh, cowl neck sweaters...) and letting their mother experiment on their follicles with Toni home perks that were advertised to give you big, bouncy curls (but they lied! THEY LIED!!) will extinguish the flames of one's hotness faster than a speeding bullet. Teenage boys didn't talk to me. I didn't talk to them, either (except Debbie Gibson-style: Only in my dreams), but that's beside the point. Rather than draw teenage boys in with my tractor beam of hotness, I was the portal through which hot teenage boys would travel to hook up with my friends. That's not a metaphor for sex, by the way. I was, in theory, Stargate, an interstellar teleportation device boys would talk nicely to in order to charm me (done!) into putting a good word in for them with my friends (curses!).

I simply didn't know how teenage boys operated then, and I suddenly realized yesterday afternoon that I still don't. I was finishing up some shelving in the teen section while a couple of teen boys milled around the department. Short of asking if I could help them find anything and offering my assistance if they needed it, I left them alone. Rare is the sight of teenage boys browsing in my department, so I just sort of marveled I it.

Several minutes later, I stood up, gathered up my belongings, and prepared to retrieve another load of books when I heard one of the boys say, "I'd like to flip through your pages and get into your story," and dear Lord, before I could laugh at his suaveness, he added "And I'd like to start from the back of the book."

That's when my eyes rolled and I stuck my tongue out and made the international sound for "Blech!" All in my head, of course, which sort of drives home the point that I feel and apparently sometimes act younger than I am.

I continued to sort of laugh about the boys' bold and very smooth moves throughout the remainder of the day, but then I was hit by a thought last night while eating dinner with my two sons. Oh, my God! One day...sooner than I even WANT to imagine, THEY are going to be teenage boys!! Cripes, my oldest son is only five months away from turning 13!

Yes, despite the crushes and the questionably mature song, my boys have immersed themselves in of late, I still tend to only think of them as little boys. Hell, I make them younger than they actually are, too. In my head and in my heart, they are two tiny babies who can't read and don't make metaphors about inserting bookmarks between a girl's chapters! I quite honestly had never really, REALLY thought about what it would be like for them to become teenage boys with all the gawky, gangly goofiness that being a teenage boy entails.

Dear God, it's inevitable though, isn't it?! They are growing up, they are going to make clumsily worded advances to girls (or, sigh, women), and they may end up on some girl's weird crush list. It's enough to curl my hair.

Without the aid of a perm this time, though. Thank goodness.