I had a e-harm date on Sunday which annoyed me a few levels.

First off, we had a lovely chat, she was a striking redhead (in her photos), a therapist, a good listener, good laugher. I was looking forward to it.

I call a few hours earlier to confirm we are still on. No response. (We had made the date the day before).

20 minutes before 3, I text “Heading out now” (no response).

Luckily, the coffee shop was no more than a 5 minute drive. It might have been 4. So if she stood me up, I could get back home pretty quick.

She shows up (on time) and she is dressed for the gym — jogging / workout outfit, big, Jackie O sunglasses, a big baseball hat (the kind you get free at charity event — it was even autographed by someone), running sneakers, no make up, all her lovely hair tucked under the cap.

Meanwhile, I’m wearing a banana republic sweater, dark new Levis, John Varvatos shoes, I shaved, I have stuff in my hair.

It made me feel that she DIDN’T GIVE A SHIT. Didn’t do a damn thing with her hair, didn’t put even lip gloss on. It made me feel not worth 3 minutes of prep. Hell, a nice blouse and nice jeans — even flip flops would have been okay.

Oh, and she NEVER took off the sunglasses. (I suggested it, but she refused)

She was gorgeous (under all the workout-I-don’t-care) and we had a nice time (and a great talk the night before), but she shook my hand and told me to “enjoy the book” I had with me as we parted.

She’s not on board, right?

At the end of the date with the girl I’ll call “The Kid”, we hugged / kissed on the cheek and she walked off to her bike. When we hugged / kissed it lingered for a second too long and it felt electric.

I thought about her for a few days. Was that an act? Some kind of dating performance piece? And God, that body. And she was the perfect height for me — maybe 5’2.

I decided to throw some bait in the water and see what would happen.

I e-mailed her on e-harm and just wrote “Wanna come over and watch Meerkat Manor sometime?”

After a couple days, she replied: “I would love that.”

Okay, maybe she was “with it” after all — what 38 year old doesn’t know the subtext of “Come over and watch ________.”

***

It took of bit of time to arrange this — I almost thought she was going to bail. Then on the phone, she’s like “I don’t have a car.”

“Oh, okay. I can go there. Do you have a DVD player?”

“My roommates do.”

“Roommates?”

“Yes, I have two. So what’s your address — I’m ready with a pen.”

“But I’m coming over there — I need your address.”

“Oh, right. It’s ______________.”

***

I arrive at her apartment — a large 3 bedroom in a old building near Fairfax and Beverly. She’s lovingly set up snacks on a coffee table in front of a TV.

Her roommate, a bearded dude in his 30′s, a younger version of The Dude came out in flip flops with his dog and set up the DVD for us, giving me a big, hard shake.

Meanwhile, my brain is screaming: This is weird! get out! Oh yeah, there was a parrot in a cage in the living room where we were, squawking “Hello!” and pooping loudly (splat! onto newspaper) every so often.

Then, for the next 90 minutes, we watch Meerkat Manor. Maybe 4 episodes.

And she’s really into it. I kind of vanished into the woodwork, even though we were about an inch from each other. The entire time I kept trying to figure out if she was developmentally challenged. Seriously. The little hands, the little face, her kid reactions, slow to get jokes.

At the 90 minutes mark, I announce I gotta go. She walks me to the TV where I retrieve the disc and then KISS HER.

AND WHILE WE KISS, SHE DOESN’T OPEN HER MOUTH.

I’m open mouth kissing her un-opened mouth. And she KEEPS HER MOUTH CLOSED. She might not know how to kiss. How is this possible?

At some point, I massage her jaw like I’m trying to get a dog to release a bone and she opens her mouth and we kiss. Her little mouth was so small, I felt my tongue run across the roof of her inner mouth.

When I stop kissing her, she looks down at the ground / her feet. We resume kissing.

She suddenly stops kissing me. “What are you doing for Passover?”

“What? Does it matter right now?”

We go back to kissing. Then stop. Still standing up. She wouldn’t let us sit down on the couch.

“I love your nose,” she says suddenly.

“Really? Why?” I had never heard this before.

“It’s SO BIG!” She says this like a kid — not realizing it’s an insult. Like when a kid says “You’re fat” to a lady on a bus.

“It’s not really — it actually fits the shape of my face — it’s just shaped like a potato.”

After about 10 minutes of kissing standing up, I go.

And once I’m outside, it occurs to me, “Oh, she just doesn’t have a car — SHE CAN’T DRIVE.” Like doesn’t have the motor skills / can’t pass the test. She might also be a virgin.

And I feel terrible for going down this selfish road.

You know her — she was even your friend…for a while. Crisis Girl. Also Known As 3-Crisises-A-Week-Girl.

The Girl who always has a problem. It’s funny, guys will not put up with this guy as a friend — one crisis fine, two…hmmm….but three? Then some dude doesn’t get his phone call returned.

Allow me to break it down — the girl whose car is always breaking down (but doesn’t have AAA), is frequently in a major fight with a girlfriend / relative / co-worker — tears on tap, ALWAYS has a medically dependent pet (a dog with diabetes, a cat with cancer), usually broke / in debt / has money issues.

She usually needs a boyfriend to bail her out of these constant jams. The guy hangs in there ’cause she’s cute but eventually she’s so rattled, she usually can’t relax to have sex, so he moves on.

At around the 4th month of dating, Ellen moved out of the free, tiny guesthouse she was living in (in exchange for cooking for the main house’s crazy owner 5 nights a week) Santa Monica (about 10-15 minutes from me) to an expensive ($1900) loft in downtown L.A.

I had a sneaky feeling that I wouldn’t make it 30 days after she moved downtown…

The $1900 in rent was $1900 more than she had been paying and really, a lot of rent for L.A. In my building, in the neighborhood just south of Brentwood (yes, OJ’s Brentwood), a 2 Bed/2 Bath would MAX out at $1600 or so. My building rented 1 Beds for $1200 at the time.

That is to say, she had to work EVEN MORE to make that $1900 nut. I think parking was another $200 a month too.

A quick rundown of those 25 days or so:

• I always came downtown to stay over (maybe 3 nights a week, costing me $10 in parking each overnight visit)
• we never had sex in the new place.
• she would ignore me and work in the other room ALL NIGHT while I stayed in the bedroom and watched TV and wrestled with her dog. Like, I went to bed without her.
• Discovered she had ERASED all the photos of us from our Hearst Castle trip and didn’t save any back ups.
• The ONLY sign we weren’t on the way to a breakup, she made vague references about trying to get me a parking pass. This actually confused me.

THE LAST NIGHT:

She was very unaccommodating in little ways. Like insisting she keep the huge windows of the old bank building she lived in open, despite central air.

So we go to bed one night and shortly after I fell asleep, a mosquito — which I HATE HATE HATE — flew into my ear, which totally freaks me out and I ended up waking up and flailing at my head and going “Aaaaaaaaah!” loud. Right into her ear.

This was what Malcolm Gladwell calls “The Tipping Point.”

The moment where the ice cracked under the weight of a mosquito.

She woke up and was SOOOOOOOOOOO ANGRY.

“What the fuck? You just yelled in my ear!”

“I’m sorry — there was a mosquito in my ear — I didn’t do it on purpose.” To add insult to injury I might, admittedly, have giggled at her strong reaction. It was pure nerves.

Her eyes burned with rage. That was it. She was DONE. I felt it to my bones. I bet the people sleeping in the apartments all around felt that tremor of fury.

There was no love left.

We went back to bed, but something had shifted. I could feel it, like a boulder that was now under the covers. A few minutes later, I got up and put my jeans on in the dark and found my shoes. I was going to leave, sneak out.

She awoke. “What are you doing?”

“What I am I doing here — what purpose do I serve?” The Truth Bomb. I dropped the Truth Bomb.

She said nothing. There was a moment and I got back into bed. (I should have left for many reasons but ultimately didn’t want to drive 25 minutes / 14 miles back to my house at 1:15 am.)

That was the last time I saw her.

In the morning, she was gone. And she called and broke up with me a couple of days later. “I adore you but…” — she didn’t — “this isn’t working for me.”

She said she would drop my stuff off at my apartment and the two times / days she gave me she never showed up or called to cancel. Then one day I went to my car and she had left a cardboard box in front of my car, unsecured, with my medications and shit in it that all could have been stolen.

I found her on Match not long after.

I was matched with a girl named “Susie” on e-harm. (I like calling it “e-harm” instead of “e-harmony”). I think we made it through the “5 Questions of Death” and got to talk on the phone.

On the phone, she sounded like a 11 year old. You know, that tiny, mildly squeaky voice. And answers questions in short stacco bursts. And when I told a joke, it took a second for her to process it and then laugh, like when you tell a joke to a kid. You know, you can watch their brains figuring out the twist and then they go “Oh, ha ha ha.”

I didn’t know if we should get together, but she was super, super cute. 5 feet and a curvy little body. So I made plans to meet at a breakfast place near her house and left it on her VM. And then she called me back VERY EXCITED about the place I choose. Unusually excited.

CUT TO: The date. She’s 15 minutes late. And since was early, I had been sitting there for 20 minutes.

She shows up and she’s cute. And dressed like a kid. She had big white buttons on her jeans. Like she stole her pants from a Raggedy Ann doll. In fact, she’s the type of girl that would buy clothes with really big buttons. Or wear Blow Pop/Hello Kitty/SuperGirl T-shirts UN-ironically. Or overalls. It was hard to imagine her in a dress. And she had tiny little kid hands. What was not tiny was her bosom. She had a very adult bra-size. It was tough to process these two “ouvres” in my head.

It turns out she was excited about the place because she thought they had closed and they had choc. chip pancakes which she ordered and was very, very excited about. Like a kid would be. Like because they got choc. chip pancakes all was right in the world at that moment. It was kinda charming and made me uneasy at the same time. I felt like a Big Brother taking a Little Sister out for pancakes.

Conversation was tough as it sometimes is with an 11 year old. At the 35 minute mark, I said, “Well, my meter was going to run up” (which it was because she 15 mins late) and she suddenly looked sad.

“I can refill it…but while I’m gone you gotta come up with some questions to ask me, okay?” Somehow I didn’t sound like a dick when I said this.

I re-fill my meter and come back and sit down.

“What’s your favorite animal?”

For a second, I thought she was kidding. She wasn’t.

“I guess meerkats. I liked that show on Animal Planet — Meerkat Manor. Maybe 2nd, sloths. They are kinda popular now. After that Ellen show freakout with that blond actress.”

“Mine’s an elephant. And when I watch shows about elephants. I have to hold this elephant doll I have.”

Oh shit.

(TO BE CONT.)

I think I’ve been giving women too much “behavioral leeway.”

Meaning, I’ve been unusually forgiving of the bad behavior of the last few women I seriously dated, much more so if they were men dating friends of mine acting the same way.

Maybe socially I’ve been conditioned to let stuff slide and/or because of my parental role models.

But if my friends came to me with their boyfriends doing EXACT the stuff my exes did, I’d have to tie them up and have them ‘love detox’ in my house until they could think clearly.

Let’s just take my recent interactions / situations and reverse the genders and see how they read / sound.

GENDER FLIP 1: THE REDHEAD

When you apologized for being the ‘man’ for the last few days, he snaps at you, “You mean for the last 41 years?”

Then the next time you get together, you drive him to a show you bought tix for, he’s being dicky all the way there, then wants to make out in the parking lot, then when you get back to your place, he suddenly has a “stomach ache” and sleeps on your couch and doesn’t kiss you in the morning. Just stands over you in the AM and wakes you up with “Hey, I’m going.”

The next day, when you muster up the courage to tell him how you feel about what’s happening between you, he admits trying to sabotage the relationship. You tell him to take a couple days to think about what you’ve just talked about and to reassess his feelings about you and the relationship.

He calls EIGHT DAYS later and doesn’t mention anything about that night and/or that heavy phone call. For the entire 15 minute phone call.

He then texts you about 10 days later, “I had a weird dream about you are u alright?”

Then a few days after that texts “You up?” A half hour after that: “OK I won’t bother you anymore.”

I would say this guy is a major dick. And it’s actually a HER.

The last woman I called my “girlfriend” was Ellen and we started dating this month two years ago.

She was an Event Planner. I didn’t realize this at the time, but this was a terrible idea.

Usually when you met someone, someone on Match, you think they want to date someone, they have the time to date someone. That is to say, someone who is not already in a long term, committed relationship with their job / career. A career that is very demanding and possessive of that person.

I’m smarter now — I hear the signs right off the bat — “I’m a pilot; in medical school and single parent to a 1 year old AND a full-time writer; I’m in production (this is a popular one in L.A. — it means they work 60+ hours a week and/or are gone for weeks / months at a time); I’m an event planner…”

What I didn’t realize at the time was that most events are on the weekend. Those two days when OTHER events you want to take your date to is happening (concerts, lectures, plays, comedy shows) and the nights leading up to that (Friday night for example), that event planner needs to plan for their upcoming events.

That is to say, Ellen was always working. When the rest of us were playing.

On the 4th month of dating (June), I tried to plan a weekend getaway, road trip for us. This was damn near impossible. I had already tried to get her to go to Spain with me in May for a for days for a friend’s wedding, but that was off the table. Even though she worked for herself, she was a slave to her clients and POTENTIAL clients (“What if I miss a $8000 job when I am gone?”).

But I got her to agree to a road trip to Hearst Castle — we’d leave on a Friday and be back Sunday. But after we had made reservations, a birthday party came up for one of her clients and she was not happy about farming it out to a girl who worked for her freelance (and only making a $100 on the whole thing by having to hire her). The morning we left, she left a bunch of big boxes with everything in the center of the living room for her.

The next day, Saturday, the client called and was livid that the girl forgot the biggest boxes and didn’t hang this lights or something and Ellen had a meltdown and there went our weekend. Over Chinese paper lanterns or something.

We never went away again.

And then there was the Squeeze concert. On a Monday night. In July.

In addition to being an event planner (at night), during the day she was a fit model. Not a model model, but someone who was a living manequin for fashion designers. So that day she had been on her feet in heels for hours and hours. And was pretty miserable about having to go directly from work to a concert. And stand.

Basically, our love life, our dates and ME were just inconveniences in her life. Things that got in the way between her and her work. It was what it was. Ellen had gotten divorced a few years earlier after a 10+ year marriage. And when she talked about the last few years, there were a LOT of boyfriends. Short term boyfriends. Maybe at least 8 of them in 3 years. That’s almost 3 boyfriends a year. That lasted a few months. I remember thinking “I’m going to be one of those short term boyfriends.”

The woman I moved out here for was the same way — married to her work. I remember nights of just staring at the back of her head at the computer in her living room for HOURS while I watched The Sopranos and played with her cat with a fishing rod feather toy.

It was 10 years later and I had dated the same person with a different face.

I had an interesting date last night.

A woman had written me a very lovely, very flattering note on Match about a week ago. She was cute. Not traditionally beautiful, but really, really cute. A real girl next door. She even compared herself to the girl next door and Pam from ‘The Office’ in her profile. She had been a teacher.

We talked on the phone. It was okay — not bad, not great. Unremarkable. But okay. I think we even talked for 45 minutes. Aside from one story she told about teaching, I don’t recall anything else from our talk.

Now, a few days before I had first date with a 5’9 blonde (let’s call her “The Mayflower Girl”) and our first phone call was an HOUR TWENTY — and flew by. It was very sparky. And Mayflower and I even talked a couple more times before our date on Tues. Which was great. And we made out in her car.

I remember thinking to myself, “I should just ONLY go on dates with women I have THOSE kind of conversations with. Long, sparky talks.’ ‘Cause historically? Those women are the women who become my girlfriends. All the other she-was nice-enough-good-looking-enough-talk-was-okay ones really go nowhere. They just don’t.

So I meet this one last night in The Valley. Let’s call her ‘The Nice Teacher.’

She’s right on time. And looks like her pics. And we have a nice time. And it lasts for 90 minutes. And it’s fine.

But I keep looking at her and trying to figure out why I, well, why I don’t want to have sex with her.

She’s cute. And has a nice body. And nice hands. And a kind face. Blouse could have been nicer. And her hair could be longer (both easy tweaks). And she’s an easy laugher.

But every time I went to think of her naked or us having sex or kissing, it was like tuning into a radio station just out of range and all I was getting was all static.

And I was having trouble thinking of things to ask her. Usually I’m an ace at keeping the convo flowing, even to the point I feel like I’m giving CPR to a conversation — but I kept drawing a blank.

But she asks a lot of questions and seems interested in my anecdotes and answers.

I walk her to her car. She drives me to mine. I’m wondering if we are going to kiss. I land just right of her mouth.

I drive home and realize, ‘Huh, I think I’ve been out with women who probably have felt the same exact way about me — he’s cute, charming, good on paper, paid the check, but there’s just something missing I can’t put my finger on….I feel like I should give him another chance on principle, but I can’t deny my gut telling me to move on and wait for A SPARK with someone else….”

Today, I happened to hear a podcast where a young woman told a story about her father…

She had an appealing voice and personality so I looked her up. She’s an actress in LA with a great look — she looks like Meryl Streep’s daughter. Pretty, but not too pretty with a slight bit of quirk (I mean that in the best way possible)…

Step 2 – Find out if she has a boyfriend.

Found her blog, no clue there. Found her acting website. No clue there (the last line of her bio wasn’t like: “She lives happily in LA with her boyfriend and their 2 dogs Cheeto and Max.”).

Her Facebook page gave me nothing. No “In a relationship with”, no “In a relationship” and then I dug through her photos.

No vacation pics with any guy, no wedding/bridesmaid pics and her date in a suit, no pics of her and another guy (maybe she’s a part-time nun?). Then it occurred to me — well, someone’s taking all these pictures….and then a clue…

There was a group pic of her standing next to a tall, swarthy vague-y handsome guy who had his arm around her (there were a smattering of dudes posing with her in other pics, even an arm around her waist, but wasn’t picking up “She’s mine!” vibe from them) — a guy I recognized from being in her acting reel.

I click on HIS page and VOILA! It says “In a relationship with Rebecca________________”

Now….WTF? Why does he have it posted and she has NOTHING?????? No indicator of anything? Ladies? Insight me!

UPDATE: I looked at the date of the pictures of the two of them and THEY GO BACK at least TWO YEARS. So they are BF and GF for at least two years — that seems pretty serious to me….so to have her have NOTHING about him being her BF seems conspicious…

David O russell freak out

I had a date with the cowering P.A. in the corner who gets hit in the face with the books and papers.

Man, did she have a story.

She was also weird.