I Have Blind Date For You

Sunday night I was prepping for beddy-bye when I got a text message from a gal pal that started with “I have blind date for you”. Although the rest of the text read like a message from a friend, something about that first line made me think I was being spammed. “Are you serious?” I replied, trying to draw out whether some random non-native English speaker had gotten a hold of my friend’s cell. She replied in the affirmative, along with some useful adjectives describing her find.

I never get to go on blind dates! Obviously the allure of something I haven’t experienced makes them more appealing then they’ll likely turn out to be, but still. So I thanked her for thinking of me and told her she could introduce us.

After a few back and forth texts she came back with “I have not one, but two dates for you!” and proceeds to give me the scoop on the good friend of hers that she has been suggesting I date for approximately 6 years. It appears we are both single. Can she introduce us, too?

I wasn’t against the idea, but I was a little concerned about two blind date prospects at once. It’s time consuming enough getting to know one person, let along multiple. Plus overlapping time frames results in comparison shopping. Well comparison dating, I mean. It’s unavoidable.

I asked her whether she wanted to do that, pit her longtime fave against some old co-worker, but it was too late. She’d already sent Facebook messages to each of us.

They basically went like: Dater at Large, Blind Date. Blind date, Dater at Large. Discuss.

I wasn’t sure what I thought her internet introduction would be, but I guess I thought it would have more… content. Something to go off of, other than our Facebook profile pictures. Now for the one guy that I’d already met, I knew I’d be able to write something, but for the other guy, the one I didn’t know at all, I have to say I was a little stumped.

Best to let the boys reach out first. They are competing for me, after all.

I've Been Pirated!

That’s right folks, in what I can only assume is a terrible movie adaptation of what I thought was a very decent book, “sexy time” has made its screen debut. The movie is Eat, Pray, Love, and the scene is in the Love portion of the book, when the heroine is visiting the medicine lady to treat her bladder infection.

Paraphrased the lady says, “This is common when you have no sex and then lots of sexy time.” Paraphrased, of course, because I'm not going to rent the movie just to correctly quote my STOLEN phrase! And I don’t have to hear it myself, when I have friends who will bring it to my attention because they know that phrase is mine!

Thieves! I feel like I finally understand Paris Hilton’s frustration. On the one hand it is ridiculous to copyright sayings. On the other, I think I deserve some credit for spreading the use of my phrase such that it made it into a movie script!

At least it was used correctly.

Come About?

Now that you all know the term “non-date”, let’s see if we can use it in a sentence. Last weekend I went on the worst non-date of all time. I was bowling. In the suburbs. In a shopping mall.

You might be asking yourself how this could have happened, how a self-proclaimed-city-snob-who-only-feels-slightly-guilty-about-said-snobbishness ended up in the basement of a mall on a Saturday night, on a non-date no less.

The condensed version is that I was hoping to catch up in person with an old friend of mine. A friend that I never dated, but did hold hands with for a brief period of time in high school. We were friends for years after that, and drifted apart as friends often do. I had been missing this friend’s friendship, which is why I got back in touch, and I had really been enjoying getting to know him again while reminiscing about old times.

During this primarily text messaging catch-up, I did think it was possible I still held something of a torch for this man. I couldn’t be sure whether it was my nostalgia for days past or whether my guard was way down because he’s seen me in all manner of teenage stupidity, but I thought maybe there was something there. But most importantly I was glad to have my friend back, and I hoped that whether we discovered a romantic connection or not that I would get to keep him.

When this friend told me that he was going to be in town and wanted to get together I was excited about seeing him in person. I was nervous, too, texting is certainly not the same as face to face interaction, but I figured it would probably be like old times.

His original suggestion was that just he and I get together, a non-date if you will. Then he expanded to a double non-date, in which he suggested we hang out with married friends of mine (he knows the husband). I thought this was a good option; it might make it more social, less “date”, and would probably be really fun. This is how we got to bowling in the suburbs, despite a tremendous lack of communication and/or interest in planning on his part. Day of he added a friend of his, and by this time his extreme delay in responding to anything and continued expansion of the guest list led me to believe he just wasn’t interested in spending time with me.

Nevertheless I geared up and found that the ridiculousness of the event made me much more positive about the whole thing. I mean, my friend was wearing sequins. It was all for naught, though, because the moment I arrived the casual chatting the group was doing stopped cold and we never really got it back.

It was… a disaster. I can count on two hands the number of words my friend and I spoke to each other. I don’t think he made eye contact with me the entire night. I made some efforts early on but it was so unexpected I had a hard time recovering from the embarrassment of the whole thing.

Or the anger that directly followed the embarrassment. In all the iterations I had run through of how the get together might go, never had I expected to be ignored. While surrounded by friends. After I had driven out to the goddamn suburbs to see him. Turns out you can be just as confused by a non-date as a date-date.

The Non-Date

I am known for my phrases - I'm a repeat phrase user at best, abuser at worst – and I always get a kick out of other people embracing mine as their own. I usually pull these phrases from movies or TV sometimes but sometimes I create them on my own.

It’s been rumored that I’m responsible for the resurgence of the term "ginormous", and it's subsequent inclusion in Webster’s Dictionary, although I can’t take credit for its inception or my usage of it (stolen from the excellent holiday film, Elf). And while I’m the undisputed originator of “sexy time”, my term for all things involving naked or scantily clad activities, I coined another phrase years and years ago that I suddenly find myself using again.

Non-date (nŏn-dāt)
n. 1. a. An engagement to go out socially with another person, often out of potential, noted by others around you, but not-willing-to-act-on-it romantic interest. b. One's companion on such an outing.
v. non-dat•ed, non-dat•ing, non-dates
v.tr. 1. To go on a non-date or non-dates with.
v.intr. 2. To go on non-dates.

When I was in my early twenties I had a knock-down-drag-out crush on a co-worker. We worked in small quarters on a close knit team of over worked and over intoxicated consultants, and during the course of a year or so it became clear to everyone that whatever was happening between us definitely crossed the professional and platonic lines.

We walked the line, that's for sure, discussing intimate details about each other’s romantic relationships with other people, but then getting into these emotional, drunken conversations after nights out that I couldn’t possibly remember the premise of. I do remember walking home about a mile one night during a snowstorm, in flats, after dramatically exiting a taxi cab he and I were sharing. We let our social circles overlap, and our professional ones, too, deciding to attend our holiday Christmas party together one year.

Everyone already thought we were dating on the not-so-secret-sly (This was obviously their oversight; I am nothing if not an incredible secret keeper. If I had been dating someone on the DL, it would actually have been secret.) so I’m not exactly sure why we fed into it, but it’s when I introduced the term “non-date”.

I used it to explain how we were going to an event together as dates, but not romantic dates. It had all the trappings of a date, you see, we went to the event with another real couple, and he actually picked me up in the cab on the way to the event. And we went to after party events together, and the after-after bar, too, but we weren’t a couple. Despite making the arrangements to attend the event together we also made repeated, loud proclamations that we were not involved like that.

For years I believed if you didn’t use the term, didn’t call something what you didn’t want it to be, that it wasn’t that. Truth be told I still that feel way a bit, I hate qualifying (or promoting) relationships and men to a level I don’t consider them. Words like dating, boyfriend, relationship. I can’t tell you how many times I say “it’s not a date” and “he’s not my boyfriend”.

Words have meaning, but persistent avoidance of them has just as much meaning sometimes. Things are what they are. It doesn’t matter what you call them.

Except of course with my old co-worker. We really were non-dating; we were good friends with ill-timed crushes on each other and too much access to alcohol. Sometimes I miss those days.