10 - Abe Lincoln

Stretch out Urkel and then bleach him...

Four score and seven years ago (give or take a few score and years) a slender man in a top hat messaged me on OkKoala or whatever. For real, he was dressed as the Emancipator for Halloween one year and used that as his profile pic. Unfortunately, that’s where the humor ended, I soon found out.

He and I found common ground in that we both worked at tech companies, we both enjoyed rock climbing and we both spoke fluent English. He seemed extraordinarily nerdy. He was heavy on the detail, but light on the humor. Not a hint of sarcasm. Not quite my type of communicator, but the point of this was to try new things so I agreed to a date.

We meet up at a local sandwich shop/bakery after about a week and a half of messaging. Abe Lincoln, as the name suggests, was very tall and nerdy-looking, but a cute nerd. The second-tallest of them all, he was 6’4, head crowned with light brown curly hair. He was very fair-skinned and his light blue eyes glinted behind silver-rimmed glasses. He had a nose like a dictator. A strong, prominent, communist nose. A nose designed for propaganda.

Not my type, but really, what have we learned from these dates besides there is no type, there is only a hope for a connection with a dude willing to spend $8 on a pretty girl. Or at least a girl with a face full of pretty makeup.

We approach the counter to order. I’d allowed myself to get hungry (shaking my fist violently at my metabolic functioning) and needed actual food. Fighting the urge to indulge in the smorgasbord of pastries on display, I order a salad. Abe Lincoln pulls out his wallet from the corner of my eye. He steps forward, but hesitates. I just don’t have time, so I continue my motion of extracting cash from my periwinkle blue wallet. Fail. I was hungry.

We get a table and the boredom ensues. He’s saying interesting things, but he lacks expression, animation. And then suddenly, he wasn’t saying interesting things, he was saying way smarter things than I could follow. Yes, we both work in the tech industry...but he builds robots. Legit, he showed me a video of his 3 pet bots rolling around his kitchen floor. Super nerd. He writes code, not like how I write code which is basically just me copy and pasting JSS and CSS. This man thinks code into existence. He attends conferences on geofencing and data algorithms for absolute fun.

I just keep saying, “Wow, that’s interesting” from across the table. What can I add to the conversation as Abe Lincoln describes the conundrum of whether or not to build facial recognition technology into pet robots? I nod; I smile; I take a sip of my water. Hopefully looking at least dumb and pretty in my pink flowy dress (recycled for the third time).

I found myself doing that thing again, trying purposefully to not speak too loudly, to not be so expressive with my face, to dial down the inflection in my voice. Trying to alter myself so as to not be the loudest, most obnoxious thing in sight.

If you know me you know this: I am loud and I am obnoxious. Sitting there, realizing I was purposefully trying to laugh quietly at his bitcoin joke (I only knew it was funny because he laughed first, btw). I thought to myself, Self...if you have to shrink yourself, shrink your ego. Shrink your impatience. Shrink your selfishness. Don’t shrink the essence of the fabulousness of who you are.

All my type-A, full-figured, loud, opinionated, determined, successful, dare I say-dominant female readers, this is for me and for you: If you feel you have to shrink yourself in fear of overpowering a man you don’t even know on a date he didn’t even pay for-you have some thinking to do.

Not to belabor the point, but we weren’t a match. And I had some thinking to do.

Test 1: Fail. But he did let me have his chips, though.

Verdict: Square peg, no hole. I let him know I didn’t think we were a good match like immediately after the date. He agreed. He was a good guy. If I had a skinny nerd friend, I’d set them up.

Click for Date 11 - Hollywood