Excuses

There are many things that I've never done in my life, but over the course of the past few months this list is getting shorter at an increased clip. I guess I've decided to shake up my life and now that it's shaken up I'm trying not to slip back to where I was before... I might not end up happy, but at least I won't be unhappy from lack of effort.

Some of the things I've done have been intentional and some have not (e.g., locking my car keys inside my car this past weekend... I've been driving for 16 years and that's the first time I'd done that). Some of the things I've done have been easy and some have not (e.g., going out on my own... I still get freaked out at some level thinking about this weekend and what humiliations await me).

The unintentional and easy stuff is pretty boring, right? It's either out of my control or it's something that comes as a natural result of something else.

The fun stuff to think about (and by "fun" I mean gut-wrenching and boundary-pushing) is the intentional, scary stuff. Like going out on my own.

Or asking a woman for her phone number.

I've actually only asked a woman for her phone number once in my life. The second time I went out, on Cinco de Mayo, actually, I met a lovely young woman, we had some pleasant conversation, and at the end of the night I asked if I could call her. I was politely rebuffed, but she accepted my card, eventually called me, and we're hanging out. So it was a good (if delayed) experience.

The next step, I was thinking, was to ask for a woman's phone number (with the business card backup) in a non-bar/club scene. There's an attractive woman at my dentist's office who I spent entirely too much time staring at last time I was in the waiting area there (partly because I was about an hour early... another small bit of evidence that I'm a moron).

So as I'm looking to push my boundaries, I thought that next time I went into the office I'd ask. Of course, that sort of plan sounds good when I was weeks away from returning, or late at night/early in the morning when the darkness makes me much braver than I actually am. (Actually, my bedroom is far from dark; there's a safety light that blasts in... but you get the point.)

I needed some whitening gel refill stuff, and today was the day. I had prepped myself to learn her name, express interest, and maybe, you know.

As anyone with half a brain and a decent understanding of my personality would have predicted, it didn't happen that way.

She was there, along with another woman at the counter. She looked me up in the computer and started to get my stuff... and I was still teetering between whether I was going to be able to pull it off or not.

When she stepped away from the desk to get the goods, the second woman said something along the lines of, "Oh! Ed! I recognized the last name. We need to get your new address and info. We didn't know about the separation, and M__ let us know she didn't have your contact info."

Wow.

Not that I'm against my dentist's office knowing, like, every detail of my personal life, but that kinda took the wind out of my sails. The woman returned, I paid for my whitening stuff, and walked out... taking solace in the fact that they had no idea of my plans but also a bit disappointed that I didn't even really get a chance to fail. Or, rather, I failed to try, and that is worse in some ways.

I can tell myself that it was a bad setup. That the shock of my separation (and it's not even "divorce" yet... separation is accurate in a strict sense but doesn't capture the nature of our relationship) being known was reasonable. Whatever. I'm still a bit upset at myself for not just pushing through.