Jeremy was the first guy that I ever really went out with after meeting online.  I didn’t really know online dating protocols or procedures, but after numerous emails back and forth and a few phone calls we decided to meet for dinner.  Now, the funny thing is, I never do dinner on dates.  Too much potential time, too much stress, but I figured that I could hack it.  We were going to the Living Well, a spot I hadn’t been to in at least 5 years, so what harm was there?  Familiar location, semi-familiar person (or so I thought—first time mistakes!), familiar situation (the first date).  And Jeremy had everything going for him.  On paper, I should have married this guy right on the spot.  He worked in porn, not as an actor, but a computer guy, but hey, spent his days in a porn studio.  How cool is that?  He drove a 1967 Ford Galaxie, one of the coolest cars around.  And he collected pinball machines.  I mean, geek chic, totally.  And I wanted to love him.  But there remains the eternal question—is it what you like, or what you are like?

In this case, we have ourselves here a serious case of what you like not at all representing what you are like.  Walking into the restaurant, bristling in anticipation and decked out in the Boy George heels (the most seriously sexy pair of shoes I own—named after the fact that I bought them to go see a London showing of Boy George’s musical Taboo), I stride into the restaurant, charm a-blazing.  Funny, he didn’t look a lot like his pictures—more so shorter and squatter.  He also had made the fatal decision to highlight his hair.  Word to all men—If your hair is shorter that two inches long and you are not a fashion or hair model, do not highlight your hair.  After one week, once it starts growing out, it looks terrible.  It never looks anywhere near natural.  And the thought of you sitting in a salon chair with your short locks wrapped in foil is just humorous.  To make the awkward looks even more so, the purple framed glasses were a throw-off.  Metrosexual indeed.

Conversation was kind of stunted, due in part, I think, to first date nerves.  We seemed to have a fair amount in common—Cats (although he maintained a website for his—eeek), music, and computers.  But the computers thing was weird.  I was doing some product development and beta testing at the time for a computer software company, so knew a little bit about the whole biz.  It got weird, though.  He started talking about the “normals” who would never understand what life was really all about, and were obviously intellectually and socially inferior to people like ourselves, for reasons I did not at all understand.  The discussion about the normals went on for well over a half an hour.  Sorry chum, but despite my ability to code (badly) in html, I am not some kind of uber-species. I don’t even want to be, not for computer skills, anyways.

After dinner we went for a walk through the Church Street Ghetto and talked about life.  He was obsessed with my life, calling me the coolest person he had ever met.  No doubt.  He was self-admittedly pretty dull.  I should have taken the clue.  The normals?  What?

As a footnote, in dating naïveté I went on a second date with the guy, wondering if it was just nerves and an effort to be different that turned our porn hero into a zero.  He took me to see Head of State.  I was busy at work and told him to pick the movie.  If you know nothing about the movie, think Chris Rock and Bernie Mac running for President of the USA.  Another hint folks—dates will judge you on your choice of movie.  It’s a dating rule.  Normals indeed.