dating update

So the date went well. We went to a little Mexican restaurant, which was quite tasty. He's cute-ish. I'm not sure he's someone I would have found cute if I had just randomly met him when I was out with friends... but definitely not ugly or anything. The thing with me is that I am someone who admits that looks do play a big part in relationships. I mean, you have to physically be attracted to the person in order to want to make the effort to get to know them. I'm not saying they're everything, but they are important. But I'm trying to allow myself to not stress that too much. Like I said, he's cute-ish so worth another date or so.

He does have a good personality. He's a talker, which is important to me. He's always telling stories and manages to keep the conversation going, which is a plus. I can totally see hanging out with him, getting together for drinks, in a group of friends, etc. I'm not sure yet if I see him more as a friend or a potential bf. But again, I'm trying not to stress too much about that yet either.

He texted practically right after the date to say he had fun, so no "3-day rule" with him. This is something that thrills me! I can't tell you how annoyed I get playing games and waiting and seeing... if you like someone, just let them know. Then he called me later that day and texted me that night. Now, some people might think this is a bit much, but it was nice. It wasn't done in a crazy stalkerish kinda way. We talked briefly again Sunday.

Then yesterday he texts me while I was at work and invites me over for dinner. So I go over there. He had made tacos, which were delish, and then we hung out for a while... played some Wii, and then made out a bit. It was nice. I'm still not sure how I like him or anything though. I was discussing it with my bf S and we decided that I'm probably not sure because it's different than what I'm used to... I usually have that instinctive "I want to get you into bed, rip your clothes off, and spend hours at a time there" feel to guys that I date. With him, it's all very nice and pleasant, but I don't have that "rip your clothes off" mentality. And maybe that's a good thing. Obviously I'm still single for a reason, and if this is starting off differently than the way most of my relationships start off, then maybe I just need to chill and see what happens with it.

Weekend date

Since all my friends have gone and gotten themselves paired up with someone (see this post) I once again decided to try the online dating thing. Now I've done this before, which is I how I met the ex that caused all of this blogging to begin with, so while some good has come of it before, so has some heartache. And I'll admit that I wasn't sure I was ready for all that again. But I figured it might be a good way to get some free food and drinks, which I am always up for.

So this weekend I have a lunch date with this guy who seems utterly charming and funny. We actually had emailed/talked a bit back in December (the last time I did online dating) and we got along well then. But then we kinda lost touch. I think he was talking to a couple other girls at the same time and decided to see how things would work out with one of them, since he was supposed to call me and then I just never heard from him again. Can't really fault him for that since that kinda comes with the territory of online dating... you're dating around, seeing what happens, etc.

Anyway, so he emails me Monday, we talk on the phone Tuesday night, he sends me a text Wednesday, calls me Thursday night, and has texted me today. We made plans on Tuesday to grab lunch this weekend, so that's happening tomorrow. I'm apprehensively looking forward to it. I'm not convinced I want to go, but mostly because I'm tired of dating around and just want to be with a good guy. But I understand this is the first step to figure out if he is a good guy.

I'll keep you all posted.

WPD

Let me tell you a story of a most wonderfully perfect day... (I told you I'd be happy during this post!)

It was a few years ago... let's say maybe sometime in 2004. I was still living in Miami, finishing up my master's degree. I wake up one Wednesday morning to find that my car, a convertible, had been broken into via knife through the roof. I know, I know... you're thinking "How in the world is this going to be a wonderfully perfect day?" Well, you're right. That wasn't the wonderfully perfect day (let's abbreviate this to WPD from now on). But this event caused me to have the WPD, so in hindsight I'm not too upset about it. Plus it got me out of work for that day... yes I could still drive, but I had to deal with the insurance company and figure out what to do, etc. Maybe it was just a good excuse. I digress...

So two days later, Friday, I was scheduled to take my car in to get a new roof put on first thing in the morning. Luckily I had nothing going on this day... no classes, no work, nothing. I drop my car off at the roof place which was very conveniently located across the street from The Falls, which was a lovely outdoor type of mall. The people at the roof place have no idea how long it will take, but my car should be done sometime early to mid afternoon. I give them my cell phone number and head off to the mall where I completely indulged myself all day.

I started off having some coffee and breakfast at the Starbucks and then wandered around for a while window-shopping, as most stores were not yet open. I come across a salon-type of place, so I treat myself to a pedicure. Ahh... how relaxing. By the time this is over, stores are open and I'm free to shop to my heart's content. What fortunate timing, as I had just gotten my tax refund and had money burning a hole in my pocket. So I buy myself some new clothes as well as a new Coach purse and matching wallet. I have lunch at Johnny Rocket's and then decided to go see a movie. By the time the movie was over, the roof place had called, my car was done and I was free to go on my way back home.

This may sound like just another day to anyone else, but to me... it was a WPD. I felt like I didn't have a care in the world (despite the fact that my car had been broken into just days earlier) and spending so much time with just me was great. At lunch I allowed myself to just people watch and not be concerned that they might have found it strange that I was eating by myself. And going to a movie by myself was also great. For once I didn't feel self-conscious about what others thought. Who cared? I'd never see these people again.

It's a day I would love to repeat, except for the whole needing to get a new roof on my car. But the whole relaxed, do whatever, treat myself kind of day. And I don't know why I don't do this more often. I would love to just go to lunch by myself and then go see a movie. I guess part of me feels guilty about taking time for just myself. I was forced to with the whole roof thing... there was no way for me to get home and nothing else for me to do for at least 5 hours. Here, I feel like indulging like this would make me think about all the things I should be doing with my time and money, instead of treating myself to a WPD. Anyone else ever feel this way? Why do we think we have to always do for others when our main focus should be making sure we take care of ourselves? I think I'm going to plan another WPD soon... although sadly I don't think another new Coach purse would be in the plans, still need to save a bit more money for that!

Typical weekend?

I feel like this past weekend is going to be very typical of weekends to come now that all my friends have bfs. (I'm still a little jealous, see my last post, although I think I'm getting slightly better... maybe... we'll see how bitter I become by the end of this post).

Anyway, Friday night I went out with S and her bf, Fly Boy (he's a pilot). Just the three of us. Now let me explain... he's a great guy. He's very good about going out with me and S... he dances with both of us, buys us both drinks, doesn't mind getting left alone if S and I want to dance by ourselves. It's just that towards the end of the night, they start kissing more, touching more, being a little more stuck together. This of course coincides with me being at least slightly buzzed (after all it's the end of the night and we've been drinking) and therefore more likely to get sad and lonely. So I feel like everytime the three of us go out, I end the night in or close to tears. Fly Boy is pretty soon going to think I'm loony!

Saturday, Fly Boy had to leave for work... being a pilot he's here a few days, gone a few days. I spend my day doing not a whole lot having slept until 1 in the afternoon. My mom came over around dinner time and we played the Wii and ordered a pizza. S texts me and wants to know if I'm up for doing anything that night. And while I wouldn't mind staying in (I'm getting old!) I say sure. We make plans to go out around 10:30. Well I get a call from her around 10:15 saying her son, who had spent the afternoon with his until-recently-absent-father, still wasn't home and so it would be a little later. I say that's fine and tell her that I'll wait to hear from her again before getting ready. Big shock... I never hear from her (sarcasm intended)... she sometimes ditches me like that. She apparently got into a huge fight with her parents, who she lives with with her son, about the fact that she was letting babby daddy back in the picture. While this weekend I really didn't care, since I was only marginal about going out in the first place, if she starts never wanting to go out unless Fly Boy is there, I'm going to be one annoyed best friend.

Sunday I did laundry, thought about going to the grocery store, realized I'd have to go to the store today so that I could pick up my birth control perscription so decided to just wait to go grocery shopping today as well, thought about how it was pointless these days for me to even be on birth control, straightened up my family room and kitchen a bit, watched some DVR'd shows, and played the Wii. It was a good day although left me wishing I had someone to share it with.

I swear my next post will not be a "poor me" post like the last two...

Jealousy issues

I admit that I have always had a slight problem with being more jealous than I should be, typically in relationships. I normally wouldn't have a problem if the guy I was seeing/dating/whatever was talking to some other girl if we were out together, but if he talked to the same "other girl" several times, I'd start questioning his intentions with her, and jealousy would rear it's ugly head. I've actually gotten much better about this as I've gotten older though, so props for me!

Today, however, I have experienced jealousy in a different light. Here's the scenario: my core group of friends includes me and three other women about the same age as me. We all started hanging out together on a regular basis during the past year or so. All of us were single, so we had the "I hate men!" philosophy in common and generally had a great time going out together, drinking, making out with random strangers, and all leaving together so as to not get ourselves into any compromising situations with the random strangers we had spent the night making out with.

Fast forward to December. One of the girls decides she's going to give her ex, who's about to leave for the Navy, another chance. So we stop hearing from her pretty much completely. If/when she did call us, she would expect us to rearrange our plans so that they accomodated her. We weren't really into doing that, so she stopped hanging out with us. She's now content to be in a long-distance relationship and when we do invite her out, she never can join for whatever reason.

Fast forward another couple of months. Another one of the group goes to Virginia Beach with her roommate (also a friend of ours, but she doesn't come out as regularly as the core group did) who's boyfriend is in the Navy there. So, the women from the core comes back gushing about this guy she met and how wonderful he is. He comes up the following weekend to visit her, she goes back the next weekend to visit him, and now, she's happily in a long-distance relationship where she travels to VB a couple times a month.

About the same time as VB boy was becoming bf of J from the core (yes the same J who's been written about before), S (yes the same S as before) gets a visit from a male friend of hers from high school. We all hang out several times together, and they make out all the time. Now, they aren't technically together, but it's heading that way since she ditched plans that the three of us had last night so that they could sleep together for the first time.

So that leaves me. The only one left in the group without a man. And I'm jealous, I admit it. It's not that I'm not happy for my friends... I really am. They are all wonderful women who deserve to be happy and in good relationships with men who will treat them right. I just think i deserve the same thing and feel left out since I'm the sole single gal left. I feel like J and S are going to continously ditch me for their men and I'm going to be spending my weekends at home, by myself, playing the Wii. Or, if S does continue to go out with me and her man, I end up feeling like the third wheel, drinking by myself while they make out.

Maybe it's just cuz S ditched me last night that I'm feeling like this today. But really... I don't know. Especially cuz now all my friends continuously tell me or talk between themselves about how they need to "find Jenn a nice guy." I feel like their charity case. And I'm jealous. Any advice?

Another weekend

Another weekend has come and gone, leaving me with more confusion regarding M. I will start off by saying that I probably shouldn't have even been out this past Saturday. Last Tuesday I started getting sick. Wednesday I felt worse and by Thursday I had a temperature of 103 and a positive flu test. I stayed home from work Thursday and Friday, wallowing in my misery. Saturday I was feeling better, but really knew I should probably have stayed in and rested up. Unfortunately, Saturday was also my friend J's birthday... and I am not one to miss out on celebrating a friend's bday. So I loaded myself up with motrin and sudafed and headed out, thinking (wrongly) that I would only have one shot and I'd come home early. Three or four shots later, as the bars are closing, I'm being dragged off to have food with J and the gang, meaning I don't get home until about 4:30. Amazingly, I didn't feel any worse yesterday after the drunken night.

So we start off at a different bar, but still one we go to often. M walks in with some of his friends later when I'm getting ready to have the first of the aforementioned shots. He does the head nod greeting to me across the bar. After the shot, I go over (cuz I am not going to have a repeat of the weekend before) and give him a hug and chitchat with him for a few minutes as he's playing pool. I leave him wanting more (at least in my mind) by cutting the convo a little short and say I'm going back to the other side to hang out with my friends. He says okay and that he'd probably be over there in a bit. He never really does end up over on the other side of the bar, but that's okay. We at least acknowledge each other whenever we walk past one another or when we make eye contact. Later on in the night, he comes over to me and says that they're all going to the other bar that we usually go to, and asks if we're gonna come. I say that we are getting our tabs then and then we'll be on our way.

We get to the other bar and he's of course in the middle of all the action, dancing with some of his girl friends (he has a lot of those). I don't worry about these girls because I think they all have boyfriends, and I've known about them for a while anyway, so whatever. But it makes it awkward when I don't really know them, and M is with them, for me to go over to M and start dancing with him. So we kinda don't say much to each other at this point. Okay, the bar is getting ready to close and M is leaving. He tells me before he leaves where they're all going, so of course J and I go there after we pay the tab. There's about 12 of us at this place, with tables shoved together to make one big table to sit at. M is on the other side of the table and, according to J (who is drunk by this point, so who knows if she was right), he keeps looking over at me. Well at the end of the night, when we're waiting for our checks, I get up to go to the bathroom and I see M look over at me, and I watch him out of the corner of my eye as he watches me walk across the restaurant. Finally, I look over at him, make eye contact, and wink at him. He smiles and winks back. But other than that... nothing. So we pay and get ready to leave and I go say goodbye to him and he says he'll talk to me soon and gives me a hug.

It's just confusing. Does he like me or not? At this point I almost don't care one way or the other, I'd just like to know. Obviously I'd rather him like me, but if he doesn't, that's cool, I just want to know instead of feeling like there's mixed messages. And maybe there really isn't mixed messages. Maybe I'm reading too much into the "friendly" things he does and he really does only like me as a friend. Although J told me earlier that night that B had told her that M never takes girls home, so he must really like me since he took me home that night. Okay, if that's the case then what happened? Cuz he's not acting interested anymore since then. Maybe I just create drama to try and make my life seem more interesting than it really is.

Smitten

Well here I am with updates. Turns out, this last guy who I had developed what I thought was a harmless crush on... well apparently I'm "smitten" with him. Who knew?! I'll tell you who knew... apparently all my friends. I discovered this after last Saturday. we hadn't seen each other since we slept together, and like I said in my last post, I had texted him once during the week and never heard from him. Well the bar was unusually pack when we got there Saturday night, and my friend and I were quite anxious about seeing the boys (her story is probably more complicated than my own, and I think I will blog about it sometime cuz I need some help in trying to deal with it... confusing, no?). So we get there, I make eye contact with my guy, but he was all the way through the crowd near the pool tables at the back of the bar. So we decide to go to the bar first to get drinks. We get there, wait a ridiculous 15 minutes or so before actually getting served, and in the meantime convince a couple guys to give up their seats for us. Well once we had seats at the bars, we didn't want to move, so we waited there figuring the guys would come talk to us.

(I think I will start inserting initials for the people in this story from now on to make it a little less confusing. No garauntee that's going to work though, especially since many people have names that start witht he same letter, so I'm going to make up some of these initials and hope I keep them straight for the entire length of the post).

Okay so me and my friend J are sitting there at the bar. M (the guy I was crushing on) goes to the other side of the bar and gets drinks. Next thing we know, M and B (the guy my friend J likes) and all their friends are a couple feet behind us, watching the UFC fights on the big screen. We were also coincidentally watching these same fights because... well mostly cuz that's what was on, but also because the guys who gave up their seats at the bar told us they would buy us shots if the guys we picked to win the fights actually won. Free shots, always a plus. Anyway, M's brother D was actually the first of the group to come say hello to us. Moments later, M was buying more drinks at the bar and made eye contact with me. He smiled and waved. I smiled and waved. We each went back to our business. At some point, he does come over and say hi to me and J and so does B. Basically though, M was acted more distant than he had been the past couple weeks, which was weird. And so I proceeded to get wasted.

I don't like to be ignored, especially by a guy I have a crush on who I slept with the last time I saw him. And yeah he wasn't really ignoring me, but he wasn't being himself with me either. Now maybe he was upset that I didn't say hi to him right away when I got there since he saw me come in. Maybe he didn't like seeing other guys paying attention to me and buying me drinks (I learned later that he is definitely the jealous type and has trust issues). Maybe he was just wasted as hell also. But whatever the reason, I don't like being ignored. Which to me apparently means I need to do multiple jagerbombs (I don't even know how many, I lost count) along with several beers, and at least 2 other different types of shots. Being this wasted and being ignored meant that I thought it was a good idea to not only drive to the place we were all going for food, but also to have M's brother D ride with me (his idea, btw) and make out with him. Maybe it's just something about that family?

Regardless, I'm not concerned that M is going to find out about this because they are not the type of family who talks to each other about their sex lives (thankfully) and because D is currently trying to work things out with his ex-wife. So he's not gonna be broadcasting that he made out with me. It was not a smart move, but this is what multiple jagerbombs do to my judgement.

Anyway, fast-forward to my drive home, where I was so upset about M that I called my ex-boyfriend in Miami, G, and cried to him for an hour. I was still upset the next day, so I talked to J about it, stating that I must like M more than I realized since I was so sad about him ignoring me. This is when she told me "Yeah you're completely smitten with him. I've known that for a couple weeks. I just thought you knew." Nope. I had no idea. If I thought I actually liked him I don't think I would have slept with him when I did. Later on, when I'm relaying this story (and the story of the night's events) to my friend S, she also said that she knew I liked M. Isn't it a friend's job to tell me that I actually like a guy?! I was totally blindsided by this information. And now I'm more stressed about it.

Well I wrote M an email the following day, lighthearted and breezy, saying that the night before had been crazy (especially for him since he was so drunk that he almost got kicked out of the bar and actually did get kicked out of 3 food places) and if he still wanted to see a movie soemtime I was up for it, and otherwise it was J's bday next weekend, so hopefully they'd come out in celebration. Never got a response from that. Then last night, my friend S and I go out to a bar for country night (the same place I met the young ex, T, in October and coincidentally the place I met M back in November). Well M was there again. I got a drink and immediately headed over to say hi to him, just in case that's why he was ignoring me on Saturday. He acts friendly, but doesn't really talk too much to me. S and I wander off for a while. Later on, M runs into us, throws his arm around my shoulder, I put mine around his waist, and we stand there talking a couple minutes. He then says he has to make a couple calls and then he's coming back with shots for us, which he does. So then we hang out with him and his friend C for a while at the bar but I'm kinda all over the place, not wanting to seem too into him since he doesn't seem too into me. Anyway, long story short, I go off dancing with this girl N, who I know from the bar, for a few minutes only to have S tell me that M and C left. Well great. At least I've seen him so Saturday at the bar for J's bday shouldn't be awkward.

Also, somewhat good news, maybe... this other guy at the bar last night, P, was all about me. He kept making eye contact with me, touching my back when he walked by. I mean to the point where my friend S even asked if I knew him. So after M left, I started talking to P and we exchanged numbers. He says he's going to call me on Thursday. He actually did call me after we left the bar to see if I wanted to continue drinking with him and his friend, but I declined. After all I did have to work today. So we'll see if he actually calls on Thursday.