Listen To Yourself Before I Have To

All of this dating stuff might be easier to stomach if the people who find me weren't so weird. Maybe incompatible is the better word (or at least the kinder word). Because I have been running into some real wacko members of the opposite sex lately.

Recently I have been talking to a teacher at a local university- let's call him Daniel. He's very educated and has a relatively high profile job. We'll leave it at that. Daniel emailed me and seemed interesting and I emailed back and before long we were IMing and doing a lot of electronic eyelash batting. Finally I let him call my cellphone.

Oh WOW. Big mistake. HUGE.

At some point someone told Daniel that he's good at impressions, and he fancies himself to be VERY talented. According to him, he can do 25 impressions and accents (not counting regional dialects of course). I am not making this up, the very words came out of the guy's mouth. The highlight of our disjointed conversation (lots of what I'm guessing were impressions of actors that all sounded like Colonel Sanders that went on and on and on and me being really quiet and wondering what the heck was going on and was I on Candid Camera?) went like this:

Him: What do you think of my impression of The Joker in The Dark Knight?

Me: Well, it's better than any other you've attempted tonight....

Harsh? Yes. Deserved? ABSOLUTELY. Comedy is a very tricky thing and unless you're A, a professional, or B, someone who naturally incorporates humor into everyday conversation, you shouldn't even try it until you are relaxed and know your audience. Jokes about Monica Lewinsky are only okay at this point if you're Jay Leno. Dressing up as a Jedi knight at Halloween is sort of pointing to a whole different category of nerd that I am not comfortable with because you probably dress up and attend conventions too. And racist jokes about Jesus....

These are all things that you do not include in a 1st impression phone call. They probably won't bother me at all if you waited a couple of months but if THIS is the first impression- what the hell do you hit me with a in a few weeks? The weirdo stinky foot fetish? The gun collection in your basement? The pet black widow spiders?

This Daniel person is not ambitious, as his resume suggests, but instead so boring and socially retarded that he had no other option but to continue in school until he got to a level where a place had to hire him based on his very specific specialty. And given his area of study this kind of attention-mongering is akin to a rocket scientist not knowing how to balance a checkbook.

I was telling my sister I could start blogging about dating all Carrie-style, incorporating beautifully worded wistful questions into my posts like "Have all men become mind-numbing nut jobs?" She came back at me with, "Can you listen to yourself before I have to?" Perfect advice for this particular first impression phone call!

I guess I need to back off the dating website BS until I'm really ready to put the effort into dating someone. Or do the exact opposite and write a book. My account on the site is still active so I get emails from guys every now and then, which is what put Daniel on my radar. I should probably just quit the site entirely though- we had a "match percentage" of 78%- VERY HIGH- so I can only imagine what calibar of guy will continue to be thrown my way. Ick. Or I'll continue to get a slew of 22 year olds (the other extreme). Double Ick. not to mention what that says about what the website thinks of ME!!!!

PS Just read this again before I posted it and decided to delete the account. It is not a reflection of who I am and is NOT bringing me anything I'm interested in.

PPS I cannot for the life of me get my fonts and text size to behave here lately. I don't know what's going on. Grrrrr....

Social Life! (Hunh?!)

I don't know y'all, getting a social life is sort of exhausting. I mean, I suddenly have things to do and people to see and I'm not used to it AT ALL. I've put a lot of effort into meeting more people in Nashville over the past 6 weeks or so, and slowly but surely it is paying off. And I've found that being around people is energizing, which is weird because I'm usually the type of person who is happy to stay indoors all weekend and emerge only for the paper and lattes. I'm just not used to doing so much STUFF, and meeting so many new people. So while I'm really thrilled that this is working it is just so against my personality to be social that when I get home after an evening out I'm just like "What the hell was that?" Then it takes me a while to come down from the energy rush, so that's where the exhausting part comes in.

The really encouraging thing about this is that I've been meeting people who are not only interesting, but also have good friend potential. And they're all sort of in the same boat that I am too- new to the area or new to single life, or both, and it's nice to hang out with people who have the same priorities. Namely, get your own shit together before you try to get anyone else involved. And that could be a while, so it's even more important to reach out and get some friends so I don't turn into a hermit. (Or the cat woman, but I don't like cats that much so I don't think there's a lot of danger of that happening.)

I'm writing about this because I've never thought of myself as the kind of person who makes friends easily (although now that I look back I realize that is total crap). I get shy, and I wonder if people are spending time with me because they feel sorry for me. Or because I make them look thin. Or because they don't have anything better to do. This is obviously my insecure teenage self shining through, the girl so shy she couldn't even look at people. Over the past 8 or 10 years that person has disappeared on the outside, and I'm slowly squashing her on the inside as well. The more you get out and do stuff the easier it gets, so there goes the shyness. I get to choose who my friends are, no the other way around; I'm not the supporting cast in someone else's life, I'm the main character in MY life.

The thing that has really helped me is the book, "Live Alone and Like It", which was written in the 1930s. It is a book for women who may occasionally find themselves living alone, you know, between husbands or something. And while a lot of the advice is archaic and sexist (hire a maid for an afternoon when you want to lounge around in bed with lots of magazines, be sure you have a wardrobe that men will appreciate, how to entertain when you don't have a kitchen), a lot of it is just common sense ways to make sure that you don't turn into a mopey depressed girl when you can be a strong woman with a full life.

And that is exactly what I'm doing (the latter, not the former).