Marisa & John
Writing about a writer is most definitely a challenging task, and since John has already drafted a pretty spot-on version of his & Marisa's story, I'll leave it here for your enjoyment:
"The Criminally Abridged John Gallagher & Marisa Pinto Story"
As an English major, I have grown to appreciate the power of the asterisk. I can lie to your face and preface anything I say with an asterisk, and suddenly it’s all ok.
With these parameters in mind, we proceed.
On September 22nd, 2015, Marisa Pinto first laid eyes on her definition of the ideal man.*
*Minus 35 pounds
*Minus 3.5 inches
*Minus a summer home in the Outer Banks
*Minus an appreciation for fine wine
*Minus a basic respect for fashion boundaries
*Minus an Instagram account
*Plus a college degree condemned by the foundation for Economic Education as “dying” and “bleak”
*Plus the voice of an adolescent female misunderstood by her suburban, middle class parents
*Plus an active dislike for her parents’ football team of choice
*Plus an unhealthy inclination toward butterscotch and eggnog.*
In the interest of complete honesty, what followed were months of John Gallagher pursuing Marisa Pinto much in the same way that legitimate 2016 presidential candidate and cat LimberButt McCubbins sought to become Commander-in-Chief on the campaign slogan “Meow is the Time.”
It was a thrilling experience because he knew he didn’t have a chance.
I’ll spare you the sentiment. If you elected to read this page because you wanted someone to outline what falling in love feels like, call Marisa and ask her to describe the moment she discovered Wendy’s chicken nuggets. Everything Marisa currently feels toward domesticated, calorie-stuffed wads of cholesterol, I felt toward her. And with her Austria semester approaching in weeks, I figured I would be easy to forget and difficult to remember.
When she said she had feelings for me, I had no idea how to possibly respond. I hadn’t prepared a punch line large enough to hide how unprepared I was for that moment.
The next morning, I consulted my bank account and discovered a balance suffering from fatigue, extreme weight loss and various other critical signs of starvation. I found the money.*
*Dear Dr. Descalzo, the second-largest Spanish influence in my life behind Google Translate,
I’m going to solve a mystery that I’m sure still perplexes you to this day. How, you ask yourself, is it possible that a seemingly responsible student with no prior record of forgetting his class materials could possibly manage to attend his final 11 class periods without his $90 Spanish textbook?
Dr. Descalzo, your Spanish textbook made for a fine learning instrument, and arguably a finer pillow. But more importantly, that textbook was the most expensive item I had to my name in the winter of 2015, and it was the distance between myself and my future wife. Regrettably, the present progressive tense of irregular -ar verbs never had an oportunidad.
I sold my Spanish textbook to the Franciscan University bookstore to finance a date, and banked on the fact that she would remember me longer than Dr. Descalzo would. So far, it’s been a worthwhile transaction.