One Date Girl

During my first senior year of college (yes, I had two of them; the five-year plan was almost the norm at my school), I went out with someone my friends later came to know as "One Date Boy." The source of the nickname is pretty obvious: we had one date and no more. It was actually a two-part date--we went to lunch one Friday before his shift at the movie theater, and then after work he picked me up for drinks at a bar downtown--but still, cumulatively, I consider it a single date.

One Date Boy (whose name was actually Patrick) was a perfectly nice boy, and we got along fine, so I'm not entirely sure why we didn't bother going out again. He definitely had a few unexpected quirks, but none of them were really deal-breakers, I suppose. Still, the odd moments of our single date made for some good stories where I probably presented Patrick in less favorable a light than necessary. For example, there's possibly nothing wrong with taking a date to a restaurant with a large fiberglass chicken on the roof. The city where I went to college actually has several restaurants that feature fiberglass animals and other mascots in the parking lot or on the roof. To eliminate all of them just on some aversion to the tackiness of the decor would possibly be a bit rash.

And maybe it's not so odd that he chose to order gizzards as his side dish at said restaurant. Plenty of people like gizzards, I bet. So what if even the waitress was a bit disturbed by his choice? ("Don't let him make you try those," she said, with a very serious look on her face.) I was thinking that "I'm a guy who likes gizzards" was maybe not the message one would want to present on a first date, but perhaps I'm looking at that all wrong. Maybe it's a fun quirk that makes him interesting and unique, and surely that's the image he was trying to convey.

Patrick had a few other interesting and unique quirks as well. He liked The Cranberries, for instance. No, I mean, really liked The Cranberries. So much so that, when one of their hits came on the juke box, he felt compelled to throw his head back and shout "Sing it, Dolores!" Um, yeah. So he was a music fan. That's not so bad, right?

And then there was the Babylon 5 obsession. Maybe it's just because the Internet was fairly new at that point and I wasn't really used to message boards and mailing lists and such, but it seemed a little strange to me that anyone would want to receive upwards of 500 e-mail messages each day concerning a science fiction show I'd never even seen. Again, quite possibly that was more my problem than his. I'm really trying to be fair in retrospect.

Most of my friends at the time heard these stories about Patrick, and since I didn't date much in college (at least not in the standard, textbook Date Protocol manner of 1. Meet brand-new guy, 2. Exchange numbers with brand-new guy, and 3. Go on date to get to know brand-new guy), his designation as "One Date Boy" didn't create a lot of confusion. When I graduated from college and moved to the Twin Cities, however, and started meeting and going on dates with strangers more regularly, I needed to find new reference points. That's when I realized maybe it's not the guys who have the one-date limit. Maybe it's me. I'm One Date Girl.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that someday I would write a post listing all of the One Date Boys I could remember. My friends, that day is today. Or, it was supposed to be today, but it's taking me longer to compile the list than I thought. So consider this Part One of the story. To be continued soon...