Air & Lack Thereof

Today I had a day off from teaching. Still, at 2pm I had scheduled an appointment with an Intro student to help her with her final paper. Her name is Haley Berry; I try my damnedest to not pronounce it like the movie star, but my stupid predilection for obvious humor is like an itch in my mind I dare not scratch. Long ago I realized that when a joke or reference like that is so easy to make, the person in question has most certainly heard it millions of times before, so I refrain. Like there’s a nice girl in AA named Dolly, so of course most of the morons she comes into contact with greet her with a natural "Hello Dolly!" when they see her.

To me, there’s no reason to make a joke that the poor girl must have suffered through her entire adult life.

…

So I spent most of the afternoon reading and drinking coffee in a place downtown called the Metro. It also serves beer, but today I took advantage of their comfy couches, reading Kierkegaard and Henry Miller and drinking copious amounts of fair trade coffee.

Downtown Augusta by the way has a sort of dilapidated charm to it; 50 years ago it was more vibrant, but then the textile industry here collapsed and the people who could migrated out to the suburbs which are now their own kind of hell: indistinguishable bourgeois subdivisions, fast food franchises, soulless strip-mall purgatorios.

…

On another lounge chair across from me sat this super cute girl with short red hair wearing headphones and working on a laptop. I continuing to read, doing my best to not stare but glancing discreetly at her from time to time.

      (I always stop to pause when I use the the words ‘discreet’ or ‘discrete’; i love homonyms. Of course you know ‘discreet’ means sly or secret whereas ‘discrete’ means different or separate. I love having such a fetish for grammar and vocabulary!)

After half an hour or so a gentleman around my age sat down next to me, doing something with his smartphone for a few minutes until he asked if i wanted to play chess. I said okay after assuring him that I am a middling chess player at best. And that is on one of my good days.

It was a good game which he ended up winning, but fun. We talked about books and turned out to be into a lot of the same stuff. I mentioned I was teaching a class on Existentialism and he had some experience with Sartre, which figured for an interesting conversation. I remarked on the cliche of the two of of (1) drinking coffee in a cafe, (2) playing chess, (3) smoking cigarettes, and (4) discussing Jean-Paul Sartre. If only we had been wearing black turtlenecks we surely would have timewarped back to Montmarte circa 1940.

After chess he asked me if i had a cellphone charger, to which I replied in the negative. He asked the redhead across from us, who ran out to her car to oblige him. He left for some reason and I struck up a conversation with her; what prompted it exactly I don’t remember. But we ended up talking for quite a while about a variety of things: education, my teaching, her interests, our mutual interest in grammar… you know, fascinating, sexy stuff. I told her my name, which, as always happens, she found curious. I asked and she told me hers: Burney. Interesting… is it short for something? No. Then at one point she saw someone she knew over by the pool table and went over to say hi.

After just a few minutes she returned and sat back down in her chair. I went over.

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Sure."

(sheepishly) "Do you have a boyfriend?"

"No…"

"Do you want to go out with me some time?"

"On a date?"

(with only a little hesitation) "Yes."

"Yes!" she said with a smile. She said she thought I was smart and interesting. I told her the same and that I thought she was really pretty. My heart was about to burst!

It felt like sunrise in my soul. I said, how about this weekend? She said, um, sure! She hesitated because she was thinking of finals, but it turned out her last final is on Thursday. We traded numbers and I told her I’d call her Friday.

As a side note, I also though my new chess buddy Aaron was really cool. We traded numbers and said we should hang out sometime. We both frequent the Metro pretty often anyway.

…

So today I made TWO new friends, one of whom may possibly end up being the cutest, smartest girl I’ve ever dated. It’s way way way too early to tell what’s going to happen in the future, but right now I have that famously eulogized euphoria of meeting someone new who I like a whole lot. She seems to like me a lot too.

And this proves that I can actually ask a girl out on a date – not just one of those safe-bet cop outs like "hey i’m going to be hanging out with some friends at _, you should meet us there." i actually met and introduced myself to a total stranger, struck up a pleasant conversation, and asked her point-blank on a REAL DATE. like an actual real adult person.

i’m trying to not invest really anything in whatever outcome happens… my plan is to go out with her, try to make it a fun evening, let us get to know each other a bit, and leave it at that. que sera, sera. but this is the most excited i’ve been in a while.

as a bonus, this makes ending things with Laine exponentially easier.

yep, things are briefly looking up for old Zeno. at least for the time being. as the Athenian statesman Solon famously said:

"Count no man happy until he is dead."