Everything Old Is New Again

Life is strange (yeah, life is strange)
What can I make myself be--faker?
To make her mine, yeah...
--R.E.M., "Crush With Eyeliner"

I've tried to start this twice, and not come close. So, let's give it another whirlaround the bend.

Friday night I was waiting for the goddamn shift to end. It was taking forever, and longer than ever because I was waiting to kick off my party. Around 7 I found a cell phone on a bench by one of the Starbucks. About 45 minutes later the owner came by to pick it up.

And not a damn thing has really made sense since.

As an end result, I've got a second date next week and a new possible girlfriend. (Am I suddenly ovulating at the outset of the year now or something? First Cristal last year, now...well, give me time, kids.)

When she walks up to me, my bear trap-like mind focuses in on something: this chick is TEH HAWT (™ Jason Kolt Incorporated). She's unusually focused on me, too, considering I'm in the SDCC Ohio Players horn guy/train conductor outfit, and asks if I picked up a phone from around here. Since I did, and that was the only one, I describe it accurately. She asks for it back and I realize that I had security take it, so I decide on the spot to apply all my training and be proactive and help her find her way back there to get it.

She's looking at me a lot, and I'm thinking a) she knows me or someone very much similar or 2) I have a boogie.

Not 2, so hurrah. Unless a) leads me to getting slapped and yelling about how she paid her own abortion. (My doppelganger is apparently fucking shady.) But we start walking back there in a completely unneccessary move on my part and she looks at my name tag.

"You ARE him!"

Then he braces himself for the hit...--Chris Rock

"You remember me?"

And I quit looking at her figure (which was TEH HAWT in a business suit, so you can believes that took some doing) and I look her in the eyes and start diving into the archives. I know I didn't know her any time in the recent past cause THAT I'd Remember and now we're talking at the same time.

Castle Park Elementary. And then, Castle Park Middle School.

She's Sophia Nava. Rhymes with lava. You can look under "hot as" for that last.

Here for a business dinner downtown with some fellow associates of a local Toyota dealership once they get done pimping '05s on the show floor behind me she leaves her phone and I find it.

Gets better.

I find out what she's been up to in the decade since I've seen her, and I tell her what I've been up to besides stunt doubling on Thomas the Tank Engine (drew a laugh), and I give her my number. Because of the party. I figured she might want to swing by. wotthehell, nothing ventured, nothing gained, to be bold is to go forth and all that. So she plugs me in, and goes to the dinner and I have my party and she doesn't show. Dirt off the shoulder, yeah?

Gets better.

Check my voicemail Saturday night, she left a message. So I call her back, and we talk a little, and I set up a small outing for a local sushi place for Tuesday. I don't really think deep into it, other than pleasant surprise.

This leads into the small informal outing.

A "date", if you're one of those assholes who have to name everything. It's been a while, but I'm oddly not nervous. I don't know why not, either, but I'm just very....Dude-like.

We get to the place and start rapping. She immediately scored some points with me by asking why I set this up with the Championship game almost running concurrently. I was thisclose to going "I loooooove football. But not as much as I love pussy."

Shout-out to USC for solidifying my choice, btw.

The date goes well. She's a little less gregarious than I am, but there's a lot of talking about our jobs and what we were up to all those years. We trade off tempura and sip sake and everything is going well until her phone goes off on a loud vibration.

She looks down, and sort of flinches/rolls her eyes. I say offhandedly, as I am foolishly trying to impress her with chopstick skills I don't have, who it is.

"It's my boahhhhhhheeeeeee."

And I says to her, "It's your what now?" and she's sort of realizing she is going to have to make a decision on the fly. I continue "Either you have an odd relationship with your sheep--which you need to tell me about--or there's something else you need to tell me about. Now."

Then he braces himself for the hit...

"Boyfriend."

WHAM.

"Well, I shouldn't say that."

Uh...erm...MAHW?

"Qu'est-ce que c'est?"

Sorry, Danny, she didn't finish the line. But she explains she was going out with this guy for a while, and he was sort of getting shady at the end and she thought he was cheating on her probably wants her back, et al.

"But forget about him."

So I do.

What a fucking lie. I do, but that doesn't come for a few more hours. We finish dinner, and chat a little more about how well things went. She says it's really something we've come together like this after all these years, and we both add some class to dating by cosigning neither one of us had a Fatal Attraction for each other because while friendly in the Way Back When, we weren't OMGTHAT"STHEONE! (I doubt I'd hit puberty by then. God, 2001 was a horrible year for me. Thank you, tip your veal, try your waitress.) But now we're here, and we say we're going to get together again--it can go either way at this point.

At which point...gets better.

We hug goodnight, and there's this awkward silence between us. Probably because neither one of us let go. I can't say who zoomed who, but someone leaned into someone and that led to us kissing for a bit.

It never occured to me, breaking awkward silences with kissing.

One hell of an icebreaker, though.

So we go our seperate ways and promise to call, etc., and then I get home and talk to my Cabinet about the next plan of action. I think it's a forward situation to move with a but attached. I get the same answers. 'Cause I got to know. As I put it, "I don't want to be a backup nigga." So I call her again. He's the ex. They just broke up, and this was her first time out. The verbal faux pax was her thinking of him that way before realizing he wasn't anymore and realizing where she was. She was surprised I called back so soon, thinking I was mad because the announcement stopped me from smiling.

I explain she mistook anger for confusion, just wondering where my place in the universe was.

Apparently, it's us getting together again next week.

Off a lost cell phone.

I think blood should've started shooting out of my ears by this point. I don't get it, don't want to get it, don't care if I ever get it. Now that's it's beginning to hit home, joy is starting to spread through me. That or a coronary.

...

...

..

.

It's joy! Success!

So I didn't want to say anything until the first was in the books, and then there was the subsequent "What're we gonna do now?" And now that I know, you have been informed.

*glares* CLAP FOR ME, BITCHES!

Ambient music: Jane's Addiction - Just Because