Mr. Unavailable #100: Anthropological Experimentation

See Mr. Unavailable #100, Update, Revisited, Down the Rabbit Hole, The Sound of Silence and I Can See Clearly Now the Rain is Gone for the background on this one.

Update: This whole thing has officially turned into a Study in Modern Dating. I am fascinated. After not really expecting to ever hear from #100 again, on the Saturday afternoon four days after "date" #5 (an improvement on the previous nine-day silence...) I got a text (...a regression from the previous phone call). When I read the first line, I did a little "I Win" dance around my apartment. The text was funny, friendly, flirtatious. I interpreted it as what I like to call a "feeler" text: he was feeling the situation out to see if I was still on the line. I kept it short, snappy--after all, I want to keep him on the line, too.

Possibly even more interesting, 12 hours later, during a bout of insomnia, at 2:59 a.m. Sunday morning, I heard my phone go BLEEP. And voila, there was another text: "Are u wake?" I'm not quite ready to let this whole thing become one big booty text; I'd like to continue at least a vague, even one-sided pretense that we are trying to date, or trying to simulate something close to it. Hell, maybe this whole thing has a chance of being rescued from the brink of just-a-shag extinction (...you're right, who am I kidding?).

At any rate, this has become something of an anthropological experiment, so I want to be able to parse and diagram each step on the road from Potential Dating Situation to Torrid Affair (I'm so lucky that it's all so romantic). So I let the text go until a reasonable hour and replied: "I was sleeping like a baby. Is everything OK?" In this case, white lies and playing dumb are acceptable (Although it's possible there was some kind of emergency and he needed a shoulder to cry on...OK, I can't even type that with a straight face). He texted back: "All OK." Wanting to let him know that I knew it was a Drunken Booty Text but also wanting to let him know that I am The Coolest Girl in the World (or a clueless 22-year-old), I replied: "Ur so cute." I guess we'll see what floats to the surface.

Predictions (Rated on a scale of 1 to 5 with 1 being least likely and 5 being most likely):

• He'll text in about a week with another feeler text (4) followed by an invitation to his place (4)
• I won't hear from him at all (1)
• He'll call within a week (2)
• He'll call within a week and ask me out on a proper date (1, no, zero...is zero possible?)

Stay tuned...

Next in the #100 series: Letting it Play Out, Part 1