Wednesday, March 3, 2010

Phone-worthy

Last Thursday I unexpectedly ended up for a couple beers down at Tom English's with a first date. It was all quite random. We had IM'd on OKC several months earlier but never connected. It was only on this, a wickedly stormy night, both of us spontaneous, that we found good reason to meet up.

So .... I won't go on too much, except to note it was a decent enough date that he stopped over for a nightcap and dropped his wallet in the creases of my couch ... which meant we had to reconnect the next day on our lunch hours so I could return it.

Fast forward to a few hours ago. We met again for a beer out at Tom English's. He's working for a tech start-up. He's been working 14-hour days the last two, after having just worked all weekend. He's exhausted. He's distracted by Sarah Palin on the Jay Leno Show in our mid-conversation. He needs to go home to bed just after the segment on Shaun White, even after I offer(and give him) a back-rub ... while sitting at the bar ... even though it was he who asked me out.

And now I'm sitting here at my kitchen table, alone, writing to y'all.

(Hm. Kind of a killjoy of a beer, 'twas.)

So here's the point of this pointlessness: I want to know how soon a date gets entered as a contact in a cell phone .... or how long he remains a faceless 617-xxx-xxxx. It's a true balancing act, I tell you: assign it not soon enough, and I have to wonder who the faceless texter might be; assign it too soon, and it's just another thing I have to frustratingly delete when the endeavor goes south.

This gentleman has kept me guessing. After Date #1 he did check in with me again Sunday night (as 617-xxx-xxxx), to which I responded ... so I figured we were headed for a Date #2 and assigned him a name. Then it took him an entire day to again respond ... so I wondered if I had over-anticipated. Then tonight our texting conversation re-upped and led us to a date, and I figured I was in good shape. Then the date was unsatisfying ... and now I'm (wait for it ..... wait for it) frustrated. Not "delete from the phonebook" frustrated. More "what the hell? Build me up just to fade to the finish?" frustrated.

No, no.

Actually ... it's that I did capitulate and add him to my phone when maybe he's not going to to be worthy.

Or ... he is worthy, and I find myself just more increasingly impatient and unsympathetic than I should be knowing another man with an all-consuming job.

[Or if I'm just, again, (argh), frustrated at my own lack of ability to tell the difference.]

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

@Karin. I have too many friends in IT whose careers interfere incessantly with their, ahem, personal lives. Just an observation.

veggiegal said...

Hmmm, well... I agree, getting distracted and saying he has to go home - not great signs. But who knows really - maybe he really WAS exhausted, and is very interested in Palin? I also struggled with the "what does it mean" so much... Interestingly, when I met the person who I later married (we met when I was 35), it was the simplest thing I ever had. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said. I liked.

As for phone numbers - my solution was simple - it went in the phone as soon as I got the number. But the name was something like "dan-match". That way I always knew who contacted me. Erasing a "dan-match" wasn't very dramatic, and I could take my time to graduate them to just "dan".

PS: I commented before as "anonymous", I will start using a name now :) Also, been following your blog since you've been featured on Boston.com about the marathon (was that about a year ago?) - you are a talented writer! I never thought I'd follow for this long...

Karin said...

@squig -- well, with advent of Blackberry and iPhone, it isn't just IT folks .... I can tell you I was lying in bed once with a man who was sending messages to his software developers. It happens.

@veggiegal -- well, thanks for the kind words and, cliched as it is, thanks for reading because it assists in my wanting to keep writing.

And I know exactly what you're saying about "simple". It's just not simple to get.

Marvel Boy said...

You should be thankful that you have "phone add" capability. I dropped my cell last weekend, and though it is still fully functional, it has erased--and will no longer accept new entries to--my phone book. (Which is another way of saying, I suppose, that it is not indeed fully functional.) Thank you, then, Karin, for keeping the same cell phone number the last umpteen years--it's in my internal memory banks.

Karin said...

@Joshua. I love you for good reason.