-{ redgeek.net }-

Several of my friends and readers have remarked that some of my most entertaining and revealing posts are those in which I recount my Entirely True Stories of Dating and Date-Requesting Purgatory, or as one friend so aptly put it, “messcapades.” Truly, I’m pleased that my hours of boredom, fear, antipathy, and (hopefully) undeserved deceit are amusing to others as well as myself. (Note that I most frequently receive comments from on these posts from my married and coupled friends, rarely from the singletons. As a further aside, most of you either end up commenting in person or via email – I’m curious as to why people rarely use the “comments” thingy – is the interface sucky or something? Let me know.)

On this tip, I resolve to begin dating more, if only to gather seeds for more self-effacing posts. Look, see how I sacrifice for you, my audience! I will drown myself in this SoCal orgy of miserable evenings and stilted conversation. I will gorge on faltered introductions, blind dates, and yes, I may even respond to Craigslist ads. I’ll take a girl to Turf Club for dinner before finding out that she’s vegan. I’ll endure public beratement for suggesting the Zoo as an outing while with the PETA activist, at which point I’ll find out she’s a PETA activist. I’ll go out with a fundamentalist Christians.

Well, I don’t know about that last one.

But I will do this, for you, for my writing, and through it all, I will not compromise myself – and most importantly, I’ll actually try to make the dates work. I’m not trying to trick or deceive anyone, and will not be revealing identities, but I hereby resolve to date more, and find something interesting, amusing, insightful, or otherwise blog-worthy in each encounter.

To kick off this renewed conviction, I’ll relate a short snippet of a conversation from a few nights ago, not from a date, but phenomenally indicative. I’d gone to the pub after teaching for a beer and a salad, and ended up running into with a former student and some of his co-workers. They all work together, so periodically I zone out as they enter discussion of inter-office politics, but it’s generally lively and tangential conversation, and everyone’s laughing and smiling. I notice there’s a very lovely Japanese woman in the group, but unfortunately for me, she has a rock the size of Hawaii on her hand. C’est la vie.

Skip ahead an hour – and hour longer than I planned on staying at the pub – and they’re trying to figure out how a some of them are going to get home. I’ve only had a couple beers, so I offer to drive them if they’re close, but they’re trying to get to North County. I actually received this backhanded compliment from the Japanese girl: “I like you … but you have nothing to contribute.”

Wow.

Then she gave me a high-five to soften the blow.

So how will I begin this misanthropic adventure? Well, a friend of mine wants to hook me up with several of her friends, although she’s trying separate the wheat from the chaff, or in her words, find the ones that “aren’t psychotic.” I say, give me the crazy ones, it’ll make for more interesting tales. It’ll be like that move 20 Dates, but hopefully, you know, not shitty.

And who knows, I might just meet someone.