Quiet You!
(And By You, I Mean Me.)

While things are going well with the nurse I've been slowly dating (one date a month on average), she continues to live far away and remains a busy person.

Right as my wasted 3 month subscription to Yahoo Personals had run out a girl sent me a message containing her email address. With things as they are with my nurse, I decided that I should try and see if this other girl and I might get along. If nothing else, we seemed to have a lot in common and maybe we could be friends.

After a couple emails I called her on Saturday and we decided to go out Saturday night. I went to pick her up from her house which was a little hard to find, but I drove right there without any wrong turns or back-tracking. I can point to that fact as my single accomplishment for the evening.

Do you ever have one of those nights when you can't make yourself shut up? Mostly I don't have those nights. Mostly I have nights where my brain decides to stay home with the conversation when I leave for a date. While uncomfortable silence is not usually something to hope for, it would have been great on Saturday.

When, quite understandably, asked what an inflatable medical mattress was for, I embarked on a long, detailed, and disgusting monolog about bedsores, skin breakdown, hospice patients, and the Polaroid of the 90 year old man's ass. Later, when she asked what my average weekend was like, I took it upon myself to explain how most of my friends went to Tahoe this weekend without inviting me and how I don't go out a whole lot for some reason. (I also made a long and stilted joke about people in tin suits accidentally soldering themselves into immobility and someone discovering them years later, the whole ordeal being like a solder based Pompeii. However, I'm not sure whether to count that in the plus or minus column.)

On top of my interminable blathering, I could not for the life of me drive where I wanted to go. We tried to see Memoirs of a Geisha, but it was only playing near Union Square, home of the holiday shoppers and no parking. Instead of heading right for the parking garage I circled the block looking for street parking. That's my normal M.O., but there was so much traffic that circling the block took a half hour.

After it became obvious that we weren't going to make Memoirs, we decided to go to a theater in Daly City. On the way there I got on the freeway, missed an exit, got off the freeway, drove through the city to get back to the freeway, missed another exit, turned around, and finally arrived at the theater. On the way to take her home I took the wrong entrance and got back on the freeway, off again, on again, and then finally made it to 19th Ave. When I pulled up to her house she had the door open before I had completely stopped the car. I imagine she was tired of driving after being the car for a combined total of nearly and hour and a half.

I think there's an excellent chance I've disqualified myself from even the friend zone, which is too bad because I think we have a lot of the same musical and comedy related interests. None the less, it's completely understandable if she doesn't want to talk to me again. I wouldn't want to talk to a navigationally challenged, morbid, bedsore-obsessed, guy with no friends either.*


*I want to point out that I don't actually view myself that way.**

**I need to point that out so I don't get another self-help book in the mail from my mom.