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You know it’s bad when your mother hides your cell phone to keep you from drunk dialing your most-recently-snuffed-out-flame. But before we proceed with the events of Sunday night, I suppose I ought to finish up with Saturday.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the text message I received from Date #17 on Saturday afternoon. Lest you think me the sort of woman who would resort to smashing candy canes with a hammer for no good reason, I was provoked.
A few hours earlier, having failed in my attempts to make sense of his convoluted voicemail, I found myself rapidly approaching the point of no return, by which I mean I no longer cared about salvaging our would-be relationship with rational behavior. Instead, I whipped out my phone and fired off a quick text:
I’m having a great hair day and I’ve shaved my legs. Are we on for tonight or not?
(And although I do sometimes exaggerate the ridiculousness of my correspondence for the sake of good blogging, this is not one of those times. Those were my exact words.)
The gist of his reply was as follows:
Hey Kat, I know that I asked you out for Saturday night, and I know you turned down an invite from one of your girlfriends to spend time with me, and I gather you’ve spent all morning shaving your legs, plucking your eyebrows and doing your hair—and that’s not including your 45 minutes of cardio at the gym so that you will continue to look hot in the unlikely event that I ever actually introduce you to anyone as my “girlfriend”— but here’s the thing: I’ve got this business trip coming up and I need to pack so this evening’s not really a good night for me. I suggest you take yourself to the local coffee shop and spend this cold winter’s eve alone and hating your life. I hear they have excellent chai lattes at Philadelphia Java Company…
Those weren’t his exact words (this time I am exaggerating), but they may as well have been because in addition to spending my Saturday night smashing candy canes, I did indeed head over to Philadelphia Java Company. There, I wasted the majority of my evening (and my chai latte) feeling sorry for myself and lamenting my love life (or lack thereof) to those Facebook friends unfortunate enough to find themselves in my wake.
After making a general nuisance of myself, I managed to put myself to bed before cruising the British Airways website for last minute holiday deals (yes, I’m still going through that phase where my solution to everything in life is a ticket to Heathrow). On Sunday night, however, I took a bit of a nose dive.
I had a few drinks. I wouldn’t say that I was drunk per se, but I may or may not have spent the entire ride home singing at the top of my lungs (Cee Lo really speaks to me these days). Upon my return to Casa Richter, I discovered an email from Date #17 in my inbox, prompted, presumably, by the rather despondent voicemail I’d left in response to the news of his “business trip.”
“Uh oh,” my dad said as I crept into the kitchen with my laptop. “What now?”
“An email!” I sobbed, throwing myself onto the couch (it’s not for nothing that I work in the arts). “An email from Date #17!”
It comprised mainly psycho-babble BS but that didn’t stop me from bawling my eyes out. Nor did it stop me from getting upset with myself for getting so upset in the first place, or— even worse— from threatening to call Date #17 right then and there to give him a piece of my mind.
“What the hell is wrong with me?” I wailed. “I’m twenty five years old! I have a Masters degree! I should be above this!” (I may or may not have interjected the “F” word every few syllables.)
After a good sniffle, I finally managed to pull myself together. Taking a deep breath, I transferred the last of my mint chocolate Christmas trees from their candy molds to a storage container and announced to my parents, “I am going to bed now because I have disadvantaged children to teach in the morning!”
I’m not really sure how this was relevant but it made sense at the time and left me feeling, for whatever reason, somewhat vindicated.
It wasn’t until I slipped into my PJs that I realized my phone (which also serves as my alarm clock) was missing. Rather sheepishly, I crept downstairs and asked, “Umm… did one of you hide my phone?”
“Your mother,” my father replied, jerking his thumb over his shoulder. “It’s in the wine rack.”
Sure enough, beneath the bottles of Two Buck Chuck, lay my cell phone—my sad, silent little cell phone, in all of its single girl glory.
“Don’t worry,” I assured my dad. “I’m not going to call him. I’m just going to set my alarm and go to bed.”
But I didn’t go to bed. At least not straightaway. Instead, I made my way on over to Match.com, located my old profile and clicked “reactivate.”
