Good Enough

"Oh, it was enchanting to meet you...." --Taylor Swift, "Enchanted"

I have been a busy girl.

Mind you, I haven't been doing anything unusual or necessarily important. It's the normal stuff....work, school, mommy-ing. The past few weeks have been a little nuts for Kylie and myself. Every week has presented something that seems to hover over us and the dominating factor for our schedule. I have been pooped.

It seems that there has been this lingering feeling for me lately of missing something. Actually, I can't really say that this is anything new. I guess that in this regard, I wasn't expecting it to rear its ugly head when it did. It's partially because the hustle and bustle of the retail holiday season is over, and therefore, my schedule has somewhat ceased to be impossible. Suddenly, I went from working 70 hours a week to 32 (burning up those comp days....), and I feel a little empty. What is a girl to do with all of this free time? Relax, you say? What the hell is that? My friend, Kelly, who only sees me every six weeks or so told me the other day that I seemed down. At first, I denied it, assured her everything was fine. Then she brought it up again. I hadn't really thought about it until she mentioned it. I spend so much time trying to convince everyone else that everything with me is fine that I actually start believing it myself. Positivity is not my strong point.

I decided to take a wild leap back into the dating game this month. Maybe it's because of the hum of Valentine's Day that's in the air, or maybe it's because I have some free time to kill. Either way, I rejuvenated my online dating profile, the same one that has provided me with endless blog-worthy material over the past couple of years. Within 24 hours of posting it, I had 150 new messages. Good grief. I was clearly fresh meat on there. It would have been flattering if even half of the guys had bothered to read my profile before messaging me. It did not take long to remember why I had quit the online dating thing in the first place.

I did hit it off with a guy named Paul who seemed to have it together. He was cute, had a job, used complete sentences and punctuation, and even adopted his dog from a shelter. We hit it off over the phone and had even better chemistry in person. I was pretty excited. Who knew that I would have such great luck so quickly?! It was short-lived. After a few days of incessant texting and planning of our second date, Paul vanished. It wasn't even a gradual thing. One second, he was telling me that he couldn't wait to see me again, and the next he was gone. My girl intuition told me that something had spooked him and that he wasn't coming back. But nonetheless, he owed me an explanation, and therefore, I demanded one. The things he said to me were not what I expected. "Blah, blah, blah....I wasn't expecting to like you that much....blah, blah, blah...I'm just not looking for something serious, and I'm afraid that it will become like that with you...blah, blah, blah....my coworker introduced me to one of her friends, and I like her, too...." Wow. Maybe I shouldn't have asked. Nonetheless, I took it in stride, and after one tearful conversation with my mom about this undeserving boy, I erased him from my life. I unfriended him on Facebook, deleted his number, got rid of his text messages. I wanted to completely eliminate any possibility that I would be tempted to contact him after that. Gone are the days that I chase after a boy who has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with me.

Imagine my surprise when, three days later, he texted me. "Are you mad at me?" it said. Uhhhhh, yeah! He followed it with endless apologies and a few phone calls that made me think he realized the errors of his ways. He said all the right things, and before long, date number two was back on. I was willing to swallow my pride and allow the boy to take me out again. I allowed myself to think that maybe he really was a good guy.

I am so delusional.

Date number two was awful. It didn't start out that way. The first few minutes were fine. We went to dinner , but beforehand, I had to drop some things off at my store. Instead of walking in with me, he waited in the car. I didn't think too much about it until after dinner. We decided to rent a movie from Redbox and take it back to my place. It was 27 degrees and incredibly windy outside. When we pulled up to Redbox, I got out to get the movie, while he (once again) waited in the car. Really? What the hell happened to chivalry. I mean, I'm all about opening my own doors and splitting the bill at dinner, but that was just kinda shitty! Then, he chose the most depressing movie on the planet to make me sit through (50/50). Halfway through, I had the urge to work on homework just to make the time pass. Not to mention that he was sitting so far away from me on my sofa that we could have fit a woolly mammoth in the space. So much for the cuddling that I was promised. It was almost like he couldn't get far enough away from me. There came a sad point in the movie, and I found myself getting teary. I blamed it on the flick, but I was really just bummed that my date was turning out to be so rotten. Talk about disappointing. At that point, I did what any normal girl would do...I facebooked about it. I spent the remainder of the movie responding to comments where my friends made me laugh about how terrible my night turned out to be. Ironically, a guy that I went out with a couple of years ago texted me to find out what happened. I found the entire situation comical and disheartening. This is what I signed up for? Good grief.

Tonight, at the last minute, I ended up going out with another guy, Jay, that I also met online. He is a football coach for a local college. When I started talking to him online, I gathered that this guy would probably have no interest in going out with me. My self-esteem is floating in the toilet, and therefore, I allowed myself to believe that I simply wasn't good enough for him. He assured me that he was picky, and I mentally began making a list of all of the reasons that he wouldn't like me. I can be incredibly hard on myself. It's awful. He asked me to dinner with him, and so I drove to Greensboro to meet him. Surprisingly, he was nothing like I expected. I had imagined all of the stereotypes I had from the football jocks of my high school days, and I was relieved that he didn't fit any of them. He opened doors for me, he bought dinner (even though I offered to split it), and he didn't laugh at me because I didn't realize until it was too late (and my mouth was on fire)that my tuna was glazed in wasabi. This might have potential written all over it.

Maybe I'm good enough for this dating thing after all...