Back in the saddle

So after a three month hiatus, I'm back to looking on OKCupid.com, better known as shopping for dates. After the disappearance of date #12 back in April, I realized I was exhausted, and longed for a sense of normalcy in my life where I wasn't constantly focusing on how many dates I could get in one week, whether I would be kissed, and having a ticking time clock going the entire time, knowing if a date didn't hit the 120 minute mark, it wouldn't count. For a couple of those betting dates, things I'd rather have been doing with 120 minutes:

1. Seeing a movie.
2. Having drinks with friends.
3. Working (oh right. Those dates WERE work).
4. Rust busting with a needle gun.
5. Coloring my hair/doing laundry/vacuuming.

Some of you may know vacuuming is not something I love to do, although some of the other five were tasks I spend time doing after the bet was done. I enjoyed them. Especially the rust busting. Seriously, if you've never done it, there are very few things more satisfying than freeing a large expanse of metal from rust. Same goes for scraping paint with a heat gun. Lettie is now free of that awful Admiral Blue paint thanks partially to my efforts.

First there was a 33-year old recent graduate from an intense MBA two year program at Columbia. As a general rule I don't mix with MBA's; guys who work in investment banks don't appeal to me in the least. He seemed to have a more interesting pre-post-graduate life - he was a set designer - so I decided to give him a chance. There was a flurry of emails, he caught my interest, and even though one of his daily companions was a small dog, we set a date. I'm always wary of guys who live with a pet that is smaller than my cat. On the Friday that we were supposed to meet up, he emailed me wanting to postpone. Since I was dealing with a deadline at work, and was exhausted and not really in the mood to be pretty and charming, I agreed. There were a handful of emails that followed, and then, nothing.

A couple of weeks later I got an email from OKCupid.com saying I had a 4 or 5 star match with someone else on the site. He was a rare book appraiser for a small non-profit, had great taste in music, film, and books (not a big stretch), and was attractive. We met for drinks one night, which led to meeting again to go explore the High Line and more drinks and making out on a street corner at a subway entry. A third date was scheduled. I had my reservations , there were some things that just didn't click with me, but I put them out of my mind, wanting to be open to different types of people. I figured a third date wouldn't hurt. For the third date, we met up for dinner in my neighborhood. After dinner, I said good night. We made plans to meet up again a couple of days later, but that morning he texted saying he was hungover, and didn't think he would make it. This was at 11AM. We weren't going to meet up until 7PM. I set aside the distinct possibility that he was blowing me off. A couple of days later he confirmed what I had tried to put out of my mind: he'd decided to spend time with someone else. This wasn't a big surprise, nor was it in retrospect a big disappointment.

I have to applaud this guy for having the guts to do what a lot of guys (and girls, I have to admit) just can't quite drum up the courage to do when online connections just don't work out - be decent enough to reject someone, even if its over email. More times than not, guys just disappear without a word. In the past, I would endlessly wonder what happened to them. It would depend on what I knew about them, but some of the things I've considered have been:

• The all too common falling off a cliff / under a bus / onto the subway tracks (morbid, I know).
• His work piled up so high on his desk, that it fell over and buried him.
• Deportation.
• A rare case of amnesia.
• A crashed server, loss of my email, phone number, and OKC account information.

Luckily, I don't really dwell on these things like I used to. That much pondering takes up way too much room in my thoughts, and its exhausting. I do occasionally wonder what happened to #12. He was genuinely busy with an insane work schedule, and when we just couldn't schedule that third date due to his work interruptions, I stopped making an effort towards getting him to see me again. After no contact for four months, on Saturday sometime between when I got up and when I needed to be down to catch Pioneer's lines at noon, I decided to send him an email to see what he was up to. I did not expect a response, I just needed to satisfy my own particular nagging question.

About an hour later, my Blackberry was blinking.