We stand facing each other on the street. Now bathed in the stale, white light coming from the street lamp on my block, I can see her face better now than I had been able to in the darkness of the bar. I fish around for my keys. As we exchange niceties, I catch her face lowering a little; and her eyes — red from the $9 glasses of whiskey I bought her because she bought me dinner — are searching for serious eye contact. Ugh. I consider the moment.

I’m familiar with this awkward forced-first-date-kiss-moment. For me, it’s an in-n-out job with a little well-placed hesitation in between. No problem. I lean in casually. She tilts her head. I’m about to make actual lip contact, but no, she dips her chin down and pulls away coyly. Ah-ha. I try again. She pulls away again. Great. I stay very still, willing patience to somehow grant me a graceful exit. I close my eyes and try to sense any real static between us, but the molecules only whisper sweet nothings about the twin bed that waits for me upstairs. As I begin to really pull away, her hands grab my head and then my throat, while she pretends to go in for the kiss, over and over, but never does. I can almost feel the handle of my front door, it’s so close. She grabs my chin and traces a finger down my chest dramatically. Really?

The lamplight and I are equally frozen, but only one of us is being gyrated on. No kiss really ever happens — just a lot of breathyness, which is worse than breath alone, and a stranger who won’t let me have my head back.
This was my Thursday night blind date. One down, two to go. Lesson #1 learned: No more mercy kissing.

To go back a moment, in the throes of a trying week, I came to a hasty conclusion that I needed a touch of seasonal romance in my life. So, on a spastic rampage of real-life avoidance, my dangerous little fingers fired off a couple of e-mails in the course of a few minutes and, with the help of friends and well, the internet, blind dates were set up. Indeed, the distraction relieved the dissatisfaction of the moment. That was last week. I was really making progress.

Come Saturday, I’m flirtatiously texting with boy stranger who gives decent text. "Where are you? Can I come meet you?" Granted, I’m new to going out with men-folk, but I’m not sure what to say here, since I’m out at the girls Pride party at South Paw — I’m at a gay bar being gay?

Going back over the Brooklyn Bridge in the cab that night, I noticed that I had received a few more texts from boy stranger — 'Come dance with me by the moonlight' kind of texts. I glared at the phone and then the awaiting city skyline, trying to chalk it up to common human afflictions, being a lot drunk and a little lonely, but we had met through an online dating site, the least sexy way to meet people ever. This wasn’t helping.

Resolved that somehow being forced to meet strangers was going to be good because it was hard, I reluctantly caught the train to Brooklyn for brunch. Within the first few moments of meeting boy stranger, the animal instincts told me it wasn’t gonna happen, especially no mercy kiss. What did ensue isn’t interesting enough to write about, and therein lies the problem — it wasn’t bad, it wasn’t good, but it was my Sunday. Lesson # 2: Don’t make dates for Sundays or any time you would miss should you not spend it flirting, laughing or fucking.

Monday arrives and my introverted self is protesting the date that I’ve set up with a friend of a friend for the evening. While revisiting the brief e-mails that we’ve exchanged, I notice that on the bottom of hers is a signature with an impressive title. Hmmh. I’ll just Google her. Betrayed by my curious fingers again. Lesson #3 came early: Do not pre-Google people.

Do not PG people because... I don’t know, you could be confused by someone’s hair, or discover they wear skirt suits with cowboy boots. Which could, in theory, be awesome, but combined with confusing hair, well, wow. I’m just sayin'.

I went, I practiced presence. The evening was full of clichés and forced humor that the PG had hinted at, almost like being out with a cousin on the strange side of the family — benign, familiar, a little corny. And finally, after beer, bad Chinese food in the back of an empty restaurant and Michael Bolton playing over the radio, I felt just fine. We exited the restaurant together, casually embraced for a moment and I walked toward home.