Best date/Worst date

In My Humble Opinion
21

My best date was with a guy who already had a girlfriend. We were both huge fans of Ween, and when I heard they were coming to Santa Cruz I asked him if he wanted to go with me. The night of the concert he drove us to Santa Cruz. We talked literally non-stop the entire way there. As we were winding up through the hills, there were no lights and he opened the sun roof so I could see the stars. Then we went and got dinner before the show, and we talked and the food was really good. Then we went to the show, which was of course awesome. We stayed until they practically kicked us out, and finally drove back to Oakland, happy and tired but still keeping up the easy conversation. I would have dated him in a second if he wasn’t already taken.

My worst date? There are a few candidates, but I’ll go with my first, which was when I was in high school. It wasn’t so much the date itself as what it revealed about the person in question.
I had been dating a navy guy several years older than me. One night he calls me up and tells me he’d like to take me somewhere nice and show me a good time. I got a little dressed up for the occasion. He picked me up in his brand-new car and took me to dinner…at Denny’s. Then he took me to his house. THAT was his idea of taking me out and showing me a good time. I gave him the boot shortly thereafter.

22

Sigh I’m not going to be able to stop ruminating about this if I don’t write it down. It’s still recent enough to be a little painful, although I’m sure I’ll be laughing about it someday (when I’m not single and unemployed).

I met a really interesting person on match.com. She was a medical student, and while she wasn’t particularly pretty, she seemed to have a great personality. We exchanged 15 or 20 emails and I really started to like her, and eventually we set up a dinner date.

The problem is, and maybe I should have warned her about this, I have a pretty bad case of social phobia and first dates scare me more than anything on earth. I’ve been mugged at knife-point and stabbed, and that was a piece of cake compare to most first dates. Hell, if finding a girlfriend was as simple as taking a switchblade in the thigh, I’d never be single.

Anyway, we planned to meet at the restaurant, and as the time drew closer, I became more and more nervous until I was on the edge of a panic attack. I didn’t want to stand her up – I really wanted this first date to go well. The girl seemed like a winner and I didn’t want to spoil it.

Anyway, I took some Xanax and managed to calm down a bit before I left, but while I was driving to the restaurant, I realized I’d taken way too much. I got lost even though it was a relatively simple drive, so I arrived at the restaurant nearly 30 minutes late. I tried to salvage the situation by explaining that I’d gotten lost, but I don’t think she bought it, and it probably didn’t help that my eyelids were droopy and my voice was slurring.

She turned out to be much more beautiful in person than in her picture, and this really intimidated me, because suddenly I felt like she was no longer in my league. I don’t remember much of the date except that the conversation was a train wreck and I was too zonked to care much about it. Every time I tried to talk I’d lose track of what I was saying (the slurring probably didn’t help either), so she had to take over the conversation toward the end. And this was not good – it was the kind of nervous, fast talking that people do when they’re trying to fill an awkward silence.

After the meal, she couldn’t get out of the restaurant fast enough. Right before we parted ways, she gave me this long, sad, curious stare, as if to say: “I have no idea what went wrong but I’m really disappointed that you turned out to be a creep and now I’m never going to see you again.” Which turned out to be the truth. She never even emailed me again after that, even though I apologized for subjecting her to such a horrible experience.

I’ve since decided to remove myself from the dating pool, at least for the time being. And I’m never going to rely on any kind of drug to make dating “easier” again. I may be in a near-panic state on first dates, but at least I can hide it pretty well and manage to be conversational and charming. But I can’t hide being stoned on tranquilizers.

I’ll tell you about my best date once I’ve actually had a good one…

-June (hoping he’ll be mugged by an attractive single woman)

23

I think we may have been seperated at birth.

I find that Irish whiskey works well. Well, actually, it’s not that it works very well, but you don’t notice that you’re being a complete boob.

Half the battle is being ignorant of your own failings. The other half seems to have something to do with filling up the empty space with meaningless dialog. I haven’t really figured out that bit yet, but with any luck, in fifty or sixty years I might have a handle on it.

My own worst date: I wrote a paper on Othello for a girl in high school in exchange for a date. sigh Yeah, that’s me…the only way I could get a date is to buy it with my (sometimes questionable) intellectual prowess and literary knowledge. Most of the girls I did this, er, with or to or however you wish to put it, at least maintained the pretense that it was an actual date, albeit one that lacked any of the intimate activities normally associated with dating. It was, I suppose, like taking your sister out for a “date”, and not in the Kentucky hillbilly sense. Anyway, this young lady in question–who will remain nameless, not because she is innocent, but because I have worked to excoriate her name from my brain–made not even the slightest effort at conversation or basic politeness. She spoke more to the waiter (nice restaurant with cloth napkins–nobody gets to call me a cheapskate) than to me, and we collectively elected to skip the film viewing portion of the evening.

A miserable time had by all, methinks, and further compounded by some rather iniquitous comments that were both untrue and unjust. The saving grace is that although she scored an A on the paper–I suspect the teacher looked at her funny–she badly failed the test, having not read one line of the play. Nuts to her.

The worst date I gave someone else: the last sort-of date I was on, I struggled to find some common topic that we could both talk about, instead of me interrogating her about her job (history teacher), or her asking questions about my family and getting terse, reluctant answers. The topic of voting, and more specifically, electronic voting machines came up. “A ha,” says I, “this is encryption. I know this.” :rolleyes: I proceded to offer a dissertation on the qualities of public key encryption and how it could be used in conjuction with a specially modified Knoppix Live linux CD distro in order to assure voting and communication security across TCP/IP from anywhere in the world while allowing near-real-time acquisition of voting data. Those of you who aren’t inclined to think about encryption and Unix-like operating systems during a purported romantic engagement are already, I feel certain, in sympathy with the young lady in question, and the rest of you don’t have any more of a clue than I did.

My best date, I think, would involve playing hookey from work with the ex-girlfriend and making out in the middle of a model of the heart at the Betty Brin Children’s Museum. That was, naturally, a number of years ago, and she, along with my career as a heart-stealing romantic, have faded into the depths of obscurity. Alas, Babylon.

Stranger

24

Best: Not that interesting to relate: Dinner & theatre (No Exit), and stimulating “this girl is too good to be true!”* conversation.

Worst: Met at her apartment, where she enthusiastically gave me a tincture of wormwood, because she was into that sort of stuff. Then we went out to dinner. She took it daily and ascribed any number of wonderful benefits to it. I guess she’d built up a resistance to its effects (which I expected, knowing what wormwood is ordinarily used for, but had been repeatedly assured would not happen with her wonderful tincture. “It’s just like absinthe!” she said.) Tremendous pressure to imbibe it, to convey trust in general and interest in her interests in particular.

Speaking of tremendous pressure, you probably know that wormwood is so-called because its primary use has been as a vermifuge. That is, if you’ve got any parasites living in your digestive system, it forcibly evicts them, and anything else that happens to be in your G.I. tract. Generally, this is not something that you want to experience in a restaurant setting.

I have no idea how (or indeed why) I soldiered on through that date. Trying not to grimace while she talked, as things churned and rumbled in the gut, and that “impending emergency” feeling increased. Then a meal that was punctuated by several (four, I think – maybe five) trips to the bathroom, where the most horrifying things happened. Things that really don’t bear going into too much detail about, but which involved extremely distressing foam issuing from places where it not to, ever. And liquid. And little lumps. All of this with a forceful convulsive action that’s totally unlike the natural result of peristalsis. Such was the nature of this ordeal that great pains had to be taken to ensure that everything remained in the bowl, and even still careful cleanup of parts that ought not to be effected on the loo was required each time that I felt it was safe to stand again, and lots of time spent trying to recompose myself, wash my face, repair my hair, etc.

Then back out to pick up where we’d left off. At no point was I comfortable, but by god, I’d get through this. I’d be an attentive listener. I’d hold up my end of the conversation. I’d finish the meal, god-dammit. Besides, I couldn’t very well bail, because I couldn’t afford to be more than a quick dash away from the facilities.

That’s the longest I’ve ever spent over a meal. I’ve never wanted to be at home alone so much in my entire life. Every time I walked to-and-from the washroom, past the other patrons, I felt horribly conspicuous and humiliated.

On the upside, she was properly contrite about having given me the stuff on the way out the door, especially after my reservations about it, and, incredibly, (after things were settled down) I ended up going back to her place, availing myself of her loo one more blessed time, taking a shower to restore my humanity, and getting a bit of action.

Still, easily the worst date ever, no matter how it worked out in the end. What a nightmare.

*Later confirmed to be the case.