that is also how it’s always been explained to me

if i roll up to a punk show and someone’s jacket says fuckin “CABBAGE” across the back, that is immediately my favorite person in the building

I was at cat lounge/rescue/adoption place in my area recently (not to adopt, just to pet the cats) and one of the cats, a maybe ~7mo female tabby with a slightly fucked up ear named Maggie, after spending most of the time I was there hiding in a corner, decided she liked me, came up to me, sat down on my lap, and refused to budge. One of the staff members came up to say “hey man you’re at your time limit, but I can see you’re in a situation here so just… whenever is chill”

The person I’ve started seeing from Hinge in recent days told me that the biggest reason she rolled with my profile was because I seemed like I was “relatively normal” and not a techbro or finance bro. Apparently this is prevalent enough around here that for someone who’s not into it, a profile that features a dad joke about the members of punk and metal bands standing really far apart because “your band width determines your speed,” offers “Live Without at an abandoned Denny’s in Houston” as an option for a past event to time travel to, and lists “worker ownership of the means of production” as a “simple pleasure” qualifies you as “normal.”

But hey, that in turn means I’m not attracting the kinds of girls who go for techbros, which I see as an absolute win.

Last Saturday I went on a casual first date at a sushi place with a girl from Hinge. I liked her and hoped we would meet up again: she was cool to talk to, which was the most important thing, and also, while I don’t exactly have a type per se, I do like some nice boobs, and sweet mother of mercy, did she have some. But she apparently didn’t enjoy our date as much as I did, because she ghosted me afterwards. I sent her a few more texts over a couple of days, but alas, no joy was forthcoming.

I spent a couple more days feeling like twice-eaten dog kibble and being acutely aware of how touch-starved I still was, but I had another Hinge match I hadn’t talked to in a week because of the first one, so on Thursday, after reality had set in, I hit her up (while… admittedly not being fully truthful about why I hadn’t done so earlier, which I do feel kinda bad about even being reassured by a friend that I shouldn’t) on the offchance I hadn’t totally screwed myself by leaving it that long, and to my utter astonishment, she responded! And it turned out she was dealing with some serious shit at work (not wanting to be too specific, let’s just say that since I had last talked to her, she’d walked out of the job and her therapist advised her to sue).

So I drew on my experience of having a prosecutor for a dad and gave her some tips for how to prepare a case, and then drew on my experience having had painful and traumatic experiences and offered to take her to a cat cafe in the city on Saturday, which she immediately accepted. Unfortunately, I got unlucky with transit, so by the time we actually met up at the cat cafe, they were minutes away from closing, but we were in the city, so we just went bar hopping instead: we got to know each other over wine, then once my not being a murderer had been established, relocated and got significantly stronger (and less expensive) margaritas.

We get into our cozy little booth in the bar, we get the social lubricant going, and after a while her hand is in mine, and I start giving her a hand massage. Most people carry a lot of tension in their hands and wrists, particularly when they’re dealing with a lot of stress: if you’ve never gotten your hands and wrists properly worked over by somebody who knows what they’re doing, do it, it’ll change your life. And lucky for her, I’m a professional musician specializing in piano, so I’ve had it done to me enough to know how to do it, and I have the hands to do it very well. So she’s saying how good it feels, and as we’re talking I can feel her whole body relaxing next to me, she does the “why do you like me” thing that women I date seem to like asking me, and I tell her that I like her because I’ve been enjoying her company, because I think what she does is interesting (I won’t specify, but it was a really interesting job hamstrung by lawsuit-worthy management), and also because I find her attractive, and then she says “Would you please kiss me?”

Sweet mother of mercy.

Well, long story short, we made out in the bar until a really bad smell wafted in, then walked around the area a little bit kissing each other some more until we both needed to get home, with her at one point starting to ask me something and then forgetting what it was because I was “too distracting.” Then eventually we wound up back at my transit stop to go home, she called an uber to get herself home and then we kept making out until the uber arrived… about thirty seconds later, because fucking of course it would show up immediately the one time you kinda wanted it to take a while (she also expressed annoyance at this).

We have already made plans to meet up again in a few days, and will actually go to the cat cafe this time.

TL;DR Went on a date, got ghosted afterwards. Felt like shit. Then had an abrupt reversal of fortune, got another date, and made out with her at a bar. Also, cats.