as mentioned, it's probably the case that i would have horribly disappointed her and she'd have cried all night and never spoken to me again...although, she had never really spoken to me in the first place, so i guess it would have been a minimal loss, on a purely conversational level.

i also suspect that i may have been in some kind of physical danger from her father, if i were to have actually gone within a fifty foot radius of her house. and, i wouldn't have really blamed him - at the time, even. i had no business being in that neighbourhood for any reason other than to mow the lawn, not even on his daughter's invitation.

worse, i don't know how many years of imagining the future came into this, or what kind of completely off-base projections were put into it. teenage girls with 99.5% averages are still teenage girls, after all. obviously. maybe she thought i wanted to be an engineer, or something. who knows. really.

but, if we had hit it off that night, due to some fluke, would it have changed my future path? this is one of those alternate history games, i guess.

i would have to assume that deciding that i enjoy spending time with this girl would require me to actually take my schooling seriously, for once. but, see, here's the twist on that - if i had decided to take my schooling more seriously, i would have probably transferred into an arts program. my whole way through university, i always saw it as some kind of back-up plan. i spent years in a math program, but i didn't really want to be a mathematician, whatever that means - i never intended to work for the government, or to be a professor, or to even be a high school teacher, or at least not seriously. the key point is that i really didn't know what i wanted to study, or if i wanted to study anything at all, so i just stumbled through it, without any real desired end point - and then, when i got to the end of it, the only reason i bothered finishing it was just for the sake of finishing it. i haven't looked at a math text book since.

because i've never been interested in dating or starting a family, i've never been incentivized to do well in school or get a good job in order to make me more attractive to potential mates or partners. i've actually made the opposite argument - that because i'm not interested in dating, it follows that i have little interest in climbing up the hierarchies in the labour force; my disinterest in labour is a consequence of my disinterest in relationships. but, this is all an analysis from a distance, so to say. there is a possibility that i may have had a stronger incentive system open up in the presence of a concrete set of options, rather than an abstraction of possibilities.

the truth is that it's more likely that i would have become intimidated by the bourgeois nature of her lifestyle and retreated, or that she would have grown impatient with me for being lower class, but there is some possibility that it may have driven me - and that even if it didn't work out, it may have had a longer term effect on me.

if the encounter would have been effective in altering my incentive system, the flip side of that is that i would have no doubt spent much less time on music over the next few years. i'm not convinced that would be a net positive in the broader arch of my life, even if others think it might be - the sum of it may have been a more normal path through these years, at the expense of a deeper level of depression.

so, would i be better off today if i had had stronger incentives during my university years to actually participate and perform? on paper, perhaps. but i think i'd have ended up miserable, in the end, and not despite it but because of it.

yet, this is all very speculative, and i think little would have been accomplished outside of me smashing down her preconceptions and false projections of me - and that would have been difficult for any teenage girl to go through on prom night.