The Chronicles of Dating, Installment #4: Another Two-for-One Deal

Date #1 - The Switcheroo

So this one is going back a few years, and probably illustrates how naive I was when I first started dating.

Anyway, on eve of my 20th birthday, I went on a set-up date for an LDS fraternity date night. It wasn't a blind date, it was just that some guys are too lazy to ask a girl out, so they have someone find them a date for them. Laura and I were, therefore, set up with guys we already knew but who obviously didn't like either of us enough to actually ask us out. Well, at least our respective dates didn't.

Throughout the first half of our evening - meeting at the institute and going to dinner at Fazolli's - Laura's date repeatedly made "jokes" about us switching dates. I should have caught on, but no.

After dinner, we went to someone's house to carve jack-o-lanterns, but didn't get started before Laura realized that she left her purse at the restaurant. This put us in a strange situation, because my date drove and had to take Laura back to Fazolli's to retrieve her purse. After Laura's date disappeared outside for awhile, he came back in and told me they decided to trade dates since my date and his were both gone. I should have been suspicious, considering the previously made remarks about switching dates, but I wasn't.

My new date and I carved a pumpkin together and were watching the beginning of a movie together when Laura and the other guy came back, each wondering why their date was snuggled up for a movie with someone else. Turns out that date switching was never really on the agenda.

Date #2 - Christmas Eve-Eve Vomit

So to complement my previous story of naivety, and to tone down my habit of criticizing my counterparts on these dates, this date story is a bad-on-me.

I seem to have a Christmas curse. This is the second date story recounted on here where I got sick on a date at Christmas. This time it hit me a day earlier - both the date and the flu - on this past Christmas Eve-Eve, when a really rough night followed a pretty awesome date.

The evening started off with dinner at the Cheesecake Factory where I ordered the grilled artichoke appetizer as my meal. Artichokes were one of my favorite foods, until few hours later when I got to have artichokes again.

My date was an old friend, so instead of having the typical and awkward bowling or ice skating after-dinner activity, we just went to his house to watch a movie.

Like usual, I had to get up to pee like 900 times during the movie. On my way back from my third pee trip, crazy hit me. I sat back down and told my date I didn't feel very good suddenly. I layed down for about 30 seconds before I got up and ran back to the bathroom to dry-heave a couple minutes.

"That was so crazy," I said when I got back from wretching over the toilet, "I was totally fine and then it hit me for a minute, and now I'm fine again."

This scenario played itself out a couple more times before I started feeling sick between pee trips too. Scared that I would puke in the car if he took me home, my date did his best to accommodate me and make me comfortable at his house. "If you do throw up," he said, "I have a new toothbrush you can use."

At three in the morning, I had a very lovely time sitting next to the toilet for ten minutes and making myself never want to eat an artichoke ever again. Afterwards, I went and woke up my date and asked if I could use that toothbrush.

I threw up twice more that night before I finally felt well enough to go home at like 7 in the morning, where I just went back to bed for a few hours, threw up a couple more times, and waited for my mom to come pick me up and take me to her house.

I was still sick for Christmas morning the next day. Slightly delirious, I thanked my mom for the new lime green lunch box she gave me (which was really a lime green scripture case) and cried for a half an hour while my family opened their presents after my brother shot me in the back with a rubber band and I broke an ornament trying to throw a water bottle at his head.

Anyway, yep, I totally threw up on a first date.

And now for the TV Characters/People I Miss:

Three People/Characters Currently on Television that I Cannot Stand

I understand that I go against popular opinion and am likely going to trigger some defense mechanisms, but I cannot help that these three people make me insane (and I don't think it's a coincidence that all but one are from reality TV):

#1
If you are wondering why Adam Lambert is so annoying, just watch this or this, or look at this. Plus, he's wearing almost as much makeup as:

#2

She's like the entire cheese counter at the grocery store, and not in the delicious way. In fact, scratch that; she's like the entire shelf of Easy Cheese at the grocery store.

And if Julianne wasn't cheesy enough on her own, they decided to add her boyfriend and create this atrocity:


#3

Not very clever nicknames and being the greasy guy in the weary love hexagon for four seasons was bad enough, but his new character transformation and perfectly flat-ironed locks aren't doing anything for any of us.

Oh, and I almost forgot this one (so we'll make it four):

#4



BONUS:

I would have included her in the original list, but since she finally got kicked off of America's Next Top Model, here's a bonus tid-bit of eye-gouging annoyance for you:


And after watching 1.2 ridiculously long episodes of The Biggest Loser, the woman on the far left is rapidly ascending up the annoyance scale:

The Chronicles of Dating, Installment #4: Dungeons and Dragons

I, admittedly, am a bit of a geek. And by "a bit of a geek," I mean that not all things sci-fi and fantasy are lost on me. In fact, the three things that I feel I may know too much about that classify and fully illustrate my geekdom:

1.












2.












3.












And trust me, it doesn't stop there either (though it does stop solidly before World of Warcraft).

Sadly, my geekiness has lead me to be set up on some rather unfortunate, "she must be willing to deal with this guy's nerdiness if she wore hear headband over her eyes when she was 10 and had a Star Wars marathon for her 12th birthday, and pretended her chapstick was a lightsaber in Jr. High" dates. There is, however, a distinct line between geekiness and nerdiness:

"A geek is someone who has the knowledge of the geeky type stuff and has social graces...A nerd is someone who has the knowledge but not the social graces, and a dork is someone who has neither."

Applying this definition, I am certain that my Christmas Eve morning, 2007 was spent in the company of a nerd.

My awesome friend, Ken, took the opportunity of the holidays to set me up with his technical writer brother-in-law who was in town from Wisconsin or something for Christmas. Because of the shortness of his stay, we doubled for breakfast on Christmas Eve...at IHOP.

At the time, I had platinum blonde hair with a dark brownish-purple in the back. My date told me, in perhaps the most monotone voice I have ever heard, that he wasn't sure how he felt about the color of my hair, because it reminded him of eggplants and he got sick from eating eggplants once.

There were many more stories told and comments made that his monotone voice prevented from being stored in my long-term memory.

I was coming down with the flu that day, and the overly-packed atmosphere at IHOP was pushing me further over the edge while my date was practically nudging me down the cliff face with a stick. If you have never been to IHOP for breakfast on Christmas Eve, never do. However, judging by the amount of people there, you must have been there with your entire extended family, as the majority of the state of Utah was crammed into patent leather booths (sadly, not boots), sticky with maple syrup and kids.

After breakfast, a failed attempt at going ice skating led to a fun-filled date of window shopping at the mall with my date, Ken, and Ken's very pregnant wife.

Our first stop was the sword-and-random-Asian-trinkets-store. I spent 45 minutes looking at painted chop sticks, velvet pictures of dolphins, and statuettes of dragons holding crystal balls while the brothers-in-law debated whether or not a certain square-ish sword was a replica from World of Warcraft, Dungeons and Dragons, or some other weaponry-specific, epic cult game.

The flu was quickly taking over my body and attention span.

From there, our fun-filled day took us to Build-A-Bear. After five minutes of us girls cooing over teddy bears and puppies and kitties and polar bears, Ken asked my date if they had his favorite animal. "Do you see a dragon?" was his Napoleon-Dynamite-tone-of-voiced reply, "but I guess if I have to pick my favorite animal in here, I'll pick the wolf."

I don't really remember the rest of the date, because I'm pretty sure I was getting a fever (and who knows, the whole date may have been a hallucination).

My friend, Ken, later apologized for the set-up, saying that he wasn't sure what happened to his brother-in-law since he moved to Wisconsin, or wherever.