The MacDonald’s Guy

October 28, 2007

Didn’t believe it could happen to me but it did. I met one of those guys who take you to MacDonald’s for a first date.

I met him last week after a class and he seemed nice enough. He is a science major. He asked for my phone number but I did not give it to him at first because I was just not in the mood for any more man.

However he looked better to me the night after when my girlfriends and I bumped into him at a party. He really got me laughing when he spent the longest time trying to guess my phone number. I found out his name was Paul and that he was studying to be a doctor. After he charmed me for about a half an hour I agreed to go out with him the next night. He said he wanted to take me to “dinner” and to consider it a date.

So I was pretty happy when he when pulled up the next day in his car. I had gotten all dressed up in this nice eighties retro plum colored dress and black high heels. He looked a little casual but I had no idea that he was thinking of taking me to MacDonald’s for dinner.

Even when he told me we were going to MacDonald’s I started laughing because I thought he was joking. Even when we pulled into the parking lot I still thought he was pulling my leg. Then I realized when he parked the car that this really was his idea of the dinner date and that it was not some kind of quick snack beforehand. This was the whole deal.

He did seem a little sheepish as we sat at our little plastic tables. It might have been because I was so overdressed. Also he was not as witty as the night before. It occurred to me quite quickly that this was one of these guys that can’t come out of their shell unless they are drunk.

After our meal of “two all beef patties, special sauce, lettuce, cheese, pickles, onions on a sesame seed bun was over he suggested we go to a bar. We ended up in this seedy student pub by the campus where I got to watch him play pool. Yep he was one of those guys too – the kind that never asks the girl if she wants to play too. He was just into the guys and expecting me to sit there like some kind of submissive little thing… this is jus ton my style. The sad thing is I could have beat him at pool too if he had only let me play.

After watching him lose at pool a few times I got a bad case of “what am I doing here” and left. He actually called again today but I think I am going to ignore him this time. All he wanted to know is how I got home! Jerk!

 

Dating Journal
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Gay or Broke?

October 28, 2007

Okay this is ridiculous but yet another man saddled me with the bill for the dinner last night. This guy was gorgeous. He looked just as I remembered when I first met him in the department store in the woman’s glove department. We both had a fetish for white kid gloves with little pearl buttons. Cliché I know and at first I thought he was gay. I actually asked him whether or not to find out if he was and he said no. Of course after what I am about to tell you, you might think differently.

We went to a fabulous little restaurant on the beach. He picked me up in his silver sports car, which he said he had just paid off. Now I am wondering if he borrowed it. I was a little wielded out by the Liza Minnelli tape playing in the car on our breezy drive along the cause way. Still who is to think that gay men don’t like Liza Minnelli?

For most of the evening he acted just like Prince Charming. He made eyes at me, laughed at my stories and even touched my hand across the table. He spent a lot of time telling me all about his acting career and how well it was going. At one point he did say something about my shoes being the wrong color. He also made a comment about my hair color. I thought it was a little Queer Eye for the Gay Guy.

The dinner was superb. We had a super expensive bottle of wine, appetizers, main course, and even though I could not eat another bite, we ordered dessert. My girlfriend Sarah text messaged me to see if it was going well and I enthusiastically tested her back to say it was going great and there was no need to create a fake emergency or come stake out the restaurant.

After we shared two or three after dinner liquors and some chocolate volcano cake the waiter finally brought the bill. It turned out to be well over $200 for the wine and everything. My prince charming turns and looks at me and says, “Let’s go Dutch.”

I look at him really dubiously and he keeps looking at me back as if to say “What?” I then tell him that I thought this was a date. He then tells me that he was sorry he misunderstood and that he only has one hundred on him and that he has to go to the bank machine and that he will be back.

So he gets up and leaves. Guess what? He never comes back. I sit there for well over an hour waiting for him to return and he never does. I end up paying the check.

So I have only two conclusions about this. He was a gay guy looking for a free meal or he just really didn’t have the money to pay the bill and ducked out. Gay or broke – what do you think? Maybe it was both!

 

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Hooked and Hanging

October 21, 2007

Why oh why is it getting impossible to get what you need for the first month of classes when everyone around you is so hooked up?? I think you all know how much of a headache it can be to get on campus and have to immediately make changes to switch out of or switch into different classes. I decided a while back that if there are changes to be made, everything must be put together very carefully so that you need to make just ONE visit to the registrar, meaning just ONE long wait in line and not weeks of schedule adjustment, dropping in and out of endless lecture halls as September rolls on by.

But year after year the nightmare gets worse, and I think it has a lot to do with students (usually the freshmen of course, but there’s no limit on idiots in the student body, right? J) getting too hooked up to their iPods. The lineups are like torture sessions, and by the time you get to your turn in line, the registrar is just about on the edge of a nervous breakdown after dealing with so many attention spans dropping down to zero because of iPods, and that’s not even counting all the blackberrys and cellphones.

Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t ever be caught without hookups when I leave the house, like not EVER. But I always turn off my units when I get close enough to the front of the line. I mean, what good is it to create delays? But unfortunately most students don’t pay any attention to that, which is funny (but not really) because they’re only extending their own stay and ruining it for all of us too.

Like last week, I had two courses to get out of and I already had the two picked. I checked it all out online first, and the two I wanted to get into were still available. So all it was going to take was a minute or two at the registrar desk, and my fall term was more or less set. Sound easy? It sure sounded that way to me at the time. When I got into the registrar area first thing in the morning the lineup was already insane, but I expected that anyway. What I didn’t expect was the people up at the front delaying their own business with constant earphone removal and replacement, answering their ringing cells, all this on top of their clueless attitude about their class schedules. But the crazy bit about the whole thing was that I could see students closer to the front grumbling and laughing and making fun of the situation, but these were the SAME people who refused to turn off THEIR iPods when it was their turn!!

So what can I say? It’s obvious to you by now that my whole morning was shot. Forget about the polite signs asking people to be “courteous” and shut off their hookups when using a campus service. Maybe they should threaten a tear-gas attack instead, if that’s what it’s going to take to make a difference between the iPod junkies and the well-organized minority. I mean, come on, wake up, you know?

 

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Learning to Forgive and Forget

October 18, 2007

If you are going to stay sane in this crazy old world and especially if you are going to continue dating then you need to learn to let go every now and then.

Although anger at times is an effective tool in dealing with difficult situations, if used too often, it loses impact. For if you are always angry, no one can tell the difference between when it is “real” and when it is just a “knee jerk” reaction. So they will tend not to take you seriously if you are always angry… compounding your frustration.

The first step in the journey toward forgiveness is the realization that anger is most often born out of ignorance.

Here is a list of ways you can be ignorant about your own anger.

· You are unaware of all the facts or are misinformed.

· You have false judgments or unrealistic expectations about the situation.

· You are really angry with yourself but are taking it out on someone else.

· The anger relates to unresolved past pain and not to what “caused” it now.

· The anger is 100% justified based upon what others

· The final step in the journey towards forgiveness is to routinely practice “better responses to anger”

Forgiveness is a form of realism. It doesn’t deny, minimize, or justify what others have done to us or the pain that we have suffered. It encourages us to look squarely at those old wounds and see them for what they are. And it allows us to see how much energy we have wasted and how much we have damaged ourselves by not forgiving.

Forgiveness is an internal process. It can’t be forced, and it doesn’t come easy. It brings with it great feelings of wellness and freedom.

Forgiveness is a sign of positive self-esteem. We no longer identify ourselves by our past injuries and injustices. We are no longer victims. We claim the right to stop hurting when we say, “I’m tired of the pain, and I want to be healed.” At that moment, forgiveness becomes a possibility-although it may take time and much hard work before we finally achieve it.

Forgiveness is letting go of the past. It doesn’t erase what happened, but it does allow us to lessen and perhaps even eliminate the pain of the past. The pain from our past no longer dictates how we live in the present, and it no longer determines our future.

It also means that we no longer need resentment and anger as an excuse for our shortcomings. We don’t need them as a weapon to punish others nor as a shield to protect ourselves by keeping others away. And most importantly, we don’t need these feelings to identify who we are. We become more than merely victims of our past.

Forgiveness is no longer wanting to punish those who hurt us. It is understanding that the anger and hatred that we feel toward them hurts us far more than it hurts them. It is discovering the inner peace that becomes ours when we let go of the past and forget vengeance.

 

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