Blind Date

For the context let us go to the beginning. I was chilling out in a café one day when I bumped into Z. We talked for a bit, and then he said he was going to meet a mutual friend, D, whom I had not seen in 20 years. Naturally I was eager to see him. When Z told me that D had driven over, I finished my drink, and walked over to his car. Along the way the café owner gave me a rugby tackle. Turns out I had forgotten to settle my bill. Well how stupid of me.

Anyway, after a nice chat (even though most of it was recounting all the stupid schoolboy pranks we used to play on each other while we were on the same school bus) we agreed to meet again. On the second meeting, D’s girlfriend – call her N asked me if I wanted to be set up on a blind date. I was a little hesitant, especially after she added the qualifier that my blind date would not be particularly good looking. But she was a nurse. I know that I have a friend out there whose ears would be pricking up when talking about a nurse.

Problem was that Z was there that night and that was the first time that he found out that I was going to be set up on a blind date instead of him - this in spite of the fact that D and him were supposed to be closer friends than D and I. I couldn’t understand it very much. D told me that it was because I was a non-Christian, and she was one too. It was fishy, but I didn’t ask him too many questions. Later on, N would tell me that it was because of a chance remark that I made, that gave her the impression that I would be nice to my girlfriends. But I probably didn’t really mean that, or I meant it as a joke. Well, what’s done is done, and I also want to add that Z, even though he’s always struck me as a nice person, has always seemed a little immature to me. He’s a school teacher but he doesn’t see anything wrong in confessing that he thinks that his Sec 2 class monitor is a chiobu. That is a little shocking.

There were a few mix-ups along the way. D SMSed me on Wednesday and asked me if Sunday afternoon was OK. I said, “ya” and for some strange reason did not hear anything until Saturday. On Saturday, I went out without my handphone, and found that D had made 8 unsuccessful attempts to call me on my hp. So I called him back and I found that that blind date was still on. Finally it was confirmed on Sunday.

I think it was only on Saturday night that it dawned on me that I could be meeting somebody who might change my destiny. But I don’t know. My gut feeling told me that it wasn’t going to work out. On Saturday night, I had a dream. In the first part, I was in a place that closely resembled Napa valley, one of the places I had travelled to in Cali last year. It was a wine country, good for growing grapes. Probably a happy place. A marathon was going on. They are usually happy occasions, at the start, at least. I remembered that my half marathon was a happy occasion. The full marathon was not so happy but yet gave me a greater sense of achievement. People were cheering loudly. But suddenly I remembered that I wasn’t going to do any more marathons, so I got into a car and drove away, at that time passing by quite a few hordes of people. Long distance running was part of my past, not my future.

It’s interesting that this dream took place in the USA. Is the USA a part of my past or part of my future? Nothing was concluded. Later on, I was wandering through a hot and hazy landscape at night, I walked into an old decaying HDB 3 room flat. There was a piano, and then a middle aged Chinese woman who looked like she was quite pretty when she was young (think Mitsuko Uchida). I was intrigued. She said that she taught Grade 8, which was around my level of piano playing. Then I sat down for my lesson with her. Something was wrong when she said that they were going to start with sight reading. Sight reading is the one thing I sucked at while learning piano, primarily because I rely very heavily on my own ears when playing. Once I am familiar with a piece, I basically memorise it and play it from memory, I hardly ever read scores. Then she took a score I had never seen before, came up to me from behind and set it in front of me. This was eerie, because that’s the way they do it when you go in for a piano exam. I looked back nervously at the bench, there were 2 people sitting there - a Chinese woman, and a black man. Later on, I reckoned this was symbolic: most of my piano teachers had been Chinese women, and most of my music heroes have been black men. I tried to sight read - it was an abject performance. Later on, a gust of wind blew, it grew chilly, and a candle was blown out - so much like a classic Chinese Ghost Story movie that you half expected Tsui Hark to appear out of nowhere and yell “cut!” It wasn’t that they were scary ghosts, and it wasn’t scary (though eerie) but it was my brain trying to tell me - these people are ghosts - get it?

I woke up the next morning around noon. I got an SMS from D telling me that he was sick and therefore it would only be the 3 of us. He asked me how I was feeling, and I told him, “if we like each other we like each other and if we don’t we don’t”. Although this was not a bad attitude to have, it was also blase, and he may have detected that I didn’t have high hopes for a blind date. (Who does anyway?) I was a little disappointed that he wasn’t going to be around but I didn’t want to prejudge whether this was a good or a bad thing. If she wasn’t pretty we’ll see about her other qualities.

So I had time to burn until 4. Should I read a book? But I figured that if I were to read a book and shake leg in McD’s in front of a tub of coke (the soft drink not the drug), it would make me nervous and jittery. I hadn’t done any running that weekend so I thought I would go swimming, which I did.

I got there half an hour early, to grab a quick bite at Chippy’s - I got fish and chips. We were to meet at Gloria Jeans. They were late. That was OK, I suppose. A woman’s got a right to be a little late. But how much of a right? OK, N appeared first, and then later on my blind date - call her S - appeared. I tried not to hide my disappointment. She wasn’t the bubbly lively sort. She was actually quite dour.

I had a checklist of what I wanted. (Mofo pls take note). Could I chat with her? Could we exchange views on what we wanted to say? I don’t know. She didn’t seem to be a great reader of books. Was she lively? I had to take into account that she had just done a night shift, so she was sleepy. Whose idea was this? Was she enthusiastic about this being a date? I couldn’t tell.

I ordered drinks for all. This was Gloria Jean’s and drinks were a little steep but I had already resigned myself to buying the first round of drinks, so that was OK. OK, S was a nurse in surgery, so we could talk about a few things. But I did let slip that my sis did complain that some of her nurses did ask a few stupid questions, so I don’t know if that remark pissed her off. But I also wanted to see if she saw the funny side of it or would hold it against me. I couldn’t tell.

Then we went on to other things. They asked me if I played sports. I said - OK, I’m no sports man but I did some long distance running before, I swim, I play a bit of basketball. She said, “I dun even know if I can do my 2.4 anymore.” Sorry, this wasn’t what I was looking for. I made the discovery that you only found the energy to do a lot of things in your own time if you set aside time to keep fit. And anyway sporty girls are usually better in bed. If nothing else they have better bodies.

I was like, “God, please please please give me an excuse - any excuse at all - to like you” There was a slight flash of anger when I found that they were talking about dinner and I probably had to get through a longer period of time with her.

Kind and good people - generally speaking - are not lazy people. Why? For the simple reason that it takes effort to be kind and good. There are people out there who maintain an agreeable facade when they are in front of people, never do anything offensive. Never talk very much about themselves. People who don’t do very much to try to make the world a better place. I’ve seen people who are like that in social gatherings, and are OK when you’re with them in that environment, but they treat their boyfriends or husbands abominably. Why? When you’re not pro-active, when it doesn’t occur to you that in life you have to seek your own happiness, when you got it in your head that your boyfriend / your husband is the one who is responsible, you are in trouble.

I know this because I have thought that I was the helpless innocent little one before. It grated people no end. You put the people around you in a no-win situation. If they make you happy, it is only because they have bent over backwards to make your happy, and they can’t be happy at the same time. If they don’t make you happy, then they are guilty for allowing such a bad thing to happen to such a poor innocent soul. And the way they portray themselves as a poor innocent soul is not entirely inaccurate because they are too thick to understand how the system works.

So, to answer the question - is she a nice person? I cannot say that I know at all. But my gut feel is - I doubt it. Even if she were a nice person after all - she is a nurse, and it is after all a noble profession - I also yearned for the type of niceness where she’s more fully developed, more mature. Or at least, more curious about what it means to be mature.

She wasn’t an intellectual either. This is not a sin, but this makes it quite difficult for her to be my girlfriend.

Hastily, I SMSed Z: “Dun worry you din miss much”. I wanted to vent my frustration on someone, and at the same time make him feel less bad about the whole issue. 5 minutes later the horrific realisation dawned on me that this was the kind of remark which, if taken wrongly, could end a friendship. Yipes!

After that, things got a little weird. S and I were not talking much, and funnily enough we were both talking more to N than to each other. Maybe I was too hasty in applying those tests on her one after another. But if we talk about stuff, it’s not a bad thing to just throw out a few things to see what catches on. Always have 1 or 2 funny stories on standby so that you could throw it out and see what comes back at you. But for the most part she maintained a stony silence.

Later on S went to the bathroom, and N asked me for “feedback”. I said, “I don’t think this is going to work out. She’s not the type I’m looking for.” And then she nodded slowly. I asked her if S wasn’t really interested, and she said that S is a person who’s quite timid, and she’s also tired. I thought, yah, what to do.

N wanted to go buy something, and she asked us if we wanted to go along with her or if we wanted to stay and chat. S said something like, “it makes me a little sleepy to hang around here” so I took that as a tacit agreement that things were not going to work out. Quite a relief I tell you.

We didn’t want to make it awkward. We made small talk along the way. S has this disconcerting habit of asking you something, and then skipping out of your field of vision while you answer. Later on, we had dinner. Maybe it was because N had started talking about more earthly stuff that made S feel a little more at ease.

During dinner they chatted about stuff that nurses usually bitch about, like horny doctors hitting on them, and how in a certain hospital, the culture is that you were not promoted based on your merit, but also on how pretty you were and on whether you slept with the doctors. This jolted me because I used to go to that hospital to get my braces fixed, and I recalled that the nurse was quite pleasant looking and quite pal-ly with my dentist.

A sudden realisation hit me, as S wondered out loud if she should visit Scandinavia. And she asked if Scandinavia was near to America. OK, not a sin to not know that. But that reminded me of my mother who liked to travel to other countries, not because she was curious about them, but because it was a form of luxury that she wished to partake in. S really resembled my mother! And that is a deal breaker, because anybody who resembles my mother is out. I couldn’t imagine living in a place where there was one more person like her. Sorry, but I don’t really get along with my mother. I know she’s my mother but I don’t approve of her character.

At that time, though, we were served by a waitress who was a little too cute to be a waitress. Of course I’m on a date and it’s quite bad form to gawk at a waitress, but I did succumb to following her around with my eyes a few times.

All the same, dinner wasn’t too bad. It was a relief to hear them talk. N was doing much of the talking. I wasn’t expecting S to suddenly come up with some exciting comment and she didn’t surprise me in that respect. I tried to keep the evening going as pleasantly as I could. Be good company.

OK, S and N are good friends. S is serious about her career. I would gather that she’s fairly competent at her job. I could have judged S a little too harshly. Let me remind all those people reading here that I have judged her on a very specific set of criteria, which is her prospects as my girlfriend. Somebody else having a different set could judge her much better. But it would have to be a quite different set.

We popped into a guardian pharmacy on our way back to the MRT station. While S was lining up at the cashier’s I started heh-heh-heh-ing to myself. N asked me what I was doing. I said I was laughing because this was going to be my last date with S. Then it was oops maybe I shouldn’t have said that. But I could tell she didn’t mind my honesty. I was sniggering to myself in the manner of a naughty boy who just crashed his bike, and decides that he should laugh at it rather than cry over it.

I don’t dislike her as a person, but I felt that she had more work to do before she became more eligible. (So do I, actually, but that’s a different matter.) S was going on the north line with me, so we got on the same train together. Coincidently that cute waitress was on that train too. She had just gotten off work. She put on earphones. (I was just commenting the other day that chiobus do that on public transport so that people wouldn’t try to chat them up) Then she did something that made my heart stop for a second. She pulled out a copy of DH Lawrence’s “Women in Love”. DH Lawrence! This is clearly a woman who is after my heart. For those of you not that conversant with English Literature, DH Lawrence is an author famous for writing about sexuality. He takes peoples’ sex lives and examines it from all angles. People in his novels have torrid, spiritual, wonderful sex. This waitress - what the fuck is a DH Lawrence reader doing being a waitress anyway? - this waitress clearly has an attitude towards romantic relationships that I am more sympathetic to, which is, I want something stupendous, mind blowing, sexy, dangerous, glorious. I want fireworks. Romance. I want to get high, drunk, I want to die with a smile on my face. Of course, this is something S also aspires to. But she wasn’t sending any such signals.

If S was not around, I could have tried to get her phone number. Damn it, this is the first time this has ever happened to me, there is this cute waitress that makes me interested, and suddenly she is off work and standing next to me. And I can’t do anything because my blind date is next to me. Is there no justice in this world?!

Afterword: A few days after the fact I met N and she told me that she arranged the blind date for me because she thought that I needed it. I thought that was funny. Usually in a blind date, one party is the one who wants a partner, and the other person is somebody who’s just curious to see what the first one is like. Now we had a blind date where both people are “just curious”! No wonder it didn’t work out.