Swing and a miss
I’m terrible with the boy-girl thing. It goes all the way back to childhood. So shy was I in elementary school that when I went to make the first move of my life, on a girl named Jenni Myers, I was too chicken. Instead I asked the kid who sat next to her in class to ask her to go steady with me. She turned around and looked at me from across the room, pointed to herself, mouthed “me?”, and shook her head. Five minutes later she came to my desk to ask for a pencil sharpener or something. I still remember my arms feeling like they’d caught fire when she walked over. I could have caught fire right there and disappeared.
My style has really never improved since. I’ve had a few relationships over the years. One with a girl in college who I was convinced was “the one”, as kids believe when they’re fresh out of high school and legally able to marry. She dumped me at a homecoming dance and went home with another guy. There was the waitress in Boise. She was stone nuts. I was 23 and she was 19. She was “ready” to settle down and I was just happy to have a warm body lying next to me. Actually it was her roommate I really wanted to get with, but she was taken. So I settled. An important lesson learned. The roommate is still a dear friend of mine, and a part of me still holds out hope we can make a go of things one day.
There was the girl who worked for her mom. There were a few girls in Arizona and a few more in Seattle. And a few here in The Couv. But nothing has really panned out.
Case in point, the last girl. Christine. We found each other on Facebook about six months ago. We’d gone to high school together back in the day. I had a minor crush on her. Thought she was cute. But she never really gave me the time of day. Fast forward to today and she’s now twice-divorced with two kids, one by each husband. That’s a lot of baggage, but certainly overcomable. We went out a few times. Had ourselves a good time. But visiting her house, the whole place smelled like cat urine and stuff was just lying everywhere. Add to that her constant insistence on buying me stuff and refusing to let me carry even my own bags, and we came to a problem. I just couldn’t do it. After a few weeks, I split.
Like I said, I don’t have much experience, either in longevity or in quality. Come to think of it, it’s really not a whole lot unlike Jerry’s character on Seinfeld. A lot of singles and doubles, but no real home runs.
Friday I took a home run swing. And while I whiffed, I think I got her attention. I ran a post-mortem on the whole situation with a female friend of mine and she informed me I’d made the biggest opening blunder a man could make. I invited her to the movies. In retrospect it was hardly a swing worthy of a home run girl, but it was what it was. My friend informed me that high school was twenty years ago and I should probably step-up my game if I wanted to touch ‘em all. And I do.
She went on to tell me about how she at first couldn’t stand her current beau and turned him down several times before finally giving in.
“You know what finally did it, Bean?” she asked.
“No.”
“He figured out what I was interested in and started asking me to do those things with him.”
An interesting concept, I suppose.
So what to do? What activity do I invite her to? Just dinner sounds boring. As does a walk in the park. I’m going to keep an eye on Around the Sun and see if something comes up.
The Amanda Peet Project is definitely going to take some time.
