The Licker

It’s pretty much been a week of work work work. Very exciting, I know. It’s at times like these that I'm going to break out an oldie but a goodie from the never ending bag of my dating embarrassments.

Like many urban, working women, I have taken the foray into internet dating once or twice. Somehow I got it into my head that reading some over-blown self description with grainy photographs was better then chance drunken meetings in bars. I had tried two different sites with varying degrees of failure and had all but given up with the online dating idea when I had dinner with a group of successful, older women who were raving about the successes of The Onion Personals. Apparently witty, intelligent, attractive men were just pouring off this site and all a woman had to do was put up a profile to find interesting dates. How bad could that be?

I put up a profile. I tried to be witty and was fairly proud of the end result. Within a day or two I had a couple of interesting hits (and a few not so interesting ones that led to yet more stories, but that is for another post). After consultation with Lucky Bear, we picked one out that looked promising. His email was adorable, his pictures looked good, and his profile was intriguing. We emailed back and forth, IMed for a few days, and then decided to meet for coffee. I was really excited when he picked out one of my favorite neighborhood coffee spots, points for knowing good places.

The evening comes and I'm pleasantly surprised at how attractive he is when he walks up. Nicely dressed, cute, polite. When he suggests that we get food instead of just coffee, I'm totally up for that. We happen to be right next door to one of my favorite places. But he doesn't want to eat there. Though we are on a block with at least 6 restaurants, he wants to go down to Sunset to get Thai food. Whatever, I'm flexible. I ask if he wants to drive or if I should. Since he had walked there (about a mile and a half from his house), that left me to drive. I was a little put off, but no big deal.

We have dinner, everything is fine. He's laying it on a little thick, but not too horrible. He pays, even after I insist. Overall, at this point, I'm thinking second date, and maybe even a little action this evening. As we walk out, he asks if we can run across the street for a minute. I have no idea what's across the street, but hey, I'm going with the flow. This is where I went wrong. Across the street was a comic book store, where his favorite comic book writer was speaking. So now I'm geeking out with the kid and all the other creepies at the comic book store drooling over some guy I had never heard of. Not only that though, the guy pulls out a note book with questions he had written to ask the writer. The most exciting part for me was that Robbie Williams showed up. Oddly enough though, that may have been the most exciting part for my date too. When I pointed Robbie out to him, he squealed like a little girl and told me he had seen him in concert, twice.

We leave the comic book store after about an hour, but not before Geek boy gets a picture and an autograph. When he suggests a drink, I hesitate, which he takes as a yes. Once I realized that I was going to have to drive the carless-wonder home anyway, a drink seemed in good order. We go to a bar, he gets us drinks and we sit down to talk. It was loud and crowded, so he keeps moving in closer and making up reasons to touch me. I knew the date had to end when at one point he leans in to say something in my ear and then uses that as an excuse to start kissing my ear. That's when I conveniently became tired and remembered I had to work in the morning.

I drive him home, pull the car over, and hit my hazards. It’s a tiny street and cars have to go around me because there was no place to pull up to the curb. Now I'm not really sure what signals I was giving off, but apparently he was reading them as if I wanted to rip off my clothing right there in my car. Nevermind that I hadn't pulled off the street, ignore the fact that my car wasn't even in park, and particularly forget that I HADN'T EVEN TAKEN OFF MY SEAT BELT! He was going for it and really didn't seem to mind that I was not participating at all. I pretty much was just focused on my rearview mirror, hoping no one would hit me. Then out of no where, as if this was expectable by any stretch of the imagination, he leaned down and licked the length of my neck from my shoulder to my ear. He must have felt the uncontrollable cringe that came over me, I literally shuttered, but yet that did not deter him. Finally I just pushed him out of my car, said good night, and drove away. I went home and showered. Strange men do not usually lick my neck without some sort of prompting. And I absolutely was not prompting!

He called and emailed for a few days, but since I couldn't even see his number on my cell phone without shuttering and reliving that disastrous licking, I never returned his call. I'm still at a loss as to what part of my non-interest encouraged that type of behavior. Needless to say, my Onion profile has now gone dormant.

Kindred Spirit

Date Dork

Death to Sallie Mae and all her god damned sisters....

What the hell is with the Mae Dynasty? Sallie, Nellie, Fannie, Ginnie, their black sheep cousin Noel Levitz (obviously a Jew. Levitz, hello. But what kind of Jew is named Noel?), and then there is the Mac side of the family, Farmer Mac and Freddie Mac, probably the ones in charge of the annual family hootenanny. Plus a whole bunch of other subsidiaries. They all have these benign, Mayberry names to hide the fact that they are infiltrating the government and taking over the country, starting with my damn Federal Stafford Loans.

Being a poor nonprofit worker and a struggling graduate student, at the present time my student loans equal approximately 1.5 times the amount of money I am going to make this year, before takes. After taxes, plus the interest adding up on these loans, don't think about. It’s painful. And not to get off the original topic, which is my hatred of Sallie Mae, but fuck the older generations who say we are so bad with our money. What do they expect from us when the only way to get a decent education is to sell your soul and your first born? Then when we get out of college, we get crappy paying jobs and can only afford to live in the cities with the good jobs by racking up insane amounts of credit card debt. It’s the damn system of "Keeping up with the Jones'" that our parents and their generation created that is putting us in the financial shit box right now.

But I digress, back to the creepy Mae family tree. In my quest to be financially responsible, I decided to consolidate my graduate school loans with undergraduate loans. I did not realize the paper storm this would be or how many times I was going to have to call the Sallie Mae call center (otherwise known as Purgatory), located somewhere in India, where they just wake people up as the phones start ringing.

If you ever have to consolidate loans, call the Great Lakes Educational Loan Services (they consolidated my undergrad loans). I want to send these people cookies or something, they are fabulous. No matter how many times I call, I never wait on hold for very long, everyone who answers the phone is extremely knowledgeable, and they are always so nice! They're Midwesterners, enough said. When Sallie Mae started sending me notices that I should consolidate the loans that I have with her sister Nellie, I called the number she gave me. After a few horrendously nonsensical calls to her, I knew I needed to get my loans away from the evil Mae sisters. Their customer service people were useless. I am not one of those people who is morally against international call centers. If a corporation is treating their employees well, I don't care if my call is routed through the North Pole. The reason this bothered me so much is because the customer service people had no idea what I was talking about, worse yet, they had no idea what they were talking about, and the connection was so horrible every time it sounded like someone was speaking Chinese through a fan.

Then I decided to switch these loans over to Great Lakes. I made one very informative call to them and had all the forms I needed to make this happen. The only problem was that I needed to inform Wicked Witch Sallie and her evil minions. This process was literally a two hour endeavor of phone calls, holding, transfers, and translation that left me wanting to obliterate all Mae family members from the face of the Earth. And the best part about it, is that once someone finally understood what I needed, all it took was one lousy three sentence fax and it was done (hopefully, I mean, they have the fax, but that doesn't mean that the trained monkeys they have manning the fax machine can decipher the message).

The evil empire that is the Mae family may have trumped me. It’s too soon to tell. I do, however, get this creepy Scientology feeling from them. If I go missing, they'd be the first place to look.

Retail Therapy

Alright, so the weekend started off a little rough. Why PDG decided that 10:30am was the best time for the pre-break up phone call is beyond me. I'm actually fairly confused about why he felt the call was a necessity at all. Let's review.

1. Met at a party (where I believe I took the initiative to introduce myself to him)
2. He called me a few days later, talked for over an hour (mostly about him, since he never actually gets around to asking about me)
3. Met for an awkward drink (see below)
4. Invited me out with his friends (see below)
5. Called me with the pre-break up phone call, a.k.a. "Can we just be friends?" speech

Basically, what is throwing me off is that at this fetal stage of a relationship, most guys would simply stop calling. As a twenty-something woman, who has done a fair amount of dating, I'm just more prepared for that scenario. Maybe it's a sad state of affairs that I am so taken aback by this phone call. I have to respect that he wanted to have the conversation and I can't imagine it was an easy phone call to make. And he probably just wanted to get it over with, hence the 10:30am call.

To really be honest, what stings the most is that this pre-break up is based on one of two things from my point of view. A) he's not attracted to me, or B) he realized he doesn't like my personality. Or worse yet, both. He has no other basis for the pre-emptive strike (unless you count Lucky Bear and Dr. No's theory that he's a closet homosexual, which again, with my dating record, is not completely out of the question). For a woman who considers herself equal parts adorable and witty, that just hurts.

So there was some retail therapy involved in the weekend. Drinking and shopping are the cures for pretty much anything these days. I know there are some who would say that that is unhealthy, but to them I say, if my therapist is okay with it, then shut the fuck up.

And anyway, PDG's friends are still calling Lucky Bear to hang out with us, so obviously someone thinks I'm adorable and witty. (And don't tell me that's faulty logic, logic plays little part in my life sometimes)

PDG's To Do List for 6/18/05

Laundry
Floss teeth
Grocery shopping
"Just Friends" phone call to Rusty Blue before 11am
Badminton game at 2pm
Butcher a small animal
Watch Moulin Rouge

I'm sure he must be so relieved to have that off his list of things to do today, with such a busy schedule.

Olympic Champion of Social Ineptitude

No stupid mistakes on Saturday, but definitely a realization that I need to be more on the ball.

Pizza Delivery Guy (I actually just wrote that as Pizza Delivery Goy, which is kind of funny, because he is in fact a goy and does not actually deliver pizza) is still in the picture. Normally the dates are so horrendous I am left wondering if I need to change my cell phone number or move to a small island in the Philippines. After our awkward, but overall enjoyable date, I was actually looking forward to hearing from PDG again. When I hadn't heard from him by Tuesday (our date having been Friday) I called him Wednesday night when I was out with friends and asked if he wanted to join us for a drink. He said he was busy (with a pretty lame excuse) and I figured I was being blown off. To my surprise, however, he called the next Monday. He had an event he was going to and he invited me along.

I was thrown off when he said "Bring Friends." Alright, so it’s a group thing. I enlisted my roommate Lucky Bear to come with me. He sent me an email the next day with the details. Now the thing that through me off the most about this email, is the part that I can't really share, as actually putting up his name seems a little rude. But he signed his name like a frat boy nickname. Like if his name was Dan, it would have been signed D-Dog, or if his last name was Gilmore, it would have said Happy Gilmore. Do you see where I am going with this? Is that how you sign something to a girl you've gone out with once and have any interest in? When I called my best friend Dr. No, he dubbed PDG the Olympic Champion of Social Ineptitude. I've fully admitted my tendency toward dating the socially awkward, but I think Dr. No may be right. Its one thing to be completely obvious in your awkwardness, like close talking, or inappropriate touching, but this guy is stealth. He's completely normal in social settings, he just seems to have no concept of how to act around girls, or more specifically, me.

Lucky Bear and I decide to go to the event anyway, we're on a new kick of introducing ourselves to strangers, so this seemed like as good a time as any. And as Dr. No and I decided, it might be a good story to add to my collection. The event was fun, he seemed genuinely happy to see me. There were only two issues. One, this was a "meet the friends" event. Which I didn't know and was unprepared for. Apparently this was a work thing. That's fine, my social ineptitude is not so severe that I can't deal with that. Other then the fact that one of his girlfriends has an obvious thing for him and the daggers shooting from her eyes at me all night made me severely uncomfortable. Second, one of his friends, Jam, who was absolutely a sweetheart, was obviously the town gossip as well. Jam and I were the only two in this multitude of people who don't smoke (I quit a month ago, so I'm trying my best). Whenever everyone else went to smoke, he and I were left inside watching drinks. First conversation was normal, and then he went in the wrong direction.

Jam: What do you think of my boy?
Me: He's cool, this is only the second time we've hung out
Jam: You two look good together, I'm feeling it
Me: Yeah, I think we're both having a good time
Jam: Good, because that boy needs to get laid.

Let that sink in for a minute. Seriously. Just think about it.

WHAT THE FUCK WAS I SUPPOSED TO SAY TO THAT? The kid hasn't even kissed me good night. Needless to say, this put me a little bit on edge.

PDG comes back, we talk, its fine. He never actually asks me about myself, which is a little off-putting (ex: I ask him what music he likes, he gives me a laundry list, and then just looks at me, when really, at that moment, it would be perfect to ask me what I like). It’s getting late, it’s a Wednesday night and I get the feeling PDG doesn't stay out partying too often. At midnight, he decides to go home. Lucky Bear is having a fabulous time (I think she gave out her number twice that night) so we aren't leaving. I walk him out and it’s the same as last time. Hugs me good bye, says we'll talk soon. I mention a friend who's a musician that's playing tonight. I tell him I'll email him the details, which I do. He wrote me back last night and said he couldn't make it because someone in his office was leaving and they were having a going away party. Side note on that - Jam has already called Lucky Bear and invited her to the same going away party; my invitation must be lost in the mail.

I'm completely at a loss on this one. Will he call? Is he interested? Are we buddies? Have these been dates? All of these are questions floating around in space with no discernable answers as of yet.

Possibilities

It seems the only thing between me and making a huge mistake is the fact that I have been up since 4:30am. That could help or hinder, I have no idea. I guess we'll see what happens.

From the beginning (sort of)...

The name of this blog comes from a notoriously bad date I had that happened around ten months ago. As recently as two nights ago, I had people asking me to repeat the story so that they could bask in my embarrassment for just a little longer.

I should preface this by saying that I have very odd taste in men that has often been ridiculed. My roommates and I always say that one of the reasons that our friendships last is because we never go for the same guys. Part of that is also the fact that I only date men that are so socially awkward that no other self respecting woman would be caught dead with them. Its not that I search them out. I think its something in my pheromones that attracts them. Whatever it is, they always find me, and I always take the bait.

This particular date is completely my fault. There was actually a moment the night that I met Creepy that I leaned over to my best friend and asked him if he thought this guy was semi-retarded. Why I would then go out with this guy is beyond all understanding. I take complete responsibility for how bad this date was. I went in, eyes wide open, to a situation that couldn't have turned out as anything other then a ridiculously bad date. What I did not know until after the fact was that this guy had already been nicknamed Creepy by a group of my friends who didn't seem to think this information was relevant prior to my going out with him.

Creepy and I met at a party. We talked a lot that night, both of us completely inebriated. That is possibly why I ignored the obvious signs that this guy was a little off. I wrote off the close-talking and over-eagerness to alcohol. Mistake number one. When he asked for my number, I gave him my home number, not the cell. The cell is reserved for people whom I actually want to talk to. In an odd turn of events, however, despite the fact that we rarely answer the home phone, I answered the night he called and agreed to go out with him that Sunday. No time was set, but as it was a date, I assumed it was dinner or drinks, some sort of evening activity. You can imagine my surprise when he called at noon and said he was coming to pick me up in an hour. There was no way that was going to happen, so we compromised and settled on 3pm.

He had made this big deal about how he had the whole date planned out. When he showed up at my house, his big plan consisted of a choice between bowling and pool. Neither sounded appealing, so I chose the lesser of two evils and went with pool. I live just south of Hollywood and there is a great pool hall right on Hollywood Blvd. Creepy had other plans and instead took me 10 miles out of the way up to Glendale to a pool hall he had heard was fantastic. It was closed. So back down to my Hollywood pool hall we went, and didn't even end up playing pool. We just got some food and watched football. He was nice, very attentive (a little too much for a first date) and we didn't lack for conversation. He was definitely a close talker and felt the need to be touching me at all times, which should have been a huge red flag.

After we ate, he suggested a movie. Sounded good to me because it required very little brain power, specifically the movie we chose. Now picture Hollywood, where we were at this point. There is the Arclight and the Manns Theaters to the West, a couple of theaters in Los Feliz to the East. And most importantly, the Grove and the Beverly Center, both within blocks of my house, where he would eventually need to drop me off, just southwest of us. But no, those are not good enough theaters for Creepy. He insists we go all the way to Culver City, again, a good 10 miles from where we were. We see one of the worst movies in the history of man, The Forgotten, and at this point I am ready to go home. Its like 7:30pm, we've been hanging out for 4 hours and I knew 3 hours ago I wasn't interested.

However, my naiveté is raring its ugly head and when he insists on having a drink, I agree. Little did I know that the drink was at his house, which is next door to the theater, which obviously he planned all along. Creepy was a sneaky little bugger. We get up to his place, where he proceeds to give me the grand tour of his one bedroom apartment. I noticed right away that while he has a roommate, who is home, there is only one bed in the bedroom. I'm not sure what to make of that situation and since I pretty much lost all tact much earlier in the night, I ask him. Turns out, Creepy sleeps on the couch in the living room. What kind of guy insists on bringing a girl back to his place when he doesn't even have a bedroom? Answer: Creepy McCreeperson.

Now this is where it gets really special. He relegated his roommate to his bedroom and takes me to the kitchen to get a beer. I shit you not; the beer was barely open and in my hand before the boy mounted me in the kitchen like a schnauzer in heat. As I grappled with the current situation, which was this man humping my leg, I think I went into a state of unparallel shock. I didn't move, I didn't respond, and yet here this guy was dry humping me in his kitchen with his roommate not twenty feet away in the bedroom. I can't even tell you how long this went on, because I think its been buried somewhere in the recesses of my mind. Eventually he finished, I guess, and asked me if I wanted to see one of his films. He had earlier told me about his days at L.A. Film School and was apparently eager to show me one of his masterpieces, which is, I can only imagine, the logical next step in his bizarre mating ritual. We go and sit on the couch, his bed, and he puts the movie in. He wrote, directed, and starred in this picture, which was twenty minutes long and for the life of me I can not remember at all what it was about. It was okay. It was a student film. Not sure what else to say about it.

Obviously, my response was no where near the raves he was expecting. The movie ended, he leapt off the couch, turned off the VCR, turned on the light, stared me straight in the face and said, "You hated it, didn't you?" The disdain in his voice freaked me out. "No," I replied, terrified that this was the part in the scenario where they found my body in the trunk of his car, "I thought it was funny."

"You didn't laugh" he sneered
"Oh, you can't use me as a litmus test. I laugh at awkward moments." Trying anything to appease him.
"Well this was hysterical" he yells.

Now I am grasping for straws. I have no idea what to say, so I pick out a character in the movie, the sidekick Dave, and say "Dave's character was really funny."

"I know, I'm a horrible actor!" He seems genuinely hurt, well as hurt as an insane person can be.

He picks up my purse and tells me he is taking me home. I put on my shoes and we walk down to the car. Somewhere between the apartment and the car, something starts pricking my toe in my shoe. As to not upset him anymore, I don't mention anything and slip off my shoes quietly in the car. He doesn't say a word to me the entire drive. I don't even know if he is breathing at this point because I am afraid to look at him. We get to my house, and while he has been a gentleman (with the exception of the dry humping) the whole date, he barely even looks my way when I exit the car. I don't even think I was all the way out when he started driving away.
So here I was, standing at the bottom of my stairs, shoes in hand because there was still something poking me, after a 7 hour marathon date from hell. I get up to my porch and look at my shoe. There, having made its way all the way through the sole, is a 1-inch rusty nail sticking up right where my big toe should be. I walk into the apartment, where my roommates are all sitting on the couch. "How was it?" was the big question.

"At least the nail didn't go through my foot..."

The case of the Pizza Delivery Guy

Sometimes I feel like my life is some sort of slow, boring Truman Show with really bad story editors. 75% of the time its totally uninteresting to the outside eye. Actually, maybe more like 95%. And then these random, ridiculous, completely out of nowhere things happen and I feel like I am in a fucked up (but usually fairly funny) nightmare that some reality show producer dreamt up.

Right now I am on my couch, all of my roommates are out with significant others, and I am in the worst mood. I feel emotionally unstable. The most recent date, which was Friday, hasn't called again, and its Tuesday. And since I am completely socially inept, I have no idea if that is normal or if I'm being blown off. Which is completely possible because I think he was pretty socially inept as well. I couldn't read what happened there at all. I just keep thinking of the Sex and the City episode where Berger tells Miranda "He's just not that into you." Why has that phrase become the mantra of the single woman? My friend in Phoenix says it all the time, like it makes things better. It doesn't make anything better. I mean who wants to think that? I would much rather think there was a death in the family and he moved back to New York suddenly to take care of his grieving relatives, all the while pining away for the relationship with me that was thwarted by timing and distance. None of that is true, of course, but its better then thinking he didn't like me.

He called at around 6:45pm on Friday night. We had spoken earlier in the week and I had told him my schedule was flexible. Since he wasn't sure what his work week looked like, I told him just to call when he had some time to get a quick drink. The call came as I was waking up from a much needed nap from a horrendously long day at work. I had been up since 4am, on my feet since 6:45am, working until 5pm. Maybe I was too eager. Being up that early is definitely a valid excuse to postpone drinks, but I liked him, and thought I was awake so I went. First mistake (well actually second if you count my horrible sunburn that should have prevented me from leaving the house for many days) was agreeing to the bar he suggested. This bar had previously been the scene of two horrifically bad dates, possible subjects for future entries. Bad karma.

I was relieved that he was as cute as I remembered him being through my jello-shot enduced haze of when we met. **Side note - I picked him up at a party a few weeks earlier by telling him he looked like my pizza delivery guy, which he did, but again, jello-shot haze.** We talked, no lull in conversation, things seemed to go well. Early on we had both decided that if we had more then 2 drinks we would be too drunk to drive home. I'm always a light weight drinker, not sure what his excuse is. After two drinks, we'd been there maybe an hour, I asked what the plan was. We had talked about maybe getting food and seeing as I was starving, it sounded like a fabulous idea to me. He went inside to close out his tap. We walked out of the bar, he asked where my car was, we walked to my car, he hugged me good bye, and that was it. I got in my car completely confused. I'm still completely confused. Where exactly did I go wrong? Was he blinded by my shiny red sunburn? Was he really insulted when I said I hated the Valley (but who really considers Glendale the Valley?). I'm pretty much resigned to the idea that he isn't calling at this point, but I honestly have no idea where I went wrong. Any insight would be fantastic.

So here we are, back on my couch, but now, two of the couples have returned and so instead of feeling like a loser by myself, I get to feel like a loser surrounded by couples. How fabulous for me. Its these moments that my decision to not have a television in my bedroom seems very mislead. But tis the life I lead, and now back to the 95% of my life that no one in their right mind would give a crap about...