From the gentlemen in this world...

Now that I am in my fourth of what will be five years at Temple University, I suppose it is time for me as a major in political science and journalism to put my blogging skills to use and join the blogosphere.

Where do I begin? Well, I am currently taking a class on writing humor, so I will start with a rather recent story.

I love games. I like watching sports, and I especially like going to sporting events. I like card games, board games, video games, puzzles, brainteasers, and the like.

The only game that I have found I am not especially fond of is the dating game.

For a long time I called myself a serial monogamist for having been in two long-term relationships during a period of about seven years. After taking some time to heal from a difficult breakup, I decided to see what this dating thing was all about.

“You’re never going to meet someone worth dating in a bar,” is the way a variation of the saying goes, but I always felt the statement to be unfair. The saying implies that decent people don’t go to bars. And well, I go to bars, so now the saying can’t be true. So in the past few months I’ve put on my best heels and my brightest lipgloss more times than my body is telling me it can handle and I’ve gone out to put decency to the test.

I am not a heartbroken, bitter, single, always complaining about how all guys are jerks kind of girl. In fact, I like guys, and I like relationships. But the stories I could tell about the guys I have met in the last several months make me question the true meaning of decency. That, or my picker is broken. Or I have a bum magnet. Even better- an ultra-magnetic bum magnet.

I’ll save the saga of dating stories for a chapter in a novel I hope to one day write, but this most recent dating escapade really just did it for me. I hate cliché sayings like, “This one was the icing on the cake,” but why not; This was the icing on the cake.

I make some extra money bartending one night a week at a bar in Philadelphia. Three weeks back this shockingly handsome guy comes walking in and orders a beer. The Canada v. Switzerland hockey game brings him into the bar, and he ends up telling me that he is taking his best friends girlfriend out for a few drinks since his buddy would be playing poker all night. What a good friend. The bar was slow so I got to spend some time talking to him, and after giving him my number (which until then I had yet to give my number out at work), he leaves as the bar closes and texts me on the way home.

I take a girlfriend with me to meet him and two of his friends at a bar the following night and we have a great time. I don’t hear from him until the middle of the following week, but we made plans to meet again once the weekend came around. We have a nice time again at another bar, though I wasn’t under the impression that he was really very interested in seeing me for I don’t know, let’s say, a date.

I text him the following day to see if he’d made it home safe with his friends, and he responds and asks me what I am doing for the evening, to which I reply my friends and I hadn’t yet decided. I ask him what he is doing and I don’t get a response for the entire night. I’ve come up with two possibile reasons for this: One, he either thinks I have no plans yet because he thinks I am hoping he will make plans with me, or two, he thinks that if he tells me where he is going I will show up there. One can only speculate.

I go out with my friends as I had been planning, and we have a fabolous night. As the night comes to an end, we’re walking down the street to hail a cab and there he is, standing on the sidewalk with two of his friends and a few girls. Perfect. I stroll on over and give a casual, “Fancy seeing you here,” to which he replies,

“Uhh, I was just going to go pee on this building.”

And yes, he really truly did say that. Priceless.

I’m not so much as sad that he lacked the common decency to respond to a simple text message as I am for the quality of person that I was interested in investing my time into. He’s a few years older than I, so now I’m just really naïve in that I’d been thinking I’d met some mature older guy. What were the chances that I would end up running into him in a city as big as Philadelphia? I would have thought they were slim. But the chances that I would get a line like “Uhh, I was just going to go pee on this building,” had to have been rather high, and the fact that he told me he goes tanning on a regular basis should have been the first indicator. My picker is definitely broken.

I still think the statement, “You’re never going to meet a decent person in a bar,” is rather unfair, but as a result of my experiences in recent months, I’d argue that you’re not likely to meet a decent person -worth dating- in a bar.

Wondering what happened to the guy, are you? Funny, me too. Though I am not interested in another thing he has to say, I have yet to hear from him anyway. Oh, the indecency of it all.

“Well, if I ever need to get rid of a girl, at least I now know what to say,” says my best guy friend as I give my roommates and friends the next-day version of the story over breakfast. “Oh and Sarah,” he continues, “From the gentlemen in this world: We’re sorry.”