Michael D. Davis.

Unlike almost every other story you’ve read or will read in this column, this one isn’t mine, but instead a friend’s. Jonathan Meyer, The Kid, or just Jonathan to those of you familiar with page four, has entrusted me to be the raconteur of his unfortunate series of awkward events. I hope I do him justice.

You see, our boy Jonathan somehow pinpointed the exact spot where well-intentioned ignorance meets misunderstanding and embarrassment, and it all started a few weeks ago. A particular young woman that the kid met at college was afflicted with constant calm and happiness, never, perceivably, becoming upset at anything. Jonathan took this as a challenge and did everything short of poking her with a stick in an attempt to break through her wall of glee and see a bit of annoyance or anger. Inevitably, he failed miserably, and the young lady’s demeanor remained unaffected by his irritating antics.

Seeing an opportunity, Jonathan took his story of this experience and told it in one of his columns. Once it was written and submitted to our editor, the kid sought out the unflappable young lady in the college cafeteria. “I have a surprise for you,” were the words Jonathan said to his fellow student. She asked what it was, but he said, “Not so fast, you’ll have to wait till Friday,” the day the paper comes out. For some reason involving training with his track team, Jonathan left this interaction by then jogging backwards out of the room. I like to think, as he did, that he was also grinning maniacally and giving the finger guns.

The next day, Thursday, Jonathan decided to read his column to some of his friends. Only partway through his reading, his friends started to laugh, which confused Jonathan. The reason for the laughter, it turns out, was one, seemingly innocuous sentence: “Naturally, I’ve made it my mission to crack her.” Jonathan’s intent with this line was to describe his pursuit to annoy the young lady. However, youth, with their ever-changing lexicon, have taken an ordinary word and changed its definition, which then taints the entire sentence.

Crack. The intended definition for the sentence is to break or lose control. The Gen-Z slang definition of the word or phrase ‘to crack someone’ is to be intimate with a person or to want to be intimate with a person. You can see how Jonathan was startled to learn this, as the sentence was again: “Naturally, I’ve made it my mission to crack her.” So, Jonathan attempted to change the sentence in the column; however, with the paper going to press on Wednesday night, there was nothing he could do on Thursday afternoon.

The column came out on Friday, and again in the cafeteria, Jonathan approached the young lady, and this time he gave her her surprise. She read the article, giggled a bit, and said she was going to send it to her parents. Thankfully, she either didn’t know of the new definition or it simply didn’t register. Although it did register and entertain a few other students on campus.

A few days later, Jonathan asked the young lady to coffee and she subsequently didn’t respond. To use another slang term, she ghosted him. When the kid told me this story initially I was confused of the timeline, and asked him if the coffee thing came before the article. He corrected me by saying the article came out before the coffee date that wasn’t. Not only did I, as it said in last week’s Just Jonathan, laugh extremely hard, but I said to him, “You don’t think the article played a part in that? If she didn’t know, then someone had to tell her the definition of that word.” This, apparently, had not occurred to him.

Here is where you’d think our story ends, but no, as our boy Jonathan was back in town this weekend to cover the STC High School band. As he was there, a group of high schoolers surrounded him. The ring leader of the gang said, “You do know what crack means, right?” Startled by this turn of events, Jonathan’s response was a flabbergasted, “You read my column?”

Well, one teenager read the initial column, who then turned it on to another teenager, and soon these high schoolers were following Just Jonathan like it’s a soap opera, waiting to know what happened between him and the young lady. As a small crowd of pimply-faced newspaper readers huddled about Jonathan at the band event, they had him read back what he’d written a few weeks ago, and then they had a few questions.

No, Jonathan said, that was not the intent of that sentence.

Yes, Jonathan said, he now knows what that word means.

No, Jonathan said, she hasn’t texted him back.

To sum this all up. Jonathan attempted to annoy a girl he knows before telling her he had a surprise for her, which was him naively saying he wanted to be intimate with her in a newspaper she probably had never heard of before he then asked her out to coffee and was ignored. Yeah, I found it funny because that’s some bad luck. But if there is nothing else positive in this story, it is that at least some of the youth at the high school read the paper.