Love and Other Tragedies, 2019, Part I

Ma thinks I'm elitist and that what I really need is to give some nice, uneducated, blue-collar frogs a chance. I can't help it. All the misspellings and camouflage and freshly-killed deer in their profile pictures make me shudder.

I'm really not trying to be elitist! It's just -- I read at least 50 books a year and love learning/discussing new things. It just seems very unlikely that someone with a high school education is going to want to discuss Chimimanda Ngozi Adichie's books with me. 

That's just about the only reason I agreed to go out with Bruce. When I showed his picture to Rosa and Charlotte, they said he looked smarmy... slicked back hair, arrogant stance, not looking at the camera.

"He went to college and spells all his words correctly. Plus, this says he's a money-laundering analyst. That sounds like an interesting job. It's just dinner."

The one thing that worried me: the app only gives you 200 characters to describe yourself and what you're looking for, and Bruce had used some of his for shameless self-promotion. "Catch me on episode X of the Netflix series, Dirty Money!"

That sounded a bit egotistical to me, but maybe I was reading it incorrectly. Either way, the fact remained that he spelled all his words right and didn't include any pictures of himself holding up an animal carcass, which was a WIN.

Everything was fine until the night before our date, when he sent me this message: "Good evening, Elle! I'm looking forward to our date tomorrow. In case you'd like to know more about what I do for a living, here's a link to my show, Dirty Money."

I was suuuuuuuuper repulsed. Was this dude even for real? He was sending me a link to watch him on TV in preparation for our date?!

I mean, Rosa, Charlotte, and I had already watched the episode because, come on, it's just common sense to Google someone nowadays to make sure they're legit...Otherwise you could end up dismembered in the back of a van in Idaho or something.

But still.

"DON'T GO OUT WITH HIM!" Jared told me. "What a douche!"

"I have to, I already agreed to dinner. It would be really rude to cancel now."

It turns out that while I'm kind of a hard-ass in most aspects of life, I'm a real pushover in dating. Plus, I'm practicing being tactful and gracious now, just as a general Life Skill.

So I responded to Bruce: "Perhaps we can just do things the old-fashioned way and you can tell me about your job over dinner tomorrow night :-)" 

See that? Gracious as shit. That's the new me.

In preparation for our date, I went back to look at Bruce's profile, which it turns out, he had updated. Now, in addition to telling women to please check him out on Dirty Money, he had actually changed one of his 6 allotted pictures to a picture he took of himself, on TV. 

It was captioned: "Screen grab from my appearance on the Netflix show Dirty Money"

Blog world, I just could. not. even.

I don't care how many words you spell correctly, 3 attempts to make me watch you on TV means you are too self-aggrandizing for me, cool job be damned.

I mean, I still showed up for the date, because like I said, I'm a pushover. I can't stand the thought of someone waiting at a restaurant for ME to show up!

But he never came, sooooo... It's one for the books.

There are definitely worse things than being single. And one of those things would be having to bolster some prick's ego for the rest of my life.