I haven't really "dated" much. I've hooked up a couple times, or met people in other contexts. But actual "dates" just don't work for me. In case you're wondering, I have had some good dates. But they're a lot less fun to talk about, and sometimes involved me being the only party aware that it was a date.
I've gone on dates with a diplomat, who, oddly enough, was a terrible conversationalist -- the kind of person who would be content to eat dinner in complete silence, which is what would happen if you didn't occasionally attempt to offer a humorous anecdote, or inquire into their life, or do anything to mask the giant sucking sound that is all the atmosphere and energy being vacuumed to a place with people who actually care about living. I tried going on a date twice with this woman, who, on top of it all, was probably 50 pounds underweight and had weird acne scars all over her face. Maybe that makes me superficial, but when there's no fucking substance, superficial is all you got.
And I think I've mentioned my first and last attempt at dating via OkCupid. I chatted with someone and bounced a few emails back and forth. We set up a date. I drove an hour to meet her in small-town Upstate New York. The first thing I noticed when I picked her up was that she was at least a hundred pounds heavier than I expected, based on her significantly outdated profile pictures. But, as I had foolishly believed myself an old-school gentleman, I accepted immediately that this wasn't a problem, and took her to an Italian place. I ate some really shitty spaghetti, though, to be fair, the shittiniess of the spaghetti might have been due to the fact that I was learning all about her incredibly depressing life. I learned that her family was shit; her school was shit; her friends were shit; her ex-boyfriend was shit; her computer was shit. I tried to make her feel better, but at a certain point I nearly choked on a shit meatball in order to prevent myself from laughing at the absurdity of the avalanche of shit I was hearing on a first date in a town that was ground-zero of a shit bomb of Rust Belt capital flight.
At the end of it all, she asked to borrow a hundred bucks. And yes, I gave it to her, because I felt sorry for her. When I tell this story, I often lie about this bit in the story, as some of my friends will give me tremendous amounts of shit if they know that I actually agreed to her request. Well, now you know that I've got a rescue complex AND I'm a liar.
That, by the way, wasn't the worst date I've had.
This is.
***
I met a girl at a party. She was a PhD student in English -- which should have been enough of a flag, but either I knew less about that particular career path, or I was drunk on mulled wine and didn't give a fuck. Being me, I tried to impress her with my surface knowledge of Yeats and other poems/novels, because I'm an idiot and my benchmark for well-readness is "I read a couple books in addition to the required reading in K-12 education over the course of my lifetime." As it turns out, she was more interested in the fact I was an astronomer because she was a sci-fi dork. We went outside to chat -- I still remember one of my friends saying "goodbye" to me in the knowing way that indicated he thought I was going to go home with her and didn't potentially prevent me from making the worst mistake of my life. Asshole. Well, I didn't, and that turned out to be A Good Thing. We exchanged numbers, and I promised to call in the morning.
I picked her up in the morning, and the first thing I notice is that she was... well, not that pretty in the face. Or anywhere else. Hate to say it, but she had a bit of a Helen Thomas vibe about her, though in fairness to the disgraced doyenne of the Washington Press Corps, Helen Thomas is fucking old. Again, I blamed the wine for this predicament. But, again, I thought that the cover doesn't matter so much, and that as long as we got along well, everything would work out. (How goddamn noble of me.)
We went to a hippie coffeeshop -- Gimme! Coffee, for you Ithaca folks, and sat down.
I know that rules of etiquette generally dictate that politics, religion, and money are off-limits in polite conversation. (Probably should probably add sex to that list, especially on a first date.) But, naif that I was, I thought that it shouldn't really matter. Besides, we're talking about me. What the hell else am I going to talk about? The 2006 analogue to Kim Kardashian?
So, we talked politics. It was early 2006. George W. Bush was president at the time, and Ithaca was, and remains, a pretty liberal community. (This, despitethe fact that Cornell gave birth to a lot of the famous neoconservatives. Ann Coulter is a fucking feather in your cap, second-tier Ivy League.)
I forget what we were discussing precisely, but she was going off on some predictable and not-very-nuanced-or-deep rant about Bush and the Iraq War. One of the few things I hate more than conservative pablum is liberal pablum, mostly because I expect better of fellow lefties. Don't worry -- that belief and the belief in being a gentleman have long gone, no doubt replaced by other, more dangerous cognitive biases.
But, all of a sudden, she had to reaffirm her solid support of Israel. (She was Jewish, and had visited Israel as part of that program that helps fund young Jews abroad to visit.) She started saying some pretty bigoted things about Muslims. I asked for clarification using a hypothetical situation, in which she made it clear that she'd feel uncomfortable about law-abiding Saudi doctors living on her street.
Ooookay, I thought. No, that's a lie. I really thought, "What the FUCK is this person saying? How the FUCK did I end up with some sort of weird selective wingnut?"
I tried to deflect. I started a discussion about family. I happen to have a cousin I cared about (and still care about, even though we disagree on a HUGE range of policy issues) who studied engineering in college, but ended up dropping out as a junior to go to a Bible college and become a youth leader/minister. This immediately triggered a tirade about Christianity -- even though I had made it clear that I loved this cousin and respected his choice. Again, pablum. Also -- what the fuck? I just said someone close to me chose this path. Were you even listening? Was she really a prototype of some sort of chat bot, scanning for keywords, going into an automatic program once one was said? Is she what's on the other side of those chatbots that try to convince me to join a porn website? Gross.
Now, I'm used to defending Christianity. I'm used to defending science. Maybe all that defending will make me defensive. I was about to prepare what I hoped would be a nuanced rebuttal that didn't involve me getting my nuts violently ripped off my body. But I didn't get a chance to do so, as things were About To Get Interesting.
A fortysomething woman came over to our table, and interrupted politely. "Excuse me. I just happened to be sitting there overhearing this conversation. I'm an ex-Catholic myself. But I just came back from Hurricane Katrina relief efforts. I met a lot of wonderful people who were deeply religious, and even though I didn't share their beliefs, we found some common ground and were able to do some wonderful things. Really, I think you should stop talking, because this is representative of what is wrong in America right now."
I believe this is a very accurate rendering of what she said. I should know because my dawning awareness of this crowning moment of awesome seared this into my consciousness like the explosion of a million suns. (Or technically a million 8 solar mass stars. Because stars like our Sun don't explode. Unless you count the evaporation of the outer hydrogen layers in late stellar evolution as an explosion. Back to the story.)
There was silence. I think I said something about how I know plenty of awesome ex-Catholics. She smiled, and excused her self.
Now, if you've been following the narrative, you might have caught that my date hadn't responded to what, I would have to say, was a very pleasant-looking woman with lovely salt-and-pepper hair. So guess what my date did then?
She responded. To me.
"Well... well... I just wish she would have given me a chance to say what I think!"
And so I got to hear what she thought.
Instantly, my thoughts went back to first grade. It was in first grade that I became interested in the volcanoes of the world. Did you know that Cotopaxi is the highest active volcano on Earth?
I sat there, and honestly don't remember what she was saying. But about a minute or two in, she paused, and said,
"You're grimacing."
I did that check that one does to sort of gain better kinesthetic awareness of my face without physically touching or moving said face to determine if she was correct. She was. But, being polite (or scared), I decided to play it off.
"Grimacing?", I asked rhetorically, grimacing. "I'm not grimacing! This is just how I look when I smile."
I can't believe she bought it, but I suppose she wanted to run along with whatever she was babbling about.
I also can't believe I faked having an ugly smile to cowardly dodge whatever the hell awaited me if I did have to explain that I was grimacing at the sheer volume of incoherent worthlessness emerging from the bowels of her distended face.
At some point, I overheard some employees, on break, in a nearby booth. One pointed his foot in our direction, and muttered something about "having a When Harry Met Sally moment". Haven't seen the movie, but I imagine it has to do with some date awkwardness. May need to check it out at some point.
Also, fuck you, employees, for your isolationist stance. I was in need of armed intervention, and you did nothing. Where's Wilsonianism when you need it?
Obviously, somewhere in this process, I seriously wondered why I hadn't followed that other woman out the door, even if she was older than me by at least 20 years. She even looked better than my date.
After all that, we went walking around in the snow. I don't think I offered my arm, but she took it, and I didn't recoil in horror. Again, I was a
She thought it was a great date, and kissed me on the cheek good night. Contrary to expectations, it didn't leave the Mark of the Beast.
I didn't schedule a second date. At some point, she did contact me via AIM; we had a brief conversation that ended up with her arguing with me when I was trying to agree with her -- probably something about the unemployability of English PhDs.
It was as if Fate was making absolutely sure that I knew that, no matter how lonely, or horny, I got, I was not to go anywhere near her again.
Anyway, with the passage of years, I found some pity in my heart for her. For life is not going to be particularly kind to a physically ugly, emotionally unstable, abrasive, bigoted, narrow-minded English PhD.
I'm also grateful because I've gotten far more joy retelling this story, to the amusement of my friends, than I would have ever gotten dating her.
If you're out there, lady, I hope you've become a better person. But failing that, fuck you for ruining mulled wine and Irish poetry for me.
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