An attractive blonde sits at the corner cocktail table reading the Wall Street Journal.
I am sitting with another attractive blonde and one of my favorite men. We suggest that our gentleman friend buy the corner blonde a drink. It is always classy to send a beverage to a lady drinking alone. So he sends over a glass of Prosecco with what I can only imagine is an eloquent note.
When she walks over to thank him, I realize she looks very familiar. She veers to the ladies room, so I ask him to repeat her name. As soon as he does, I know exactly who she is.
She is not someone I know well. Someone I have met a handful or fewer times. She is the ex-girlfriend of a friend.
Correction. She is the crazy ex-girlfriend of a friend.
I have only enough time to explain that what little I know of her is that she is crazy. Crazy and conservative. When asked, What kind of crazy? I have no answer. Those stories are not mine to tell.
I excuse myself so she and my gentleman friend can get to know one another. Because the other things I know about her is that she is very attractive and smart. And I could be wrong about the crazy part.
I am not wrong as the text from my gentleman friend later reveals, Really, you left me with a crazy conservative chick? I mean, really?
I promise him my firstborn in penance. He laughs me off. I am certain that I am obligated to bar tabs for the next few years.
Within moments of sitting down, she says two revealing things. One, she admits to being conservative. Tell me something I don’t already know. Her ex-boyfriend calls me a flaming, hippie liberal.
Two, she says she’s a Libra. Explains that as such she often finds herself in conflict. You know, conflicted, a.k.a. crazy.
Later that same evening, a gentleman I am getting to know waxes poetically, wait, no, just waxes, about being a Virgo and his compatibility with my sign, Cancer. Conclusion, we are compatible.
It strikes me as an interesting way to describe oneself. To have a label as simple as an astrological sign to whip out and explain yourself rather than allowing folks to know you through conversation.
I am a Cancer. I am emotional, clingy, loving, imaginative, loyal, sensitive. But it is far more telling that one might describe me, accurately or not, as an artsy-fartsy, flaming liberal hippie.
Just as it would have been more helpful to my gentleman friend if the attractive blonde had described herself, not as a Libra, but as a crazy conservative.
It would have saved him time and me a year’s worth of bar tabs.
3 Comments
October 30, 2009 at 2:30 pm
I really don’t get it when people still identify themselves by their astrological sign. And especially when a crazy conservative does. Wouldn’t that kind of contradict their conservative religious beliefs? (I’m assuming crazy conservative lady is also a conservative christian.) People are weird.
November 2, 2009 at 9:10 pm
A woman once stopped dating me because I’d never been to a protest in D.C. Yeah, she was the other side of that coin, the “crazy liberal.” Actually scary crazy liberal. I spent the entire evening of our last date trying to get a word in edgewise, and failing magnificently, in an attempt to defend the middle ground in general and men in particular.
November 6, 2009 at 1:15 am
All any of us need every once in a while is a little middle ground.