Blondie and the hottie from the gym

** Today we have a guest post from Blondie, who has agreed to share some of her dating adventures in the city. Like some people we know (ahem) Blondie is enjoying a fairly fresh foray into singledom, making good use of the wonders and joys of the Internet. ***

Friday night was supposed to be my dating night off. Thursday night I had been with a couple I see, and I had a date on Saturday with a guy I've been seeing for a little while - so Friday I was going relax and give my "body" a rest.

I ended up going out to the bars with a couple friends. The plan was just to have a beer or two, go home and watch a movie. Well, I get to the bar and we hang out a bit and I realize that this guy who I've had a massive crush on at the gym is there. Not some guy I've seen - but a hot 6 foot 7 inch tall basketball player I've been watching while I cool down on the track for the last 5 years.

I tell my friend the story and he talks me into talking to the guy. Long story short - I talk to him and end up going home with him that night. Yep - I got to sleep with my gym crush. But that's not all.

Side note - this gym guy ends up not being very bright. It was an interesting situation for me - I felt like one of those guys who sleeps with hot dumb chicks. While we were hanging out post sex, I was found myself having an internal debate about hotness vs. intellect. Does his hotness make up for lack of smarts? Would I ever dare bring this guy around my friends? Would I be comfortable keeping a guy around for sex just because he was hot, even if he wasn't that interesting to talk to? (I appreciate that this might make me sound like an asshole but I have smart friends and they would call me out on this.)

But, the sex is fun, I have a good time. And, oddly, after sex, he hung out completely naked until I left. He was up walking around, doing all kinds of things. I thought it was cool how comfortable he was, most guys throw on a pair of boxers or something. Though I guess I could have done without him leaving the door open and looking at and speaking to me while he pissed.

As we're hanging out afterwards, he asks if I want to spend the night. I say no because, quite frankly, his apartment was kind of a shit-hole. I don't quite understand how a 32-year-old guy with a professional-type job could live like that. Anyway, I say no thanks and go home at about 3:30am or so. When I got home, I sent him a text saying I made it home safely. He didn't text back until the next day, but this is the conversation:

Me - I made it home safely.

Him - Who is this?

Me - Uh ... Blondie. The girl you slept with last night.

Him - Haha, no seriously, who is this?

Me - I am serious. Don't you remember?

Him - I'm in Seattle with my fiance. I think you have the wrong number

Me - HA! You're right. Wrong number. That's hilarious.

Well.

It turns out that I don't have the right phone number for this guy. He just gave me his number, I didn't give him mine. So now, not only did I hook up with the hot dumb guy, but I'm the one who never called again. Part of me feels a tad bad about that, but part of me thinks it's a little funny, if a bit of a bummer because I would like the option of sleeping with him again ... but c'est la vie.

Going Out In Anchorage, AK

I recently moved to Anchorage for a job and was curious what it'd be like living in a place where the male to female ratio is skewed, to put it mildly.

"You're going to get raped. I heard they pay for women they're so desperate for pussy up there," said one idiot at a bar when I told her where I was moving.

"8-to-1 guys to girls. You don't even have to be hot to get proposed to I heard," said her friend.

"Get a gun," was my brother's request before boarding the plane.

And with that sage wisdom, I went to a local watering hole to meet some new gal friends two nights ago. I didn't make any effort whatsoever to look cute. In fact, I did the exact opposite. No shower after two days of skiing and hat wearing. I didn't even change out of the sports bra from said ski. I managed some deodorant and a different hat, but not much else. I chose one of my more pointed t-shirts (a bright red shirt called "burning bridges" with an image of a guy burning the bridge between him and a woman on the other side). What the hell anyway with all that stupid romance shit.

We saddled up to the bar and of course the three old guys sitting to the right of us starting making conversation, but they were fairly easy to not engage. I find old guys far more fun to drink with than younger dudes mainly because they're harmless and have funnier stories. If you tell them you're not interested, they're not butt hurt and they'll often still buy you a drink for being cool enough to not be a complete bitch. Younger guys on the other hand...sigh.

There was one of said younger versions of the male species to the left of my friend. I noticed him glancing at us every 30-45 seconds and looking for a way to insert himself in the conversation. I also noticed him staring at my tits every time he looked over. Did I mention I was wearing a t-shirt and sports bra and am not exactly a Victoria's Secret model? I have pretty much no boobs to speak of, particularly in a sports bra and t-shirt so I was curious what he kept staring at.

He finally figures out how to interrupt our convo with some asinine comment. He asks me a question, to which I ask him why he's been staring at my tits for 40 minutes. With absolutely not a moment's hesitation, he shifts his gaze to my general torso area and does not look up while responding that he's trying to figure out what my shirt means.

"Really? I'm confused how a bridge burning with a man on one side and a woman on the other is confusing."

"Oh. That's a guy, huh?"

"Yep. A guy. Burning a bridge. The shirt's called burning bridges, weird huh?"

The entire time, he has not once lifted his gaze to make eye contact.

"You're still staring at my tits dude."

"I know. I just don't really get your shirt."

I didn't engage him any further except to make a rather horrible, politically incorrect joke a few minutes later. I wanted to give the angry, lesbian feminist vibe because that's never failed in the past to scare guys away, but this guy didn't seem to mind neither my condescension nor general insulting of his ethnic identity. He asked what we were up to later that night.

Might have to take my brother's advice after all.

Lessons on life and love from Beyonce

I recently met my good friend's sister. The way the visit worked out, the sister and I had some time to hang out the following day, after my friend left to fly back to Oregon.

Over a glass of wine, the three of us sat talking, and my friend's sister told me that whenever I woke up in the morning, we could go out and get breakfast together, and she'd be happy to show me around her town a little bit, as I hadn't spent much time there.

"And of course, if you'd like, we can go ring shopping! I know some great jewelry shops!"

Whoa. Wha?

Back up a little bit. I'm in a relationship. Have been for about 2.5 years. I'm 30. In the last year, I moved across the country to be with him. So, would I like to go ahead and get - if not hitched - engaged? Sure. And I don't see the point in pretending that's not the case. I don't try to advertise or bitch about it, but I'm not going to lie about it - definitely not to my closest friends. But, now I have to wonder.

I mean, I figured my friend would give her sister some backstory on me. She knew where my friend and I had met, she knew the basics of why I live in the south ... but is "she's waiting on her slacker boyfriend to propose" on the short list of details about me that I expect people to hear before they meet me? Yikes.

It brought me back to a conversation my boyfriend and I had before we moved out here. Two friends of mine had been together for 10 years, and I knew she was ready to get things moving. Get married, think about starting a family. So when I saw him, and she wasn't around, I'd nudge. And I wasn't subtle.

"Dude. What are you waiting for? When are you going to put a ring on it?"

It made me feel annoying, but I checked with my girlfriend, and she was totally OK with this type of encouragement. [I mean, I could write another blog post about why and how it is that there are certain decisions in hetero relationships for which women are basically removed from the decision-making process. You can't nag. You can't push. You're not supposed to complain, lest you be one of those gross old-fashioned girls who actually - gasp - wants to get married. Yuck. We're not supposed to care. And it's not like you could do something crazy like ask him.]

When my b.f. heard me talk about this couple, and about how the fellow needed to get his shit together, he wondered if I was trying to give him a hint.

"No, dear. They've been together for a decade. It's a different situation."

But that conversation was a year and a half ago. Are things different? Is living in the south affecting my views on marriage? Out here, people give me a sidelong look when I mention that I moved across the country to live with my boyfriend. People check my hand when I talk about him. I've literally been told that Jesus wants me to get married. His stepmother told him it bothers her that he hasn't at least bought me a ring.

I don't know. But I do know this: I told my boyfriend the ring shopping story when I got home. I'll let him decide what it all means.

Pay it Forward, Asshat

This is about some of the content that you won't find on this blog and WHY it isn't there anymore. Some of the best stuff gets pulled. This is the story of two blog postings that you can't see. I have to make it clear that this blog began in a small town in Oregon called Bend. The "dating pool" in the town would fit in the bottom of a mashed PBR can. We have (almost) all moved to other locations and are too twitterpated right now to be mean little bloggerbunnies.

The first story starts several years ago, while I was perusing a friend's website. I found a link to this site and started reading through the postings. I was amused and appalled, but disgusted in that car-wreck sort of way. I kept reading. I found a posting about someone's disturbing date.

It sounded bizarrely familiar. It was a date I went on. Yes, it was blogworthy how bad the date was. I had blogged it for another blog. Since everyone was wondering who in the world would have gone on a date with this particular Contributor, I left a link to my blog at the end of the "comments" section. It became a Blogwar. It was awesome, but our friends eventually made us make peace with each other and the blog was pulled from this site and the other site as well.

Of course, I swore up and down that I would never do that again to someone, because I then understood how it felt to stumble upon someone else's version of my bad date. Of course... I lied. I'm a blogger.

About a year passed, and I became a contributor to this blog. After a particularly interesting Thanksgiving party, I blogged the evening. That very day, I got an e-mail at my work from the guy whose party it had been. He asked me pretty please to pull the blog posting because it might endanger his livelihood if it got around town that he partied quite that hard. I had no idea that he even knew about the blog, but one of his workmates was an avid reader and was able to identify him from the bits and pieces I dropped throughout the story. We pulled it.

I guess the moral of this story is that you really should not date or party with a blogger, that we are all a bunch of asshats. We really are. We function on the belief that you all want to be the stuff of literature. Send us your stories. Happy dating!!