This is one of those posts where you’re either going to hate me or like me more after I tell you what a terrible human being I am. (Here is where you say, Is there any other kind?)
So I went on a date a couple of weeks ago. Nice guy. Wore a button-down shirt to our coffee date. Let me pick the time and place (oh come on, did you expect me to wait for him to do it?). Brown curly hair, brown eyes. Graduate student in history (my undergrad major). According to his email, which was basically an online dating profile: “Hiking, playing frisbee golf, and drinking lots of Twinings black tea are the hobbies I’m most involved with at the moment.”
Obviously, halfway through the date we started talking about Twilight. He asked me my favorite poet, and I said Elizabeth Bishop. This was the only question he asked me all night. The rest of time he spent answering my questions with interview-ready responses. When I asked why he went back to graduate school, he gave me his “list of qualifications” off his resume, did not ask why I was in graduate school or anything about what I was studying, and then he said, “I feel like I’m at an interview!”
To my credit, I didn’t mock him. Then.
Therefore I was desperate to string my one question out as long as possible, so I said, “Of course, a little farther down the line of favorite things to read…you know, Bishop at the top, but about ten down you find Twilight.”
He hung in there. “Of course,” he said, “that makes so much sense.” Or something like that. The fact that I can’t recall the conversation perfectly (one of my greatest skills in life) tells you pretty much all you need to know about how things were going at this point.
“No, really,” I said.
“Totally,” he said. I nodded. “Oh…” he said. “Really.”
I love talking to people about how much I don’t hate Twilight. You can find just a few of the reasons here. I think Stephenie Meyer writes a nice, clean sentence that doesn’t get in the way of me chanting make out make out make out. And no, I don’t care if it’s with Edward or Jacob. I just think people should make out more. I’ll save the rest of my reasons for when we talk face-to-face. I find it’s a good litmus test, and I don’t want to ruin it before I have the chance to see if you turn red or blue. So I told him that yes, I have in fact read all 4 books, but woefully have not yet made time to catch up on the movies.
He said— I kid you not— “Well, I guess all this really does is reflect badly on me, that I’m judging something before I even give it a chance.” He said this sincerely. About Twilight. As if the hype hasn’t give him a pretty good idea of whether it’s his cup of Twinings black tea.
I should’ve known: in the email he sent me asking for the date, he wrote, “If I had one wish I would ask that the everyone on the globe have access to quality education considering many of the world’s problems are due to ignorance.”
I really, really hope he gets that Mr. America sash. That’s such a good answer.
xxo,
MM
