Sunday, September 19, 2010

Being a dick does not get you dates. Until it does.

So I met this guy who just moved to the neighborhood, and fuckin' A. I can't stop grinning something fierce.

Here's the thing I hate about dating: it makes me feel boring. I'm not a boring person. I do exciting shit all the time; unfortunately, half this exciting shit is not first-date-appropriate (politics for starters, my crazy/freaking-me-out-a-little family for middlers, and the BDSM/kink/fetish/sick fuck nonsense for THE END OF THE FUCKING DATE IMMEDIATELY). I make really immature jokes and then laugh at them. My friends and I are obscene. I love my job but my job is not my life and I don't want to sit there and talk about work work work work with some be-suited Manhattan asshole (actually if he's wearing the suit that's totally awesome; I have a sick kink for business suits).

I like talking about writing but the unfortunate thing about being a professional writer is that everybody thinks they can write and I have zero tolerance for listening to someone rabbit on about their bullshit idea for a screenplay unless they are also a professional writer/studied it in college/sold a script for a million dollars/whatever. It feels disrespectful to the sheer amount of time and effort and money and tears and studying and writing writing writing I've done in my life to compare my career as a screenwriter to your aspirations. This is not something I'm going to change my mind about. This makes me an obnoxious dick.

I've been told that I'm intimidating. Sorry? I don't know what to do about that. If you're intimidated by me, I really don't know why. I'm not mean and I won't fuck your shit up just for the hell of it. I won't even fuck your shit up for a reason -- see previous post where I attempted to be nice to a fucking intolerant asshole because I hate being rude. I guess there are elements of my personality that are kind of obnoxious -- my roommate points to my tendency to go from reckless enthusiasm to near-fatalistic cynicism in 4.7 seconds; he says it gives him conversational whiplash. I think it's funny but my sense of humor is weird. Maybe my sense of humor makes me obnoxious; I could just be a dickhead dude-bro in a lady-suit. Straight men -- adult men -- probably don't want to date a dude-bro in a lady-suit.

So I turn it off on a date. I turn off the things that I feel make me interesting or give me any kind of personality whatsoever. (Great. My personality is undateable.) I'm faultlessly polite and I never make a dick joke and I don't even talk about what books I'm reading because one of them is The Ethical Slut and that is one title that when dropped into a conversation will cause the universe to spontaneously make that needle-scratching-on-a-record noise that no one under the age of 40 save vinyl-listening hipsters has ever actually heard in person. So dating makes me feel stifled, and boring, and a little dishonest because what is this be-suited Manhattan asshole going to do when he discovers the dude-bro inside the lady-suit?

But yeah, so I've been cranky about that lately (two stupid-awful dates in a row will do that, I guess). And then last night, a new neighbor who I met a few weeks ago at a Writers Guild lecture texted me to see if we could hang out kinda late. I was more than happy to meet up and I'd poured myself a whiskey-on-the-rocks upon getting home from the aforementioned stupid-awful date (yes, I'm an angry drinker) so I was feeling a little bit of that recklessness.

I wasn't thinking of it as a date. I was thinking, "sweet, new friend!" So I didn't really, you know, dial it down.

And I had a blast. He had a blast. We met up at 11pm and closed out Beauty Bar because we talked for five hours. He walked me home and yeah, there were make-outs and damn he's a good kisser. He texted me at 11 this morning to complain about the slow-ass hipsters making his sandwich at Little Skips -- something we'd joked about the night before. And he told me he couldn't wait to see me again -- that he was tempted to ask me out to dinner today even though he knew he was supposed to feign disinterest. I'm a little freaked out by how much I enjoyed myself, and how much he seems to enjoy me. And it all seems totally honest.

Apparently my personality isn't as poisonous as I'd thought. Sweet. There's a lesson to be learned here.

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