2008-04-01
Keep Your Clothes On
Luckily, I have a crush with whom I have been spending some time.
I say luckily because me having a crush and spending time with him is usually comic gold.
If it's not pure comedy, it's something that ends tragically a couple of weeks later with me wondering what kind of idiot I had been involved with, like the last guy I was sort of involved with.
He would do things like sigh that he wanted to go bowling on a sunny, 68 degree day in JANUARY.
Actually, he would text it because he thought that talking on the phone was weird.
Shut up. I had my reasons.
And on the subject of bowling, I have gotten some flak for saying that it wasn't the fact that he always inappropriately suggested bowling; then for adding to that the fact that I don't care for bowling at all.
"It's not about the bowling."
"Yes it is," a friend said. You just said you hate bowling and even when he suggested it later, you still said you didn't want to go bowling. It's about bowling. You hate bowling."
It wasn't about the act of bowling.
It was about the fact that this guy would suggest bowling when, for example, I expressed a need for end-of-the-week respite. On a Friday after I had gotten beat up at work all week: "We could go bowling. After dinner."
He had to have dinner with his parents.
Because he lived at home.
Happily unemployed.
I guess he had to have dinner with them in order to get the car.
Seriously, shut up.
I had been at work all week and also had to put my name on something because out of 3,000 women in my sport, I was the only one in position to effectuate a major change. A noisy, smelly bowling ally sounded like the opposite of what I wanted.
Then the next day - a gorgeous day.
Bowling?.
No. Again.
And he felt that I was shooting him down just "because", to emasculate him or make him feel bad about his life.
Hardly.
Shooting down happens because I don't like your idea, not because I need to make you feel shitty about it.
And just like not only are you continuing to suggest bowling when you can be pretty confident I don't want to go bowling (then telling me I am not pleasant or nice), I can feel like you aren't paying attention to what I am telling him I want or need.
So no, it's not about bowling per se.
It's about someone not jiving at all with the way I feel about a beautiful winter day in Tucson, Arizona.
But that's all barely relevant.
I'm in a whole new Situation here, this is a good situation.
No, a great situation.
This is by far the coolest guy I have ever met in Arizona and dare I say it: He's as cool as Jesus.
He's got that THING, that combination of age and simplicity and immaturity and boy-energy and shyness and brains and looking solid but not hot. He has a lot of the same vibe Jesus had, if you take away alcoholism and misogyny. He's a big, vibrant personality and creative and weird.
And so I REALLY like him.
I want him to REALLY like me.
Because I like him, I am uncharacteristically awkward around him. Either he suffers from the same affliction - being generally outgoing and intimidatingly smart yet becoming paralyzed in the presence of a great member of the opposite sex or he's just not that into me.
I can charm and date men who are not particularly what I am looking for all the live-long day.
Give me a 27 year old grad student and I am his constant day-dream with texts and voicemail rife of innuendo during my workday.
Give me a 45 year old tech service guy and I get free cable.
Give me a 39 year old creative, coolly-employed college grad who lived in Springfield for some time in the late 1990s and I can only barely stutter out stupid things and giggle at the end of every nonsensical thing I say in my lame attempts to be funny or cute.
I don't think I make him laugh and I don't seem to inspire any lack of impulse control that would cause him to tell me I am pretty all the time.
But since we are still making plans together so..... you decide.
If you have any insight or experience with something like this, drop me a line.
Is this normal? Do people get really tied up around each other and like each other or do they get tied up because they know what time it is and that they don't like each other all that much or don't turn each other on.
I know what I am doing with the 35 year old virgins and the slackers who borrow their mother's cars to go out once a week.
A family joke, and you have to say this with a DEEP southern accent: "I'm not a idiot."
But put me in a room on date number three with a guy for whom I need no justification to explain liking him to my friends, a guy whom I genuinely like on many levels and I am as far from being charming, witty and adorable as I was when I was a dirty, pretentious hippy in college.
A lot of the talking has fallen on him and for that, I have no excuse.
I normally have a problem shutting up; however, unable to run my mouth in his esteemed presence, I naturally have thought about removing article of clothing instead.
Like, he could say something interesting and funny and I could take off my shoes.
He could tell me a story from his job in Springfield and I could take off my shirt.
And so on.
Saturday night, I was sitting on his couch, both of us sort of clinging to opposite arm rests and being generally like oddly well-behaved, adultish teenagers trusted to be alone together because all parents know we are far too awkward to do any damage.
So awkward, it's cute, or would be if it was a couple of fifteen year olds sitter there instead of people well into their thirties.
It is not cute considering that I am a totally confident, accomplished, and attractive adult with some depth who has never been accused of being unfunny.
I worry that I am going to over-whelm him but I think that worry is starting to fade a little.
I mean, duh, either it's meant to be or not and if you're not yourself at the outset then you set yourself up for major disappointment.
I'm glad I haven't dived straight in, that I've allowed things to flow so that the pool with be full when and if I do dive in.
I gotta loosen up though. I've been coy, or seemingly I am trying to be coy and that's not what I do.
It's go time, I can feel it.
Coy doesn't play well on me.
It causes me to I lose my words; then I am lost, unable to feel relaxed and reduced to being a slightly annoying lump of muscle and flesh hanging out on your couch and hoping you'll say something I can easily seize on to break through my painful shyness, made ever-the-more painful because I'm NOT naturally shy.
Actually trying to be coy makes me seem mildly retarded, which will be exacerbated when at some point in the near future. Should I not relax and continue to be verklempt and weird (which is bad enough), I will surely begin to randomly remove articles of clothing in lieu of trying to have a normal conversation with an awesome dude who I really sort of like a lot and who plays Alice Cooper at 9:53 in the morning.
arizonasarah at 9:04 a.m.