Mr. Unavailable #137 (Intro): Spring Fever

See The Phoenix Rises, Paper Perfect, More Nouveau, Please, Visions of Sundance, Fantasyland and The Gongs of Doom for the background on this. 

OK, I know I’m fast-forwarding by quite a bit. It was February and then there was one date in March (#134, who, thankfully, never called for that second date) and now it’s April. Let's recap: Last we left off, I had finished “Calling in the One” with a solid idea of what I was looking for (a long-term, committed relationship) and had therefore taken myself off of my self-imposed guyatus. I’d also, due to a severe lack of contact, written off #113. Clearly, someone who lived in Arizona and only texted me on major romantic holidays (i.e., Valentine’s Day) was not what I was looking for.

After all that, I came flying out of the single gate with a serious case of misdirected spring fever. Misdirected as in Mr. Unavailable #s 135 and 136:

1         #135: I developed a serious crush on a guy who turned out to be gay despite my flirtatious attempts to prove him straight. Case in point: At a party, after getting over my crush-borne muteness, I found myself in conversation with him. We were talking about nicknames.

“It’s funny, in my phone, since I don’t have people’s last names, I have descriptions of them,” he said, “like ‘Johnny No-Thumb’ and ‘Katie Long Legs.’”

I’m not the quickest knife in the drawer when it comes to seizing flirty moments, but I seized this one.

“If I were in your phone, what would I be?”

It was perfect. If he was interested, he’d say something like, “Tara the Tantalizer” and then ask for my phone number.

“Um, I don’t know,” he said. “Probably ‘Tara Blonde.’”

Needless to say, he didn’t ask for my phone number.

2.     #136: I developed a crush on a guy friend of mine who’d recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years. I’d misinterpreted his Valentine’s Day text and various other flirty texts as real interest instead of what they were: Just a guy who’d recently broken up with his girlfriend of two years who was casting his net far and wide. In other words, he was probably just as misdirected as I was. There were two defining end moments.

     #1: When he said he’d meet me at The Bean where I was doing some writing and never showed up.

     #2: When he said he’d meet me at the café that I was at—again—and actually did show up but then started talking about his various sexual forays and ended with a critique of a recent liaise: “It might sound weird, but her lips are too small. I need someone with a big, full set of lips. I mean, look at my lips, these suckers are like fish lips. They need some massive kissers to be compatible.” I sat back in my seat mentally pursing my own meager pucker. Well, that was that.

All this is to say that I came flying into springtime with a: Very. Open. Mind. There were a few more revolving crushes in there, but you get the idea. I was up for anything. I even joined an “Over 40 Singles Club Meet-up” and I’m not even 40. Like I said, you get the idea. Nora and I started throwing social darts at all kinds of random city social targets: museum nights, meet-ups, tours. I was bound to hit the bull’s eye at least one time. And hit I did…with #137...