Two different friends needled me about the quick demise of this blog, so I spent a few minutes paging back through my google calendar to figure out exactly what I'd been doing in lieu of blogging.
The answer: certainly not dating. In the last two months, I managed a scant two dates -- both in early January and both pretty forgettable.
The first was with a kid who was frighteningly similar to me, down to the close cropped hair and facial scruff. He'd spent time in both Iraq and Afghanistan, embedded with the military and working as a translator, a job I would've killed for. We had similar interests, both considered ourselves grungy backpackers at heart, and had both spent more than our fair share of time globetrotting. It was like going on a date with me.
I am sad to report that I found me bracingly boring.
He wanted to make small talk in Farsi, which I found strangely abhorrent. I think he assumed I couldn't understand him (please: that Tehrani dialect was clear as a bell), but in reality I was just grappling with an unexpectedly visceral reaction to it. Odd, given how often I have extended conversations with myself in Farsi.
I'm normally good at cutting people people off definitively. I usually say in no uncertain terms that I enjoyed myself, and that I'd be happy to hang out again as friends, but that I don't see a romantic future in the cards for us. I know that I'd prefer it if people would have the courtesy to do the same for me; just ignoring text messages seems cruel. But somehow when dealing with a facsimile copy of myself, I couldn't bring myself to do it.
I never returned his texts.
***
Unrelated sidenote: I am typing this, as always, on a blackberry while sitting at a bar. The two people next to me are, respectively, a club promoter and a gay DJ, and their conversation is so piercingly vapid that it's sapping my will to live.
("What I'm envisioning is a theme based on cake -- both in the Marie Antoinette sense, and in the very real sense of cupcakes. Because that kind of juxtaposition -- I mean, god I just love juxtapositions. We need to come up with a name for this. Maybe ... 'Worldwide Cake.'")
***
The second date actually was a second date -- my first ever off OkCupid, which I was hoping was maybe a sea change. I had high hopes: the guy had seemed interesting enough over our first date (ramen noodles in a pseudo-Japanese noodle shop that I love) and attractive, albeit desperately in need of a haircut -- an architect with a mop top.
But I was bored over dinner -- sushi and sake -- and bored over drinks after, at a wine bar for which I had a groupon. (I will concede that thrift and romance are a poor match -- but I go on enough dates that good lord, I'll take savings where I can find it).
I kind of saw that our future wasn't super bright, but I'd had enough to drink that making out with him on the sidewalk outside of the wine bar -- in front of the bar's massive window, with people inside actually pointing at us -- seemed like an excellent idea. His rather breakneck style of making out, though not pleasant to experience, made up for its lack of precision with an excess of gusto. For a brief moment, I thought he was going to gnaw my face off.
I confirmed our lack of future by going home with him, a mistake I was fully aware of making at the time.
I ran into him a month later at a friend's party -- I was leaving as he was arriving -- and did not recognize him at all. I think it's because he'd gotten a haircut.
