The Lottery

I walked into the restaurant and right across the room, I saw him. Tall. Black nikes. Crew socks. 

While the food was absolutely delicious, I couldn't help but to be completely distracted by this person's smile and charm. Right away, I thought to myself, "Man...if my aunt and uncle weren't here right now, I would have talked to him already." So of course, I had no choice but to sit there, eat my meal, and slyly glance over toward his direction whenever I had the chance. 

All of a sudden, I became increasingly uneasy and without realizing it, I blurted out to the two of them,  "You see that guy over there? I think he's really cute." After identifying the guy, they proceed to talk about how tall he was and then the moment I dreaded happened. The bill came. "Sigh...another opportunity lost." Just when I felt hopeless, I looked up to see a tall figure walking towards my table. 'Alright, alright. This is it Khanh. This is your chance.' And that was when my uncle did what any other uncle would do. 

After getting his attention, he bluntly said to the guy, "Hey. I think my niece wants to ask you a question."

-Ahhhhhh, best uncle ever. Alright, leave the rest to me-

"Yeah, I do. I wanted to ask for your name."

He looked shocked. After staring at my uncle for a split second or two, he finally glanced over my way. "My name is Ben*"

"Ben, nice to meet you. I'm Khanh." I ripped a piece of my napkin, took the same pen that the waitress gave us, and wrote down my name and number.

"If you're ever in LA, give me a call." I slipped him the napkin, grabbed the togo boxes, and walked out of the restaurant. 

Now I know I meet people all of the time and I have no problem introducing myself to others, but this was a special circumstance for me. First, it's a rare occasion that I find the opposite gender interesting enough to initiate in such a manner. Secondly, I've been wrong about a person before. However, I knew that if I didn't do it, I would end up spending the rest of my six hour drive back to Socal thinking about what could have happened if I did talk to him.

But now I would never know because I did ;-) (Had to add in that extra winky and pat on the back)

People have said time and time again that change typically happens over a duration of time. In my instance, following graduation, I am feeling those changes more rapidly than the average person. This is an example of just that. Two weeks ago, I would have never been that assertive. Why? A) I didn't feel the need to step outside of my comfort zone B) I had a full plate 

This is not the case anymore. In hindsight, it was my way of liberating myself from the fears of rejection or even worse, judgment. But you know what? There's something great about an unwarranted maneuver. He was not expecting it at all. Heck, neither was I. What matters was that at the end of the day, I can sleep knowing that fear did not hold me back. Or you can think of it this way. Situations like these are similar to buying the lottery. Most of the time, someone (not you) out there walks away with the winning scratcher. However, other times, life might just throw another curveball and you end up with a jackpot.

I don't know about you, but I'm feelin' pretty lucky.