Ira Glass

Looking back on it, I think part of the problem was how I thought about love as a kid.

I had a few ideas about how you get someone to love you that, in retrospect, weren't particularly helpful to me.

First, I thought that if they can see me sleeping, they would immediately fall for me.

When I went to sleep each night, I would consciously try to sleep in a cute way, just in case the girls I liked would peep on me.

I'd roll into a fetal ball like a kitten and scrunch my head into my pillow, hands under my head.

I imagined all the popular girls, intent on cruelly pranking me, got a ladder and climbed up my bedroom window.

But instead of painting fatso or whatever on my window as planned, their collective hearts would melt as they saw me sleeping like a babe, an angel, buried snugly under my blankets.

I guess it was some crossover of a kid's knowledge of what was endearing to adults applied to romance.

My second theory was that they'd fall in love with me if they can see me reading aloud.

This conclusion came out of my experience with nieces and nephews who'd fawn all over me when I would read to them.

By age six, I was already an uncle, and I felt this lent me a certain maturity.

Often, at recess time, I'd go to the back of the classroom and read from a selection of kids' books.

All the kids would gather around in a circle, and I'd pour through books like Percy the Rose-Eating Donkey, affecting the voices of the different characters and speaking with a preacher's sweaty charisma.

I'm not sure why, but everyone in my class seemed to love the way I hammed it up.

The only problem with this was the girls in class ended up treating me like their uncle.

They called me Uncle Howie and talked to me in baby talk.

Read me a story, Uncle Howie, and so on.

Don't get me wrong, I love the attention, but I wanted love, not wuv.

So I had all these ideas about love.

And of all the girls I knew, my theories were most intensely targeted at one girl, the most popular girl in school, Karen.