I didn’t have much luck with girls in high school. I remember a few really awkward dates. I was a nerdy kid. I like math, science, and reading. At my school, those definitely weren’t the popular things to do.
This story starts a while back in a coffee shop. I was there with some friends. At some point I noticed this beautiful girl at the other side of the room. She was using her iPhone. She was gorgeous, so I could only imagine she was texting her male model boyfriend. While I was staring, she looked up, saw me, and smiled.
She noticed I was staring, I was sure. I got embarrassed, and tried to play it off. My friend Josh saw what happened and tried to get me to talk to her, but I just started sweating. I wanted to leave, but he talked me down. So we just kept hanging out.
It might seem weird, but I snapped a picture of her with my iPhone. She was looking out the window, and I pretended to be fooling with my phone. I was in line to get more coffee, and got a really great angle with awesome lighting.
I took the bus home. I just had this creative, inspired feeling after seeing such a lovely girl. I kept thinking about her! I wanted to make something to express how beautiful she was. So I brought up this new app I had just downloaded called Comic Genie.
Comic Genie is neat. It lets you easily draw talk bubbles on your photos, so you turn them into little comics. I had never used it, but now was the perfect chance to see how well it worked. I opened up the picture and tried to come up with something funny or clever.
I just looked at her in the picture for a while. Her face was illuminated by this ray of sunlight that was streaming in through the window. She was so beautiful, I just stared for a few minutes. I eventually noticed that there was something just outside the window. It was a little bird, looking right at her. The angle I captured made it look like the bird was talking to her!
I got a really great idea right at that moment. I double-tapped to add a talk bubble to the picture, and typed some speech. “I wish I could sit with you, pretty bird.” It was corny, I know. But I was in a corny mood. What happened next could only be conceivable in this age of total connectedness.
I take lots of pictures with my iPhone. That’s basically the reason I got Comic Genie. I like expressing my creativity. I wanted to add something personal to my photos, so when I shared them with friends, it’s like I made them.
When I got home, like I usually do, I synced my iPhone with my computer and got all the photos off. I then uploaded everything to Facebook, which I guess is a habit of mine. I was still distracted by her, I guess. I mean, who uploads pictures of people they don’t even know to Facebook?
When I woke up the next day, I check my email and I had a friend request. That’s pretty normal. I opened it up and it definitely was not normal. The friend request was from the girl in the coffee shop! She said “I like the comic! Didn’t I see you with an iPhone at the coffee shop?”
How did she find me? That was really scary and surprising. Then I remembered that I uploaded everything to Facebook. I tried to calm down and think. I looked at her profile. We had a friend in common, Alex. I went to look at the comic. He had tagged her face in the picture, and she had gotten the notification. Unbelievable!
I didn’t know what to do, so I just accepted the request. She must have been logged in, since she started a chat with me right away. To keep the story short, I’ll just say that she like shooting photos which was a relief since I had taken one without permission, and she wanted to get together. She said I was cute. We met at the same coffee shop. She was curious to know how I made the comic. She thought maybe I used Photoshop, but I showed her Comic Genie and she bought it, too. We wound up staying at the coffee shop all day, making comics and showing them to each other. It was so wonderful!
And that was how I met Julie, the girl of my dreams.
