My New Boyfriend

Hey there.  How goes it?  Happy Friday to all, more pleasantries, yadda yadda yadda.  I just wanted to take a hot minute to introduce you all to my new boyfriend.  He's a real tall drink of water, don't you think?  Sitting there so regally casual (that's not a thing) in that chevron stripe chair.  Or maybe it's the ghost chair?  I can't be sure.  He's always switching seats and whatnot, but he's also always telling me the nicest things and encouraging me to drink more wine.  I previously thought I was the only one who got him, but then I turned on the RNC, saw ole Clint Eastwood and was absolutely thrilled to realize I wasn't alone in my connection with invisible chair people.  What. A. Relief.

OK, listen, he's yelling at me to go to the airport now.  Don't want to be late!

Happy Laborless weekend, everyone!

Sunday Bloody Sunday

Last night I had dinner (read: 6 bottles of wine) at a friend’s apartment.  She told me the tale of a man she knows who has two wives, one in the city and one in the Hamptons, meaning he’s essentially not legally married to either of them.  It was then I realized my own dating stories are bush league.  I apologize for that and plan to do better moving forward.   

So, ever the one to be cool as a cucumber and never overreact in a given situation, I took back to the internets to do a deeper dive into Mean Mike and IA’s alleged working relationship.  Naturally, I’d completely and unnecessarily overreacted at first.  They do not work together, nor did they ever even overlap.  The link was old and outdated as was easily verified by simply clicking on the current “Team” link for their company.  Game on.  A few flirty emails over the course of my raincation later, there was a date on the books.  

Day of, he asks me to meet him at The Wren on the Bowery for bloodys.  I’m in.  Maybe Mean Mike-who-hates-sports-and-TV-whose-father-grows-wine-grapes isn’t so bad after all.  He sends along his phone number (646…) for greater ease of communication.  I reciprocate.  A text pops up, “eww, I don’t talk to 917s!”  Excuse me?  Don’t push it.  You’ve already got two strikes with sports and entertainment and it is common knowledge that there’s a pecking order of NY area codes.  917 > 646 > 347.  In the eternal words of Bruce Hornsby and, well, 2PAC, that’s just the way it is.  

MM calls me while I’m getting ready, makes fun of me for living in Brooklyn, then insists he’s casually dressed and urges me not to wear pearls.  What?  You can’t throw out a hipster joke – especially when I’m nothing close to being one – and tell what I should or should not wear.  Also, don’t tell me how to dress, ever.  I’m perfectly capable of pulling together an appropriate ‘Sunday on the Bowery.’  He sounded fairly drunk, so I decided to wear, excuse my language, a fuck ton of sapphires and diamonds.  For good measure, I pour myself a greyhound “to take the edge off,” said alcoholics everywhere to enjoy while I finished frosting myself.  For better measure, I had a second.  What?  It’s refreshing.  And good thing I did, too, because MM was three sheets to the wind and loud as a marching band when he showed up.  The bartender and I make eye contact.  Collective eye roll.  BUT who am I to judge someone for being drunk on a Sunday afternoon?  Answer: no one.  Plus he was a lot cuter than his chosen photographs made him out to be.  

Within five minutes, we’d covered religion (also an atheist) politics (Libertarian) and sex.  The last one involved him asking what happens in 50 Shades (ummm) and what my chosen word would be for a see you next Tuesday.  What?!  Pass!!! I awkwardly sipped/inhaled my drink.  If that’s how this conversation is going to pan out, I needed to catch up and/or blackout.  It takes a lot to shock me, but I was not prepared to review preferred terminology for female anatomy in the first minutes of a first date.  

Somewhere between him blurting out James Brown lyrics at the top of his lungs as if he had some sort of musical tourettes (I know, I know – very PC of me) and mindless banter about what constitutes good, Irish whiskey, we had this conversation:

MM:      I feel like everyone always says they love to travel.

Me:        Well yeah, who doesn’t? 

MM:      starts to speak….

Me:        …cuts him off…. I mean, seriously, you’d have to have some sort of severe personality disorder to not love travel.   Don’t you think?  I understand that some people can’t afford it, and I’m sympathetic to that, but you’d have to be a real asshole to not have a sense of curiosity or desire to experience other places or at least want to travel.

MM:      I don’t like to travel.  I think it’s a big hassle.

Me:        Oh, well, er… sure, getting to NY airports could sometimes qualify as an entire leg of The Amazing Race, but it’s totally worth it once you arrive at your destination?  Oh, right, you don’t watch TV.  Well, it’s a multi-Emmy winning reality travel show on CBS.  So anyway, I need to run to the Ladies.

As I opened the restroom door to return to the bar, I saw him hand the signed check to the bartender and put his wallet back in his shorts.  (Shorts on a first date, really? At least they weren’t of the cargo nature.)  Anyhow, cheers to not being cheap, right? I think he also saw the writing on the wall with me, that someone who spends her weekends in the fall not only glued to college and NFL football, but plays out the screaming lunacy in color coordinated clothing and/or Super Bowl edition Cruz or Bavaro jerseys does not for him, a great love make.  More than fair and right back at you, MM, for not doing wanting to spend your precious few fall and early winter weekends doing exactly that.  At least now I can put this blog’s URL back in my Twitter profile, for I no longer care what he finds if and when he googles me.  

Until the next, failed social experiment, 

Vennifer.

New York is the Smallest 8 Million Person City in the World

I should never say things like "this actually happened last week" as if it’s some sort of pinnacle of ridiculous.  Other people could.  Other people lead pleasant and normal lives.  I envy the other people, because when I do something like that, when I dare to dance around any kind of sweeping blanket statement that implies even the tiniest bit of finality in a given situation, it’s as if I’ve tempted the universe to top it.  And top it, she has.  

I hit a patch of terrible timing with IA and thought, well, loon in my head, there’s three ways you can approach this here.  You can go crazy girl on him.  You can say that’s not good enough and walk away from it completely or you can continue seeing other people in an attempt to keep irrational at bay and see if the tides turn when this young gent has some actual time on his hands.  

Reasonable thoughts and subsequent reasonable actions coming out of me are about as common as Halley’s Comet, so I’ve gone with door number three.  I mean, does it still bother me that he had to sit at work through my [fab] birthday party and that our respective week-long vacations are on different weeks?  Sure, but this isn’t a place for whiny, sad thoughts.  If it was, however, I have some whiny-ass, sad thoughts I’ve been keeping to myself, my chardonnay and my cat.  I digress.  

So this guy Mike reaches out to me and he’s kind of a dick.  Being a girl and nothing if not predictably stereotypical, I’m instantly interested.  Mean Mike tells me, among other things, that he “hates sports and TV in general,” then asks me to tell him 10 random things about myself.  Eye roll.  Even though a man’s hatred of sports falls just under “drives molester van” and “general serial killer vibe” in my ranking of red flags, I decide I want to pursue this for the story. Also, he told me his father grows wine grapes, so let’s sprinkle on a little genuine interest/potential for opposites attract kind of thing for good measure.  

I ramble off nine mostly uninteresting and generic things about myself and then ::bats eyelashes even though it’s over the internets:: say, “10 – I’m concerned you might actually hate me because I’m absolutely fanatical about sports – football in particular – and about 95% of my job, which I love, is based around the television industry.” He replies almost immediately telling me not only that I may be right, but that my answers didn’t exactly help the situation.  Again, eye roll, this is going to take some finessing to move forward.  

By finesse, I mean silent treatment for four days.  Why (WHY?!?!) does that work so well? Whatever, Mean Mike asks me to get together for a drink, making sure to note he’s only free through Thursday and his – and I quote – “dance card is full this weekend.” Then, in a move that finally gets the bizarre ball rolling here, he throws in his real email address for greater ease of communication.  

Obviously the first thing I do is Google it.  That’s when all the air got sucked out of the room.  The first link spells out for me in great detail that he happens to work at the exact same small, private investment bank as IA.  It’s a 20-person team.  What. The. What. How does shit like this always and only happen to me?  Do you know how many banks there are in NY?!  Seriously, could he not have worked at a different one, on a larger team, with the ability to get lost in the crowd?  Even Deutsche Bank midtown vs. downtown, or something of the like, would be more ideal in comparison.

In the end, I have no idea if this is a setup or more likely in my case, just a very, very curious coincidence for three people living in ‘Merica’s most populous city. And I don’t know that I’m going to do anything in the way of finding out either.  I mean, up till now, my action plan has been to sit here, staring at the Google with my eyes bugged out, gabbing to any friend who will listen.  Like I said earlier, I am trying to stay away from the outwardly-expressed crazy girl behavior, but this latest development makes an awfully enticing offer to give in.  I suppose the moral of the story here is maybe don’t put all your eggs in a Tiny basket.  It can get messy.  

Until the next, tragic disaster in my personal life, 

Vennifer.