The 100 Girls, 100 Days Project

When starting out this project I had a few goals. One was to meet all kinds of new girls, and expand my dating circle, because maybe I was looking around in the wrong place. Another was to simply just suck it up and try to date all those girls I always wanted to but life, insecurity, circumstances, timing, whatever got in the way.  Thanks to the social networking these days, this is how we get to Emma.

Emma was a girl in my junior-year, 17th Century Lit class. Emma ,the blonde, weird, awkward girl who sat next to me and started chatting me up. I vaguely remember her constantly chewing a pencil and, they way I figure, an oral fixation is never a bad thing. So when she showed up at the dingy bar twenty minutes after the start of happy hour, I was all game for continuing something I had to hit the pause button on when I got a girlfriend six weeks into the semester.

Immediately I noticed that she kept biting her fingernails. I let out a sly smile, but she caught it. I am nothing but indiscreet half the time. I always get caught. Something happened mid-date though. I might not have noticed it back then, but her awkwardness wasn’t so much awkward as it was weirdness and full on non-sequiters. And her voice was weirder than I remembered. I never noticed it until then that she almost always had a shaky quality in her voice.  You know how people sound when they are cold? She sounded like this all the time. Within half an hour I checked out, and I let her do most of the talking. Despite my lack of intentions with this whole damn thing, I knew I outgrew this particular girl, and I was feeling an odd moment of not wanting to put myself through it. I got out of there in 2 hours and I only had one scotch and soda.

And I think sobriety might have been the biggest misstep of the night, because I made a call that I really wish I could have blamed on drinking. I called Kara and asked if I could come over and talk. I went over there, and she was shocked when I turned down a drink, but I was nervous. Uncharacteristically rattled, and in a weird mood, six words really can change the course of things.

Let’s make a go of it.

She laughed, and asked if I was joking…but I wasn’t. Something just clicked. To be honest I haven’t been sleeping very well since the whole thing happened. I hadn’t slept great before it either, but this just added to it. I can’t move my neck these days. I can’t tell if it’s stress or bad sleeping positions, or the fact that I’m getting old. I told her that 30 days of half-crappy dates, drunken one-night-stands, and a continuing binge drinking might be a little too much to take. I had reached a boiling point. But she wasn’t having it. She equated it to a freak out over being single, and having to plow through the dating scene

She wasn’t exactly entirely wrong. I think I just got weirded out being single, and was clinging to the one thing closest to a relationship I could get. I was probably just forcing myself into l feelings because she was the first girl I wouldn’t regret sleeping with. If I was honest with myself about Kara, I really couldn’t see it realistically going anywhere good. I was deluding myself.

So after a third-project panic attack, I will bounce back into this with a renewed vigor.