Are You a Boring Date?

A few weeks ago, my co-worker suggested I'd get along with her friend Alyssa. Of course, I beelined to Facebook to check her out. She passed my Facebook cuteness test with flying colors.

I met Alyssa out with my co-worker and an all-star cast of friends (those friends who don't make me dissolve into an ignorant bastard) I had assembled: Friend endorsement plus the all-star cast boded well. I got a date with Alyssa — we decided to go to the Yankee game on a weeknight.

The date got off to an odd start. Alyssa said she was tired because she had locked her keys in her apartment the previous night and slept on a friend's couch. She got about three hours of good sleep. She also told me that she had been sick the past two days and was on antibiotics.

She still didn't have her apartment key. She planned to go to a friend's apartment after the game to get a spare key to get into her apartment.

I set a goal to be a great date so that she'd forget how tired she was and that she had to run around the city after the game to get keys. Here was an opportunity to shine.

In the beginning, the conversation flowed, and there was occasional laughter. But things went south the second half of the date.

For the last 45 minutes, she seemed disconnected and uninterested, answering everything with one word: "yeah," "uh-huh," "right," "great."

And she was literally yawning in my face. Even in light of her lack of sleep, I was embarrassed. I hate when I'm totally aware that I suck, that I'm not doing something right, that it's not working — like those agonizing moments of trying to remove a bra...it's all like a bad American Idol tryout.

I felt like a floundering comedian. I attempted to tell one of the most embarrassing things about me, trying to get her to laugh and wake up: "You know, my buddy and I made up a pretty amazing choreographed dance in college, but we closed our bedroom door during rehearsals so our roommates didn't catch us."

But, no laughter. She was either spent from not getting enough sleep or completely bored by me.

Dying isn't so bad, but knowing you're going to die before you die is awful. The last 45 minutes were those final minutes the doctors told me I had to live, waiting for the flat line and accompanying extended beep.

And it was still embarrassing and painful when she announced, in the sixth inning: "I think I'm going to have to leave after you finish your beer" (for those of you who don't know, a full baseball game is nine innings). She implied she was going to leave alone, but there was no way I was going to stay and watch my third least favorite team in all of professional sports (after the Steelers and Duke University) alone. I wolfed down my beer, which had become the ticking barometer for how miserable she was: The longer it took me to finish, the longer she had to stay.

We left on friendly terms, with a hug and a post-date "thanks" text back and forth. After I let her off the train, I hopped off in the West Village and found a little bar with live jazz and an interesting cast of late-night imbibers. Like a prison tradition, I explained how I got there (what I was in for) to my fellow inmates: "I just went on a brutal date. This girl was so bored."

The patrons asked what I planned to do with the rest of my night, and I replied: "Get a few drinks here, and then go home drunk and listen to music and be sad."

They replied: "That's beautiful."

Finally, people who understood me.

I chatted with the patrons, bartender, and jazz band about music. I must have wanted to prove to myself that I wasn't such a boring person by stopping in at the bar.

Maybe it just wasn't a match. I told my co-worker about a reference I made to Buddy Holly influencing the Beatles while at the game, and my co-worker said: "Yeah, Alyssa doesn't know who Buddy Holly is."

Ending up in a bar alone is not how I had planned this night to end, though I didn't expect a serendipitous late-night skip through Central Park after the game either. (Maybe something in between?)

So I'm definitely not going to ask this girl out again. But should I chalk this up to incompatibility or her weariness, or both? Or am I just totally boring to some people. (Don't pick that one, I can't handle that truth!)

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