Back in junior high, I used to rock these green and brown plaid No Fear shorts pretty much every day.

By the end of my tenure at Orinda Intermediate School, they had assumed two holes, several menacing grass stains and one nasty cum stain on the inside. Did I say cum stain? Oh … ok … good.

I miss those shorts, and several other low-pressure facets of junior high life. One thing I do not miss though is the bullshit. You know what I’m talking about. Example:

“Ricky said he likes you, should I tell his friend Bobby that you sort of like him back?”

“Well just tell him I might kind of like him, but maybe not for another week.”

It seemed entirely natural at the time, the awkward posturing we did to send the right signal or play the perfect degree of hard-to-getness. The novelty of courtship gave me a little tingle in the ball region, but it was real fucking silly.

To my disgust, the games continued throughout high school, so, with my back to the wall, I played it cool, real cool. But even with my hat backwards, jeans halfway down my ass and boner always concealed, I could never get warranted action. Turns out girls have every excuse in the book memorized, and because my grasp on the games was slim, I believed those lying whores.

Fuck.

I recently picked the brain of my good female friend about why girls play tricks – no, excuse me, I mean why girls play games.

“Leverage,” she told me. “The more a guy has to work for a girl, the more a guy appreciates his prey. It’s all that evolutionary stuff.”

It made sense, but I couldn’t betray my sex.

“But wouldn’t the world be a happier, more carefree place if guys and girls didn’t have to worry constantly about the image and signals they send to members of the opposite sex,” I replied. “Why can’t a girl just admit that she’s attracted to a guy and that she wants to have immediate sex with him.”

Well, I didn’t say that last part, but I was thinking it. Damn I wish I had those shorts.

Daily Nexus sports editor Chris Trenchard likes it rough – it tingles his balls.