And so that’s what I did.
I went on Date Eight, Date Nine, Date Ten and Date Eleven. I stuck to the promise I’d made to Lux, and when I met guy I liked and he asked me out again, I went.
But as much as I tried to keep an open mind, still, my head just wasn’t in the game.
In fact, one guy put it perfectly when he said, at the end of our date, “I enjoyed meeting you Tracey, but you didn’t really seem there.”
He was right.
Which is why I never wrote about any of them.
“You know what you should do?”
“What?” I asked, as I warily eyed the contents of her enormous cup. We were in a conference room waiting for McKenzie so we could have an events brainstorming session for the Office Health & Wellness Committee. Lux was on a cleanse and the sight of her green juice was making my stomach turn, as I recounted my own experience with a juice cleanse. I took a sip of coffee to try to settle myself.
“You should put an ad up on Craigslist for guys to come audition to be your boyfriend!” Â She said joyfully. “It’ll be great! We can list what you’re looking for and then have them all come and compete with each other to show why they think they’re best for you!”
I cocked my head to the side. “That has got to be the most ridiculous, and dare I say, dangerous idea you’ve ever come up with.”
It was obvious he had taken great pains in his appearance that night. He was wearing a classic blazer over a v-neck sweater. His hair was neatly styled and even his nails looked nice and clean.
“Hi, I’m Ned,” he said and extended his hand.
I took it. “Tracey. Nice to meet you.”
“You are really beautiful,” he said as he sat down.
I smiled. “Thank you. That’s a nice thing to hear.”
“Really.” He looked at me with nervous sincerity. “It’s hard to believe someone like you would need to do something like this.”
I almost answered with a snarky, “It’s because I’m bat-shit crazy.” But I got the sense that Ned was the kind of person who would be hurt by sarcasm. Continue reading Speed Dating. Part Two.
“This was a bad idea,” I said to Thalia as our cab rushed downtown. Well, ‘rushed’ maybe is an overstatement. It was Saturday night in Manhattan, so ‘steadily crawled’ might be a more accurate description.
“Why do you say that?” she asked, as she pulled out her lip-gloss to reapply.
“It just was, ” I said and slumped back in my seat.
Tara, our former Summer intern from NYU, who was now a full-time employee at our company, had been sitting on the exercise ball at my desk, when I’d started looking into Speed Dating events. Speed Dating had been the winner of the Reader Poll a few days prior, so I knew I had to get on scheduling it before too much time passed. Otherwise when I wrote about it, people would be like, “Poll?? What poll? What in the Horatio is she talking about??”
Not Quite A Cougar 