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It Happened to Me

Back at last!

At long last, and twenty-four hours later than I intended, I am back from beautiful (and incredibly cold Canmore, Alberta. My quick reviews:

  • The wedding: Amazing. Ashley and Turner put on a great ceremony and reception, and they’re such an amazing couple.
  • The Redhead: An excellent travelling companion and wedding date.
  • WestJet: One helluva of a great airline.
  • The Drake Inn: A nice motel with a great restaurant.
  • Banff Airport Taxi: May they spend seven eternities burning in seething pain in the 9th level of Hell.

More later!

It’s good to be back!

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It Happened to Me

Happy New Year!

Happy 2004!

The Redhead, with whom I spent the stroke of midnight in a quiet and dark corner of The Dance Cave, fly off to Calgary this afternoon, followed by a shuttle bus trip to the town of Canmore, where we’ll be attending Ashley Bristowe’s and Christ Turner’s wedding.

Regular blogging will resume Monday. Have a good time, everyone!

The Redhead is coming!

The Redhead arrives tomorrow morning, and on New Year’s Day, we’ll be flying to attend the wedding of my friends Ashley and Chris out in Canmore, Alberta. This means that posting will be a little lighter than usual until Monday.

By the way, The Redhead figures quite prominently in this article that appears in the current issue of Harvard magazine. Please note that they got a crucial fact wrong: her personal blog is written in her spare time, not her work time.

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It Happened to Me

Sometimes it turns around

Richard at Just a Gwai Lo linked to my earlier entry about what makes a date a date and linked to an entry in the blog Oblivio which the author goes on a date only to discover that it isn’t a date.

Sometimes the opposite happens, and I offer this story as proof.

(I’ve also been told by a number of people that my Worst Date Ever stories have given them hope. If hope can spring from a train wreck, this story should inspire you to pick up the phone/fire up the instant messenger software and ask that guy or girl out.)


The scene: A cold clear night in November 1992 at Cafe Max, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Our protagonist is easing quite nicely into his second year in his second incarnation as an undergrad at Crazy Go Nuts University.

This was a friendly date. I’d asked to kiss her after the Hallowe’en party, but she had to politely decline. She had a boyfriend who went to another university and wanted to maintain the relationship despite the fact that he was all the way over there, I was right here, and probably smarter, more charming, better-looking and Crazy Go Nuts University’s best damn DJ, ever. In spite of this, she’d agreed to go out on a getting-to-know-you kind of dinner outing.

I paid for everything and expected nothing but pleasant conversation and a goodbye hug at her door at the end of the evening, which makes me either an old-fashioned gentleman, a complete sucker, or possibly both. I decided to take a pragmatic view of the whole affair:

  • A non-date with a pretty girl is better than an evening at home watching Star Trek:The Next Generation
  • If I impress her, perhaps she can introduce me to her friends (deVilla maxim #12: Cute girls have cute friends)
  • A non-date is still a good practice run for the “real thing”, where one can sharpen one’s skill without risk. Kind of like the holodeck from the aforementioned Star Trek:The Next Generation, at least when the safety protocols are working.

Things were going quite well. The “your back story first, then mine” conversation flowed freely with no uncomfortable silences and the food was excellent. If this were a real date, I thought, this would be the best date I’ve ever had..

After dinner, we took a nice long walk through Kingston’s quiet but quaint streets back to campus, where we descended into the basement pub known as Alfie’s to catch the Rheostatics show. We sat near the back, drinking in each performance and saving any conversation for lulls between numbers.

A few numbers into the first set, she leaned in and whispered into my ear: “I thought I should tell you that I’ve changed my mind. This isn’t a platonic date.”

It took a couple of seconds for this to register, and when it did, it was like a Bruce Lee kick to the head. In a good way, that is, if such a thing is possible.

Well, I’ll have to invite her to my birthday party, I thought, followed by Wait…birthday…what time is it?

I looked at my watch. 12:03 a.m.. November 5th.

“Hey,” I said. “I just turned twenty-five.”

“Happy birthday.”

She leaned in, and we had our first kiss.

Sometimes it turns around.

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It Happened to Me

In love and war, it’s the declaration that counts

On the evening of Christmas Day, after my sister and brother-in-law had taken their kids home and I’d finished helping Mom clean up the dining room and kitchen, I left my parents’ house in the ‘burbs and returned downtown to attend a gathering at Deenster’s and Chris’ place. Among the attendees was my friend (and former OpenCola coworker) Kate, and I was telling her about The Redhead’s upcoming visit.

Me: The night she visits, we’re going to Kalendar and then go catch a movie.

Kate: Which one?

Me: I think we’ll go see Big Fish. We’re both interested in seeing it, and it looks promising.

Kate: Tim Burton’s usually a pretty good bet. Dinner and a movie, wow!

Me: Maybe even a cocktail at Lobby afterwards. At any rate, it’ll be a proper date. Even though nobody seems to actually date anymore, I’m still a big fan. I remember reading an article about how “hanging out” or “hooking up” has replaced dating, but I like dating better.

Kate: So do I.

Rich: So what makes a date a date, say rather than going out with a bunch of friends?

Kate: You have to call it a date.

Me: Yeah, I think you actually have to say “I would like to go out with you on a date.”

Rich: So it’s the declaration that makes it a date?

Kate: Yes. It’s like the military. You have to declare a war, otherwise it’s just a police action.

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It Happened to Me

Last Friday’s Party, part 1

Last Friday, Eldon invited me to join him at Jo-Anne Liburd’s 30th birthday party. It would’ve been a fairly mellow evening if not for a couple of notable events. Jo-Anne is a friend of Eldon’s and one of the organizers of the For the Love of Breasts gala where I had a very, very, very good time.

(By the way, the Flash-only nature of their site makes them terribly hard to find on the web — it turns out that the number one Google result for the phrase “for the love of breasts” is this blog. It’s flattering, but that spot truly belongs to them, and they should post some pertinent data such as how many people attended, how much money was raised for breast cancer, and to whom and how the money will be handed over. All I have is a set of photos showing how much fun the event was and how much fun I had, and some elliptical hinting at the ensuing make-outs. Interesting reading, but the point of the event was to raise money for breast cancer research, not to provide me with opportunities to snog.)


Let me digress for a moment: the second Star Trek movie, The Wrath of Khan, starts with the “Kobayashi Maru” simulation, in which a ship’s commnder is led into a trap from which there is no escape. It’s called the “no-win scenario”, and it’s a test to determine the character of a potential captain. It requires a large room to simulate the bridge of a starship, plus “actors” to play the part of the bridge crew.

It would be simpler and cheaper to simply put the test candidate in a party full of WASP chicks. You’d get the same result.


One of the first people I ran into at the party was Alison, who is the wan-looking woman in this photo (first shown in this entry):

She’s also the happier-looking woman in these photos from when we joined the band onstage.

She introduced us to her sister and a friend of hers, and we started talking. Ten minutes into the conversation, I was feeling a few hunger pangs as a result of having had a light dinner and looked to the table to see what kind of snack food was available. The table was to my left, and Alison stood between me and it.

While I was checking out the table, Alison’s sister leaned over and whispered into her ear. Alison made a look of mock horror on her face, turned to me and put her hand on my shoulder.

“Accordion Man,” she said. “My sister says that you were checking out my boobs.”

“Beg pardon?” I asked, still thinking about how nice some sliced green peppers in sour cream would be.

“My boobs. You were checking out my boobs,” she exclaimed. She cupped each breast in her hand, lifted both and pointed them straight at me. It was then that I notcied that she was wearing a white tank top, which only served to reinforce the fact that she had breasts, and that you should look at them.

“Well, they’re very nice, but…”

“So you were looking at them!” she exclaimed.

“I told you!” said her sister.

I sighed. There was no winning this argument.

“That’s okay,” said Alison, who then pinched my cheek. “It’s kind of cute how you boys deny everything. I’m going to get some wine now.”

As she left for the kitchen, her sister leaned over to me and said “I saw you checking out her boobs. They’re pretty nice, huh?”

“Um, they’re quite…becoming.”

“Okay, but you shouldn’t stare. Girls don’t like that.”

It was too late. Just like someone who’s told not to think of a purple cow, the breasts that originally held no interest for me were like eye magnets, and I spent the rest of the evening trying not to look at them.

That’s the downside of being a guy in North America at the start of the 21st century: I’m forever getting blamed for 10,000 years of sexism that I didn’t even get to enjoy.

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It Happened to Me

Awwwww…

Ryan thinks we’re cute.