There are those dates that you know beforehand will not aspire to much in the future tense, but they will at least entertain you. These date will at least be a good conversation, time well spent, something you didn't know and now you do...
And then you get disappointed.
Such was the experience with the pseudo intellectual.
False advertising
We all do it, don't we?
We can say a few words in a certain language and we claim we speak it fluently.
We can do creative things with a few vegetables and tofu and we claim that we are great cooks.
We were in some exotic place a few years back and we claim we are world travelers.
We all lie.
A little.
It's expected.
That is why once I set up to meet someone from the dating site I never return to their profiles to memorize their fantasies...
(Once, a friend told me, a friend of hers went out with this guy with a Masters, several languages, etc. When she met him it turned out he didn't have of the things he claimed. He said that he saw the profile filling like goals to achieve. She is still with him.)
Anyhow, we met at Cafe Olin. I got there half an hour early so I ordered a glass of white wine and read. I sent him a message telling him I was sitting outside. I noticed he had visited my profile at least five times in the previous hour.
I saw him come in and not see me. After a few minutes of mirth I asked the waiter to tell him where I was. He called me from his table, claiming it was more comfortable (it was).
He ordered a bottle of wine. And he could never stare me in the eye.
Here I thought I was meeting an Eastern European with several languages, a lot of knowledge and a very entertaining and smart conversation. We can all have a little bit of expectations, no?
He was not a professor, as he claimed, or at least not in my books. Someone who teaches others how to pass standardized tests... well... that is very low on the scale of professorship. It is even below teaching high schoolers, even bellow middle school!
He was amazed at my languages, and, as usual, he wanted to guess where I was from. He, of course, didn't.
We ordered some food. Food! wow, this is the first date in a long time in which there is something solid, which will enter our mouths! (no pun intended!)
So a salad for me, a sandwich for him, lots of wine for both of us. Expectations rise!
And the conversation didn't flow. There was something there that just made it very difficult to engage.
We spoke of my classes and of his appearances in the telly (he was raised in London) in the Russian Channel. Mostly he spoke of anti-americanisms and the difficulties of going to academia.
He was very happy by the way the waitress uncorked our wine and he kept not looking at me.
At one point of the conversation, with the stumbling on topics without flow, he asked and asked questions, and I... started to lie.
I knew I would never see him again, he was too boring to waste another evening, and, why should I tell him real things about my life anyway? Who was he? Why did he, out of the rest of human beings in the world at that precise moment, deserve to hear bits and pieces about my life? What would it do to me to share something with him? Nothing.
So I lied. About my brothers' jobs, and about a trip I am about to take, I lied about my father and about my past... It was incredible how easy it became! He would never know and I, well, I continued to play with my fiction to take me thru the rest of the wine and the check so I could go home...
(Before I finish this one, he was very surprised I had a metro card even though he knows I live in this city. I found that very bizarre And, when we stood up, finally, I was much taller than him, much. No more Oompla Loompa - Hobbits situations for me! (check post 1)
No comments:
Post a Comment