Written in my old LiveJournal, from five years ago today:
I called him at 7:01 to let him know that I’d be a minute late. “Well, more like two minutes,” I said, since I was already at the one-minute mark. “I’m just waiting for you outside,” he said, and I crossed to the opposite side of the street so I could check him out from a distance when I got there. I’d seen a couple of pictures of him, but after my best friend, Tracey, had a horrible almost-blind-date experience where the guy looked great in his pictures and literally like a cartoon in person, I was skeptical. I’d told him in an e-mail earlier this week, “I’ll arrive in disguise to scope you out beforehand, so please plan to be there a few minutes early.” He’d written back, “Okay, fair enough. I have to warn you though, I will also be in disguise. Look for someone dressed as a goofy-looking persian guy in a ‘business casual’ ensemble with a briefcase,” and I’d replied, “I will likely be dressed as a mid-16th Century Scottish warrior and will spend the entirety of the meal playing renditions of Celine Dion ballads on my bagpipes. You should feel free to remove your costume, as I’m not sure I could stand to be seen with a goofy-looking persian guy.”
He wasn’t goofy-looking at all, though. He was born in Iran and lived there for a year, but he just looked like a regular, old white guy. Who happened to dress better than any regular, old white guy I’ve ever dated. He was wearing a brown sweater with a white collared shirt underneath and black pants with brown pinstripes and had-to-be-picked-out-by-an-ex-girlfriend black shoes, and I thought he was pretty much the most adorable human being ever. He stuck out his hand and said, “I’m Kamran,” and I said, “Handshakes are weird, and I feel like I know you already, anyway. Let’s hug.” He said, “We’ll talk about the possibility of a hug if this encounter goes well.” He was trying to joke about it. I said, “Encounter?!”, and he smiled as he opened the door to the restaurant for me.
It was a macaroni bar in the East Village called S’Mac that I’d chosen for us after a co-worker recommended it to me. While we looked at the menu, I asked, “Will you think me too rebellious if I put broccoli in mine?”, and he said, “That is pretty daring.” I asked what he was getting, and when he said he was thinking about the brie, I punched him in the arm and said, “I knew that’s what you were going to say!” He was a little hurt that I’d already pegged his entire personality in the first two minutes of our date.
The place was packed, so we went to the bar at the window and sat next to each other with our feet propped up on the windowsill. I stuffed my hands in the pockets of my hoodie, and I saw him look at my reflection in the glass in front of us. I asked him about his job, and he said he’s a patent advisor at a law firm that’s going to pay for him to go to law school, even though both of his degrees are in physics. He just moved here two months ago after finishing up his Masters at a school that he kept modestly referring to as a “college in New Jersey” until he slipped up once and said Princeton. Princeton! I hate capitalism, and I hate lawyers, but education still impresses me.
Without any broaching from me, he mentioned how much he wants to see The Science of Sleep, which led to me ranting about why I hate Woody Allen so much. We talked about old David Lynch films and how Zach Braff is so amateur and narcissistic and great. He asked me about the book I was carrying–the new Chuck Klosterman, naturally–which led to me ranting about why I hate On the Road so much. I told him I would’ve never agreed to go out with him had I known he liked Jack Kerouac, and he said, “How fortunate for me that I didn’t mention it in an attempt to impress you.”
He’d used the phrase hits the spot in an e-mail the day before, and I’d written, “I wonder where that comes from. That’s your research project for tomorrow.” When I asked him if he’d remembered, he reached in his pocket for a folded piece of paper, and I said incredulously, “NO!” He recited facts to me about the origin of the phrase and then handed me the paper, which had the Pepsi jingle that supposedly made it popular–and the parodies that followed–neatly typed in a font that wasn’t your run-of-the-mill Times New Roman default. In one spot, he’d accidentally written fo instead of for, and he said he’d noticed the error but liked it too much to correct it. I handed the paper back to him, but as he began to fold it, I snatched it away and said, “I just decided that I should keep it,” and I was embarrassed that he knew I wanted a souvenir of him.
Our food was delivered to us in little skillets with potholders sewn to fit the handles perfectly, and I asked him what he thought we should hide in the potholders. I ripped off a little piece of his Pepsi jingle paper, and he feigned like he was hurt. I asked him what we should write on it, and he said smarts, so I tried to impress him with my handwriting and then shoved the paper into the potholder before putting it back around the handle. We agreed that we were sorry to miss the moment when someone discovers it. I told him about a shirt Tracey had in high school with a pocket in the sleeve where I used to store things like Doritos, and when I finished, I said, “I’m sorry. You’ll have to get used to me talking about her every other minute.” And then I realised that crap!, I’d just assumed that he was liking me and would be seeing me in the future enough for me to mention Tracey another 100,000 times. He went to fetch forks for us, and when I swiveled around in my chair to see where he’d gone, he was watching me from the side of the counter. And he smiled at me and I smiled at him like neither of us could help it, and then I turned back around and had to cover my mouth to keep from giggling. It was one of The Most Perfect Moments in Dating History™.
After we ate, he left me again to get some containers for our massive leftovers, and I noticed a Post-It folded in half lengthwise underneath his chair. I picked it up and read the writing, which was the address of the restaurant, my phone number, and a couple of professors’ names. I’d wanted it to be something scandalous–like maybe a love poem he’d written for me but been unable to give me out of embarrassment, or, you know, a detailed drawing of his genitals–but no luck. When he came back, he saw where I laid it beside his napkin and asked, “Why did I get this out?” I said, “I pulled it from your pocket while you weren’t paying attention.” He said, “What?!”, and then I laughed and he knew I was kidding. Trust me; this was very cute at the time.
He asked me what I do for fun, and I said, “I walk.” As we got outside, he asked where I wanted to go, and I said we should walk to the East River.” He said, “I’ve heard that Avenue D is pretty shady,” and I said, “Luckily, I know Kung Fu.” He asked, “So you could protect my honor?”, and I said, “But I wouldn’t.” He said, “Well, I have . . . a ballpoint pen?”, and I said, “There are something like 36 ways to kill someone with a pen, right?” I led him down the street and asked him if he thought he could ever poke someone’s eye out with a pen. He asked, “Just for fun?” and I said, “No, like, in a rape situation.” He said, “I suppose I could do anything if I had to.” I said, “Not me. I’d take an unwanted penile invasion over that squishy eyeball-poking-out sound any day.” Just then, I realised that we were walking toward Avenue D even after we’d decided not to, and I asked, “Why did you let me take us the wrong way!?” He said he didn’t want to be the one to break it to me, so he decided just to go along with it. I asked, “Do you feel like you’re about to get raped?”, and he said, “A little bit.”
So we turned around and headed back to Avenue B to this amazing bar called Luca Lounge that was filled with Victorian-looking red velvet furniture. We went to the empty back room to sit at the ends of two couches that formed an L-shape and seriously talked about music for, like, two hours. He made fun of me for loving Bush, and I made fun of him for loving Sublime. He told me about his college band back in California, and I told him about all of the awesome band names I’ve thought of over the years. I asked him what his guilty pleasure bands are, and he said, “You really know the right questions to ask.” We talked about the two years of his childhood when he lived in Ohio before moving to Idaho and the fact that he revisited Ohio in 2000 and went to the science museum where I was working at the time. We wondered if we saw each other then and wished for a map of our lives so we could see how many times our paths have crossed. Then we somehow got on the topic of how badly I want to take up smoking and then all of the drugs we’ve tried, and when we were finished, I said, “I can’t believe we just had that conversation. That’s what you talk about when you’re trying to seem cool and impress each other.” He asked, “Aren’t we trying to seem cool and impress each other?”
I kept having to get up to use the restroom, because I seriously drank four gallons of water at dinner, and right before I left one time, I asked, “You wanna time me?”, and he said, “Ready . . . GO!” When I came back, I said, “I just remembered that cellphone commercial where the man asks the woman if she wants to time him while he goes to the bathroom and we’re supposed to think this makes him a horrible date.” He said, “I thought of it, too, but I didn’t want to tell you.” I said, “I don’t care; I always thought it made him adorable,” and he said, “So did I.” And then he looked at me out of the corner of his eye and smiled. !!!
He insisted on paying for my soda at the bar, and I said, “But you already paid for dinner.” He said, “That’s just how I roll,” and I told him that he couldn’t have said anything lamer or awesomer. We both needed to get to Union Square to catch our trains home, so we got on the L together, and he mentioned how incredible it was that the rain managed to control itself all night. I said, “New York is the worst when it’s raining. The garbage smell is about 400 times more powerful, and all of those assholes walk around with their giant umbrellas with the–” He finished my sentence with, “–the two tiers.” Which is just what I was going to say.
And then we had tons of babies.
Or, uh, I mean, . . .
When we got to Union Square, he asked, “Can I have a hug?”, and I said, “Isn’t this your stop, too?” He said, “Yeah, but I want a hug, anyway.” So we hugged, and it was wonderful, because he’s so close to my height–which is a perfectly respectable 5’7″–that our faces touched. He walked downstairs with me to ask me questions about my schedule for the weekend while we waited on the platform for my train, and we decided to go see the new Zach Braff movie. He said, “I’ll call you,” and I said, “Thanks for taking me out,” and he said, “The pleasure was mine,” which is really cheesy in writing but really nice in person. I gave him another hug, and he said, “I’m still going to wait until your train comes.” I said, “But we’ve already said goodbye! Now we’re gonna be all awkward.” He asked, “What’s better than two goodbyes?”, and I said, “No goodbyes.” And I looked at him out of the corner of my eye, and he was looking at me out of the corner of his eye, and Tracey says that this is the moment in the trailer of the movie version of the date right before the screen goes black and the title comes up.
And here we are, five years later:
And I’m still just as excited about him today as I was back then.
