Are You Going to Confiscate Our Snake?

I've only had this computer since September, and already the letters are starting to rub off the keyboard. Ridiculous!

Anyway, I had good intentions tonight. I was going to go to the grad party for just an hour and then I was going to come home and do some grading and some paperwork for the job I'm starting next week. But really, who did I think I was kidding? Shawn made margarita shots and the next thing I knew it was 10:00 and I'd had the world's strongest Long Island iced tea and said margarita shot and now there's no way I'm grading tonight, much less doing anything else productive. I'll just get up early tomorrow morning to get some work done before I go to City A for the night. Really.

But I AM in the mood to talk about Penn. Yes, that's going to be his pseudonym. Why? Possibly it's because he lives in Pennsylvania. Possibly its because he's a writer. Possibly its because Penn is ever-so-vaguely similar to his actual name. Possibly its because Penn Badgley is the hottest person on TV right now (and certainly the hottest guy ever to come out of Baltimore, wouldn't you say?) and I don't particularly care that he's my baby brother's age or that he's on a show geared toward fifteen year-olds or that he looks nothing at all like the guy I'm dating other than that they are both white guys with short dark hair. Possibly I'm calling him Penn for all four of those reasons. More likely, just to be difficult, I'm calling him that for none of those reasons. At any rate, that's the pseudonym I'm going with.

We met at a bar in City B five weeks ago. My aunt was in town visiting and my cousin Rae and I had taken her out to a bar where a popular local jazz band was playing. It was about 11:00, and everyone else in my party (Rae, her husband, my aunt, and my aunt's "friend and business associate", aka "married man who is in love with her") had gone out onto the patio to smoke, and since I'm not a smoker I'd agreed to stay at the bar and guard our stools. So I was sitting at the bar by myself nursing my vodka tonic and thinking that I'd head home when I finished it since I was kind of bored, when this guy walked up to the bar and struck up a conversation with me as he waited for his beer. We ended up talking for about twenty minutes and I was like, "Hmmm, he's cute, we're having a good conversation, maybe I won't go home yet after all!" But right about the time I thought that he said, "Well, I'd better go out to the patio and see if I can find my friends," and he left. I was a little bummed that he didn't ask for my phone number since I thought we'd been having a good conversation, but by that time my group had come back in from the patio so I thought, "Oh well!" and ordered one last drink. Luckily, a few minutes later Penn came back to the bar to get another beer and we started chatting again. We ended up talking for another half hour or so, and this time at the end of the conversation he asked for my number before going back outside to check in with his friends again.
About ten minutes later as I was getting ready to leave (for real this time) a girl walked into the bar and stared at me for a second and then said, "Are you talking to Penn?" I warily said, "Yes...why?", thinking that she was probably going to tell me that she was his wife or that he's a total psychopath or something. But instead she said, "Oh, good! He came outside and was telling us all about this really cool girl he just met so I had to come in here and see who he was talking about. And I'm so glad it's you, because you look so cute and normal!" It turns out the girl was his best friend's fiancee (he was third-wheeling it with the two of them for the night). So I grilled her for a minute about Penn and she reassured me that he's a really nice, good guy, and while she was obviously a little buzzed (I don't think she'd have approached me if she was totally sober) I was glad to have reassurance from someone that he was normal and not in a relationship.

So anyway, that was how we met. That was on a Friday night, and the following Sunday he called me and we ended up talking for three hours as I cleaned my house. I couldn't believe we'd talked that long, and I was convinced that we'd already used up every possible topic of conversation, but no. We exchanged AIM names the next day and have been talking on the phone, IMing, and e-mailing on a daily basis ever since. He's really good at striking the balance with communication: not so much that it feels clingy or overwhelming, enough that I know he's really interested.
Some other things I like about him so far:
-He earns a salary and he has his own apartment. (Seriously, this shouldn't even deserve a mention, but my generation of men is such a bunch of spoiled, living-at-home-for-years mama's boys who don't want to be bothered to get real jobs that I'm still a little shocked that he's not mooching off his parents or living with an ex-girlfriend or some other kind of annoying and questionable arrangement)
-He plays rugby. (Admit it, that's kind of hot)
-He's working on his MA, so he understands the academic lifestyle and all of the complications. This is HUGELY important.
-He likes my dog and let's me bring the dog to his apartment when I come up on the weekend even though he's technically risking eviction by doing so.
-He reads a lot.
-He loves to travel.
-He seems to get along well with his family. He visits his mom often enough to show he's a devoted son, not so much that it's creepy, he has pictures that his niece drew hanging on his fridge, and there's this picture of him giving his nephew a piggy-back ride that pretty much made me melt the first time I saw it.
-So far, he doesn't appear to be an alcoholic, or have a drug problem. Also, he has no children of his own yet (You'd also think that this should be a given, but it's not. Do you know how many guys have a drug/alcohol/baby mama problem? Lots of them. And the older your dating pool gets, the more of them you meet.)
-He plans good dates. So far he has taken me to an aquarium, a baseball game, and a political rally. And last weekend I got to his place too late for us to go out anywhere since I couldn't come up until after my night class, but he had made a plate of cheese sticks and potato skins and bagel bites for me because he remembered me saying at one point that I am a big fan of appetizers. Aw!
-On the first weekend that I met him, I asked him what he had done on Saturday and he told me that he'd gone by himself to visit a museum devoted to a famous writer who lived in City B in the 19th century. He went to a museum! A museum devoted to a 19th century writer! By himself! JUST BECAUSE HE THOUGHT IT WOULD BE INTERESTING! I'm getting all hot just thinking about it! Haha.
-Speaking of hot, yes. Yes, it is.

It probably goes without saying that I'm totally smitten at this point. Part of me is so nervous about this. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. I keep waiting to stumble across the huge deal breaker, the thing that makes me go, "You know, you have a lot of good qualities, but because of this problem I can't date you after all." But so far, despite five whole weeks of silently saying, "What is wrong with you? Seriously, what is your defect?!" I haven't been able to find anything that makes me want to end this. It's not utterly perfect, of course. He lives 100 miles away (No, that's not a typo. Not 10 miles, 100 miles. Totally doable, but not quite ideal, especially with gas prices being what they are). On weeknights he goes to bed at about 10:30 so I can never call him as late as I want to....um, that's about all I can think of off the top of my head. Neither of those are big things, but tiny things like those are reasons I used to rationalize cutting off potential relationships in the past. Which is I guess how I know I really like this guy: because its not that the nitpicky perfectionist in me can't find the tiny flaws, it's that I just don't care about them because so far I really like him.
Luckily, it seems as though he really likes me, too. As I mentioned in another entry, he's leaving for Europe a week from today. If he wanted to wiggle out of this thing, there would be no better opportunity than a trip to Europe with no cell phone access. And yet yesterday he sent me his itinerary so that I can know where in the world he is for the next month. He also wrote on the bottom of it that he'll e-mail me whenever he can get internet access. This without my even hinting that I wanted him to stay in touch.
Also, on Tuesday night we were talking online and we ended up in one of those sappy, early-relationship conversations where you're trying to feel each other out and see if you're on the same page, and, well, to summarize a sweet conversation that I'd like to keep to myself, we apparently are. About midway through the conversation I got up to carry some dishes into the kitchen, and as I walked across the living room I couldn't resist doing one of those wiggly, excited shimmy dances. And even as I was doing it I had sort of a meta moment where I was like, "Oh my gosh, this guy is making me dance in my living room. This is baaaaaaad."
And not to get too excited, and not to get too hopeful, and not to ignore the fact that the odds are pretty good that this relationship will end someday, too, and knowing my luck sometime soon...but the last time I was so overwhelmed with giddiness about a guy that I did an actual, genuine, uncontrolled, unplanned happy dance was October of 2000.

And I'm scared that I'm feeling this way again because I can seriously barely remember how to function in a reasonable adult relationship that involves actual dates and calling to check in with one another and meeting parents and making important decisions together. And now that a reasonable adult relationship is suddenly an option I'm absolutely freaking out because I told myself I wouldn't do this whole commitment deal again unless I was reasonably sure it was something real, and I still don't know exactly what real is but the fact that there's something here that even has the potential to be real is really freakin' scary. And I can't help being cynical and wondering how he's going to screw it up or (more likely) how I'm going to screw it up.

But I'm also feeling happy and optimistic enough about it that I wrote an entire blog entry about it. And for me, that's saying a lot.