Ahem

Dear readers, you may be wondering where the dating has gone in this here dating blog. It’s not one of those very rare (and usually) brief moments where I’m keeping my dating activities to myself. There are simply no dating activities to report.

The last discussion on this topic was about “Sailor,” the work fella I have an enormous crush on. Nothing has changed. I still have a crush but we’re no more or less friends than before our one and only, apparently nonromantic, date.

However, I’m going to spend a little time talking about Sailor and his significance in my romantic life. Before he came on the scene, which was right after the phase out of Kansas, and during the time of my few dates with Kenny (mostly not written about), I was feeling dull and flat romantically. That wasn’t a bad thing. I wasn’t feeling lonely or desperate. I was flattered by Kenny’s attentions and proud of myself for ending things so cleanly with Kansas. I was feeling good about not feeling anything much.

I’m feeling that way again and it’s odd. I’m so used to obsessing given the slightest provocation or opportunity. When I wrote my blue post about Sailor, I’d say I was obsessing about him, slightly. But I as I predicted, the blues were gone in about two days. And what did I do about Sailor? Not nothing, but close. I invited him to see Shawn’s play. Sailor declined politely. He didn’t invite me to anything else and I didn’t invite him to anything else—until yesterday.

I went two weeks with no contact with Sailor. No contact and no obsessing about someone on whom I possibly have the biggest crush of my life. It’s just…not like me.

I’ll get back to the contact we had yesterday in a minute, but I want to tell a little story about me and obsessing first.

I wondered recently if I wait to obsess until after the first physical contact. Not surprisingly, the answer is “no.” I can obsess immediately after the first good evening with someone. I did just that a few years ago about my then-future boyfriend, “Jeff.”

I met Jeff about five years ago when I went to a play with Pele and a bunch of her friends. Actually, most of the people there were friends of a friend of Pele’s, meaning lots of strangers. One of those strangers was Jeff. As soon as the play was over, we gravitated towards each other and spent the rest of the evening occupied in lively conversation. We exchanged numbers long before the end of the night. I was very happy and sure that I’d be hearing from Jeff soon.

But I didn’t hear from him soon. I waited and waited for him to call. He didn’t call. I obsessed. The decision whether or not to call him was a major distraction from everything else in my life, including work and a weekend trip to New York. Eventually, I called him and left a message. He returned my call (a couple of days later!) and we made a date. Not long after that we were a couple. The relationship lasted three or four months. Jeff is a super sweet guy and I don’t regret dating him, but I think I made the relationship happen through force of will. Not that Jeff didn’t like me. No, the problem was more that I didn’t like Jeff--enough. But because I’m always looking for a boyfriend, always wanting a boyfriend, always hoping for a boyfriend, I got myself a boyfriend. Or something like that. (Caveat: I’m not at all sure what story Jeff would tell. I sincerely liked him and would have been happy to maintain a friendship, after a few months break, but he wasn’t interested.)

Clearly, I obsessed over Tim and Owen. Not so much over Kansas, though. I didn’t count that as progress, though, since the whole thing was so misguided. Perhaps I didn’t give myself enough credit.

Ok, back to Sailor. At work, we recently got a bunch of new software, including MS Outlook (we had Lotus Notes before) and MS Office Communicator, which is an intranet instant messaging client. Previously, we had no instant messaging capacity at all, and we still can’t use internet IM clients.

I’ve had access to the IM thingy for weeks and weeks, but not everyone else did. I’ve only used it so far to chat with one person and not about work. Now, when you add someone as a “contact” the program sends a message to that person. Earlier this week, I got just such a message from Sailor. I was pleased. While it would be fun to speculate on all the reasons he might have added me (true love, perhaps?), the main message is that he regards me as a friend.

However, he never did send me a message. More surprisingly, perhaps, I never sent him a message either. Don’t think I wasn’t tempted. But there was no particular message to send and I figured he’d get in touch with me if he felt like it. He didn’t, and I didn’t either, so no contact.

The next part of the story you’ve heard before—each year I get four pairs of Nationals tickets through a season ticket sharing plan at work. Each year, I have trouble using all four pairs and/or finding companions to the games. My last pair of tickets for this year is the day before I leave for Israel. Ideally, I'd sell the tickets. My second choice was to have Pele come with me to the game if I couldn't sell them. But Pele can’t back me up because she may be out of town that day.

I occurred to me that I could ask Sailor to the game. He likes baseball and we’d talked about going to a game sometime. Or at least I’d suggested it and he seemed receptive. Yesterday afternoon, I finally decided I’d see if he wanted to go. If he did, I’d stop trying to sell the tickets. It’s only inconvenient for me to go because, ideally, I’d keep the day before I leave free. However, my flight isn’t until 6pm, so it’s not really a problem.

I thought I’d invite Sailor over the IM thingy. But, by the time I'd worked up the nerve to contact him, he was gone. Not just “away” but “offline.” Oh well.

When I left work at 7pm and started to walk home. I thought, "I’ll just call him. I have his cell number, so why the hell not?" The idea of calling made me nervous, though. I told myself, "You don’t have to call him, you don’t have to do anything. But I want to call him. What harm will it do? Worst case, he can’t go. That’s it."

I called him. He didn’t answer and I didn’t leave a message. I continued my walk and put in me headphones to listen to the ipod. Then a curious thing happened, my phone rang. It was Sailor. He said, “Hi, Jamy? Sorry, I was on the other line when you called.”

“Oh, no problem.”

“What’s up?”

“Nothing.” And I proceeded to chit-chat about a variety of things unrelated to the baseball game. I felt a little crazy as I did it but he was amiable and the conversation was pleasant. Eventually, though, I got to the point and I asked him if he was free to go to the game. His answer was an enthusiastic “Yes!” I even over-explained about wanting to sell the tickets and how hard it is to find people to go to games and how Pele would go but she’s often out of town and how funny is it that on Monday we have tickets to the SAME game and can’t even back each other up. Uh, yeah, it was almost that bad.

But I caught myself getting a little out of control on the nervous talking and ending the conversation soon afterwards—the total time was about 20 minutes. He said there is a slight chance he’ll be out of town, but he’ll let me know for sure next week. He said he probably wasn't going to be out of town two or three times—maybe he really wants to go to the game?

It would appear I have another date (“date”?) with Sailor. I don’t quite know what to make of it…and, well, I haven’t tried to make anything of it, at least not yet. I’ve been working like crazy trying to rewrite that awful (awful!) report and this business with Sailor and our future plans and his constant IM presence hasn’t distracted me at all. I don’t get it. Am I really as mature as I seem? Am I dead inside? Or is this what “normal” people feel when they like someone but have almost no information to go on—do they just calmly wait and see? Well, normal or not, my behavior indicates calm wait and see-ness.

It’s really not like me. What a relief.

Grateful for: the calm.