Five

Welcome to your first ever, off the cuff, mere minutes after a date, date review. No, really! Thirty minutes ago, I was sitting across the table at Panera from Five, and now I am sitting at a small table in Starbucks and writing about it. This should be fun!

I prefer a day or two to pass before summarizing, but I’m going a little stir crazy in the same location, at the same table, going over the same damn words every day for the past three months. I need something a little fresh.

A date review to break up the monotony sounds perfect, no?

I mentioned how Five was already annoying the shit out of me, right? No? Five was already annoying the shit out of me. In fact, he had been for weeks. We’ve been trying to get together for a date for that long, and it was kind of my fault, but mostly the weather’s, and then a good bit of Four’s. Let’s blame everything on Four from here on out. Fuck Four.

I’ll admit it: I’m not exactly in a jovial YAY let’s MEET PEOPLE kind of mood, but I’m pushing through that. I had a good session with my therapist (I love my therapist), we sorted out the entire Four debacle, and I have obviously decided resolutely to move the fuck on. Hello, it was two weeks. Get over it.

But back to Five being annoying. He has been, underhandedly mentioning how difficult it has been to meet (hello, it’s called RECORD SNOW FALL!), and then trying to change the time of our meet up today, underhandedly complaining AGAIN in this really obnoxious “I’m just kidding!” kind of way when I said that the new time wasn’t possible. It’s the day after Christmas! It’s a little hectic. You’re lucky you’re getting a date at all, buddy. But I held my ground, and we met at our original time, and I was equally as unexcited about it as I have been about all of these dates. Maybe it’s a defense tactic.

Oh. Looky here. Five just texted. You get to experience this in real time. Exciting!

Except not really, because Five wasn’t all that exciting. Five was, well, kind of… oh, I hate to do this because really he seemed nice and genuine and… fine, I’ll just say it: Five was kind of dorky. That’s okay, I know, but it was the kind that is awkward and maybe a little sociopathic kind of… there’s really no other way of saying this… not someone I would ever want to fuck. An awkward exchange of bodily fluids in a twin, unmade bed, on sheets he’s had since college after watching all of Star Wars one evening? Yeah, that’s more likely.

But back to how it went: it was fine. We met for drinks at Panera. Him, coffee; me, tea. (Did I punctuate that correctly? Don’t tell me if I didn’t. You try rereading the same twenty-six pages over and over again for weeks on end and let me know how your mind sees common punctuation.)

He was awkward as hell when I first walked in: not looking me in the eye, looking at the ground, looking anywhere but at me as I made my way across the room to the table he had picked out. And when I got there, I realized quickly that he had already purchased a beverage. I guess that’s normal, considering the casual setting, but I wasn’t expecting it. So I sat down only to say an initial hello and then excused myself to go get my own drink. When I came back to the table we talked easily enough. Not much as far as chemistry is concerned, but he asked me about the essay I’m working on, told me about one he had written in college on leadership models that somehow compared Martin Luther King Jr. and Star Wars, and as much as I wanted to be interested in this, I couldn’t hear anything but “Dork dork dork dork dork dork. Dork dork dork dork. Dork, dork dork dork dork dork dork dork. Dork dork dork dork dork: dork dork dork dork dork dork dork!” I’m not saying that this is an immediate deal breaker. It’s not. There is some real symbolism and significance to Star Wars, but I do wish that someone would send out a memo to all men that mentioning Star Wars on a first date is probably not the best idea. Unless you’re obsessed with it and it’s your life and you need a girl to put on a Princess Leia costume before you’re capable of getting an erection, in which case you should mention that immediately so she can run, screaming, in the opposite direction. Or wink and reveal a flash of white and gold under her shirt and have you fall madly in love with her. My dating philosophy: it’s better to get all the skeletons out of the closet from the start. Better than finding them out later when you’re too wrapped up in emotions and rose-colored glasses to see how terrifying they really are, no? And wouldn’t you want to find someone, ultimately, who would love you, skeletons and all? I know I do.

Just saying.

The entire date lasted for about an hour and a half.

Maybe we’ll just be friends. Or writing buddies, because when I mentioned wanting to one day teach writing at the college level, he told me that he had written a novel.

“Oh, really?” I said, leaning in closer. “What kind of novel?”

“Modern fiction,” he said. “Kind of like Dan Brown.”

Oh. I sat back in my chair, slightly disappointed. Again, not judging. (But kind of, you know?) I read The Da Vinci Code. It was just a missed moment, and when he launched into some bizarrely inconsequential and nonsensical explanation of how it starts and how it is a lot like The Manchurian Candidate, but NOT because he wrote his BEFORE the movie came out, and then something about something that I didn’t really listen to and all of a sudden he was talking about computer code and the technology behind house arrest.

Really.

Maybe it was nerves. Regardless, I won’t be initiating contact, the test of a good first date, in my book. I could definitely wait for Five to contact me. That’s not the best sign in the world, but at least I’m not writing him off with the likes of One or the felon I accidentally dated earlier this year.

In conclusion: if he wants to see me again, I’ll go.

In the meantime, I’m meeting Six tomorrow.