The horrors of dating blindly.

As a single girl in a fairly small city, I've tried all the dating routes available to me. Single people know what I am talking about here.

"Oh, Jen! I know this guy who knows this guy who's nephew is this girl's cousin and he is PERFECT FOR YOU! Please oh please let me play matchmaker and ruin an entire evening for you!"

Okay, so from the advice of my best friend Nadine, I thought I would share with you my most horrible blind date story for this evening's entry.

So, we meet for lunch in the Old Market. He asked me to pick the restaurant and of course I choose Ahmad's Persian Cuisine because it is wonderful. I walk up, fully expecting a frightening troll, and find a rather cute, nerdy guy (just like I like them) waiting for me. Well, we sit down to eat and the conversation is sparse and awkward. I am trying, but being quite shy myself, it's difficult to even keep any conversation going with this guy. He is either equally as shy, or just not interested.

We eat a great lunch, (as per usual at Ahmad's) and he even says he is glad to have tried Persian food and really liked his meal. Just so you know the background of this, Ahmad's is a very nice, quite fancy Persian restaurant. Albeit fairly priced, the food is not cheap. You drink water or tea out of lovely wine glasses. That is the kind of fancy we are talking about here. Water out of dainty freakin' wine glasses.

So, we are talking a bit, waiting for the check to arrive, and then he coughs a little.
He coughs, and then spits up something unmentionable into his WINE GLASS. Then, as if realizing that I do in fact still have eyes with which I can clearly see he is literally spitting up in front of me, he turns away finally as if embarrassed, and mumbles: "I have a cold."

I am utterly shocked at this point, and politely say, "Oh, that's okay" and try desperately to control my urge to run screaming from my all-time favorite restaurant in all of Omaha. All I can think of is how the poor waitress at Ahmad's will react to catching a glimpse at this guy's wine glass when she clears our table after we depart. Oh please don't let her remember me next time... "Say, isn't that the girl who was with the guy who hocked a nasty into his wine glass?"

Oh, shudder.

So, I brush it off because I am extremely patient and attempt to subdue my own instincts to cough and gag after watching this. Thankfully, the check arrives before I am required to make any more conversation. Since it is a blind date that didn't even go well, I feel obligated to go dutch. So, as he is reaching for his wallet, I am reaching for my purse. He looks through his wallet and then begins to mumble again... I look up and see that he appears to be uncomfortable and/or displeased. So I say, "I only have a credit card, so I'll ask her to split it first." And then he looks even more uncomfortable still, and pulls a small wad of cash out of his wallet and slides it across the table to me.

Then he says, "I forgot to bring enough money."

Okay. You knew where you were going was not going to be cheap. You knew it was a date.

There is literally $6 in the pile of cash he has handed me, and I stuff it in my purse and say "That's okay" because at this point, it is okay. I just want to get the hell out of there. I feel embarrassed because this is the kind of thing that snakey guys would do to get out of paying for a date with someone they are not interested in. I'm sure guys do that, somewhere on earth. I'm positive I saw it in a movie once. So, I have no idea if this guy is seriously this pathetic, or if he is playing me. Either way, I don't care, because I pay for our meals with my card and we leave.

But it gets weirder. As we are walking out, he randomly tells me that his cell phone (the only contact I have for him) is being shut off that day. I say "Oh, that's too bad." when I really mean "Oh freakin well." Once again, I just feel like he is playing me. But then, and this is the strangest part of all, he actually wants to hang out after this horrific ordeal. He actually asks if I want to walk around the Old Market (downtown Omaha) for a while before he goes to work.

I say, "No, I really can't, I have to run some errands." Ouch, I'm sure that one stung. As any guy knows, girls will ditch ANY plans or responsibilities for a guy they are really into. That is just the rule. If I am crazy about the guy, I am gonna ditch my own grandmother (I love you Gramma!) so I can talk with him and possibly make out with him profusely. Yeah, I said make out profusely. I swear to god that makes sense.

Anyway, so he walks me to my car (he doesn't have one: shocker), and then actually tries to hug me as I am nearing my car. Let me just tell you, I am the dodgeball champion. Seriously, a 6'2 loogie-filled broke-ass guy was coming right at me, and BAM I was outta there. Ducked into my car and waved goodbye.

Looking back I still have no idea if the guy was playing me or actually pathetic. His last few actions of course made him seem as though he was just a poor, poor sap with terrible luck and wicked phlegm issues. So, really, I tend to lean more towards the sympathy angle of it as I look back on it now.

As much as I hate to be insensitive... Ah, give me a break, the guy was a grade A loser. If he was really broke and sick and nasty, why did he agree to the date in the first place? All he had to say was "I'm broke and sick, let's postpone until I'm a functioning human again." But no, he went ahead with it anyway and made a total ass of himself. He really has no one to blame but himself.

But seriously, if anyone has a funnier dating story, I have to hear it. Because I think I win.