8. Board

I have a talent for handling all things boring. Maybe it's because I spent a lot of time with adults as a kid so I had to wait for the age appropriate stuff. Maybe it's part of my genetic make up. Perhaps I'm just a dullard. We may never know.

It works out well for eating (I can eat the same thing for lunch every workday for about 6 months before it even occurs to me that it might not be yummy), for waiting (a snafu put me on a bench outside a restaurant waiting for my companions for about an hour, I couldn't have been happier), for commuting (I've been walking my commute for weight loss for how long now? And I'm just now getting bored out of my skull) but not so much for other things.

The last time I tried to date a perfectly nice man met me at a party and made a perfectly nice inquiry about me to the hostess. The hostess gave me a verbal personal ad that should be on Match.com as a template for beginners and I agreed to an exchange of information. We went out to drinks. A few months later we went to a movie. After a time we may have done dinner and a movie. We saw a play once, that didn't go very well. This went on for over a year, with a few months in between each encounter, and, while I knew in my heart I was dodging him, I couldn't come up with a valid (in my opinion) reason for just never calling back. Round about that time he came to one of my bowling birthday parties. We had a perfectly nice time, my friends thought he was perfectly nice and he had to bail a little early to go to rehearsal which was, of course, perfectly fine.

Pony Express said to me, "That's just mean." I didn't know what she was talking about. "He so wants to kiss you. Like so much!" she teased. I did not want to kiss him. I had the grace to feel a little bad about that but I really didn't. I also mentioned how I never wanted to see him naked and I felt that was what was hampering my ability to return the poor guy's fucking e-mails. I begged her to help me figure out what my problem was, why I couldn't just give it the old college try with a perfectly nice guy. "Oh," she said, "I thought you knew. He's boring."

Oh god, it was so true. He was boring. He is boring still, I see him every so often at parties, but I don't feel guilty any more. Well, only a little guilty, he is after all perfectly nice and so I want perfectly nice things for him. I am not perfectly nice, I hope he realizes that. I am, however, fully petrified to try dating again because my Boredom Detector is completely non-functional! How will I work out whether I'm not trying hard enough or I'm bored to actual distraction?

Suggestions welcome.