This JCPenney advertisement from at least 9 years ago (I found this online in recent years) featured an innocent girl probably no older than a fifth grader. She secretly puts the initials of her name and her crushes on a piece of paper (yup this was the days way before the iPad and the MacBook was just on the market eclipsing the PowerBook) and even in old medium would someone be afraid to have the crush come back to crush them.

Throughout the then 60 second spot, the scribbles disappeared from the paper, and moved on to her desk, then onto the chalkboard and girl tried to cover up the doodle. The girl for the right reasons became paranoid throughout. The message moved from the locker room, to a bulletin board, to the cafeteria where she would then see the scribble once again near the boy of interest, and plop onto the cafeteria table and try to cover it up as the boy moved her hand and both would smile.

Yours truly could relate to this story up till about the 45 second mark. Crushes in the last few years I’ve kept under secret. I’m too afraid to tell anyone about any feelings of any girl that I’ve previously liked. It’s even too risky to put it on paper because I fear something like this would happen in real life. Children are often teased about infatuations, but when one is hitting 30 in a year, the rules are much different, and more against me.

So yeah, my lips are sealed.