Back to the not so dreamy date.
Click here for a recap.
It was obvious from the get-go that my suitor was a man with a mission. How do I know this? Because he pulled out a typed up mission statement from his wallet. I kid you not. He was a bit like a modern day Rain Man. I almost expected him to start rambling on about K-Mart and underwear. But oh no, he had far more important things to discuss… like his mission statement.
“Here, I brought you something to read,” he said excitedly. As he rifled through his wallet, which I’m sure was chock full of all kinds of interesting things, he whipped out a typed sheet of paper.
At the top of the page the headline blared “My Ticket To Television Stardom.” The next page was filled with his printed out response to a blog on the conflict in the Middle East. He then proceeded to explain that his post was an attempt to incite a humorous response from other bloggers regarding the crisis in Israel.
Now, I’m not exactly a history buff, but I know enough to realize there’s nothing funny about the crisis in the Mid-East and comparing the players to
Star Wars characters was almost other worldly. I’d known the guy not even 10 minutes and he was already trying Jedi mind tricks on me.
It’s as I tried to feign interest in his blog response that I started to get that icky feeling in my stomach. He went on and on and on… As he talked to about Babylon and did a psychoanalysis on all of the other blog participants, I wondered what I’d gotten myself into. Perhaps I could cut my losses by telling him what I did to stupid little men on blogs.
Suddenly, I felt an aching for J-Fed. My handsome, witty, funny estranged husband didn’t seem so bad after all. Meanwhile, my coffee date was coming across worse than any history teacher I’d ever had. I started to tune him out and secretly wished we were at least sitting in a classroom where I could count the ceiling tiles to pass time.
“So what do you think? Is it well written? What would you add? How would you have responded?” he snapped me back to reality. I tried to say something but I realized I had thrown up in my mouth as I continued to study his hands in search of that lost booger.
“Um, it’s great,” I said forcing a smile. My parents had raised me to be polite and to respect all creatures great and small, but this was just too much. This guy didn’t want a date; he wanted an audience. And while I might have been a writer and an editor for a living, I preferred not to extend my office hours to creepy strangers at coffee shops.
“Now, what’s your take? Do you think Meccaleccahi (or whatever the PM of Israel’s name was) is Darth Vader or Luke Skywalker?” he pushed. I hadn’t felt this frustrated since I sat down to take the LSAT all of those years ago.
Run, run for your life Kiki. Get away now. I realized in some cultures it would be extremely rude to simply bolt without saying goodbye. But there’s a time and a place for everything. Saying farewell wouldn’t be appropriate because then I’d have to actually admit that I’d said hello to this hand job – no pun intended.
With no other choice, I did what Kiki does best. I flipped the bitch switch.
“To be quite honest, I really have never given it much thought. Do you know why? Because I’m shallow, shallower than a kiddie pool. In my spare time, I shop and work on my tan. And the rest of the time I take care of two kids, two dogs and a cat. Got that? Two kids, two dogs and a cat,” I spouted.
He looked at me as if I were a bacteria in a Petri dish. This was amusing in itself considering the glare was coming from this strange little man who’d secretly tried to pass off a booger to me upon our first meeting. Even J-Fed had never sunk that low. He knew a tissue when he saw one.
The Jedi Master graciously explained he was going to get going, and before he could even finish his sentence I uttered a “nicetomeetyou” before sprinting to my car, ensuring that he didn’t get a chance to see my license plate number.
My first attempt to prove J-Fed wrong lasted a whole 38 minutes. God help me, it was the longest 38 minutes of my life. If the single life looked anything like this, J-Fed was right. I was going to die alone. But would that really be so bad?
Unhappily Ever After,
Kiki