Oh my goodness! My life is positively replete with Admiration Situations. That's an excellent term for it, thank you.

Best of luck with your engineer friend, Shoshannah. You can do it! Remember that she's just a person, no more or less complex than you are. 

Anyway, I have had heaps of Admiration Situations in which I merely watched from afar and never really became friends with the person. It'a one of those cases in which my introversion gets the best of me. But, for one person things are different...storytime!

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So I was in the ensemble for my school play, Romeo and Juliet, and there were a lot of very outgoing, funny, and kind people in the cast. They were all kind of best friends with each other though, and I wasn't close with anyone yet.

One day our director decided to do an exercise to create intimacy in the cast. We walked around the stage without speaking, paired off silently, and then stared into each others eyes. As we stared, the director would say aloud a thought that we were supposed to have about our partner. For example, he would say "I am angry with this person" and then we would imagine that we were angry with our partner and try to convey that emotion solely with the expression in our eyes, and receive that angry emotion from the other person. Then when he was finished, we would break off and walk around again looking for a new partner. Sounds a bit mad, doesn't it?

It was very emotional and some people were crying after one where we imagined wanting to hurt other people (intense, I know, but there is a lot of hurting other people in Romeo and Juliet). However, on the third partner the director said he would end us on a nice, light one. 

That time, my partner was someone causing an Admiration Situation - let's call him John. The phrases the director was giving us were things like "I would like to spend time with you" and "I want to be your friend." And at that moment, I started crying - silently, dripping - because I wanted so badly to be his friend and I didn't think I ever would be. 

Well, I think this experience stuck with John because from then on he went out of his way to befriend me. I was overwhelmed by the attention and became all levels of awkward, but still he persisted in talking to me and being kind to me. 

Now, months later, I am actually a little less nervous and awkward, and I can actually enjoy talking to him. He wants to be an engineer, just like Shoshannah. Overall, I'm so glad I got to know him because he's so different from the people I normally talk to and I've learned some things about life from him. The moral of the story is: go out there and talk to the people you want to be your friends! Don't let the awkwardness get in the way, because the best friends won't mind. They will love you in spite of it.

I'm still working on that. XD 

Thanks for the advice, guys! @Bibliophile, Actually, I live in Kentucky. :-) But I used to live in Saint Louis, Missouri, which is sorta close to Illinois. You were probably thinking of someone else. ;-)

I'm uh... *coughs* had so many of these experiences - it's practically the story of my life. So we have a small school. Say 40-45 7th through 12th graders, and it's a Pre-K through 12th combined school. I mean, even my Sophomore class is combined with the Freshman class (only three of them). Long story short...

Whenever a new kid comes, even if it's at the beginning of the year, I literally will not even say hi, or "what's your name?" until a week or two of them being there. Then by the time I do say something, I've come across as cold and stuck up. I don't try to come across that way! My closest friends will tell you that I am super nice and talkative once you get to know me.

So yeah, I've lost a lot of potential friends that way.

And there's this kid in my class who's super nice but really quiet. I guess he struggles with anxiety worse than mine... and so everyone thinks he's this coldhearted person, but I know otherwise. I've gotten to know him fairly well because it's easier to talk to another shy kid. But still, that admiration situation is so high there for both of us. Literally, we went an entire day not even making eye contact because we were too nervous to talk to each other! And mind you, this was after I became friends with him. We just both suffer greatly from admiration situations. :O

Can you guys help? I really want to be able to make friends with new students and help both me and the other shy kid get over our admiration situations. We'd be even better friends if we did.