a little more conversation

I was running errands last night and I saw police cruisers and cops with shotguns in my general vicinity. I kept driving and when I came back the street was blocked off and when I turned the corner to go down the next one, there were even more police cars, a crashed car and police gathering evidence to put in a bag and the whole neighborhood out because evidently some guy went crazy and they found 4 guns and a hundred knives in his apartment.

Viva Cleveland.

And the rest of the night was quiet. I listened to music, gessoed boards from a generous friend, bought some lemonade from the kids down the street, and spray painted canvases and painted on the back porch until the sun set.

I bought a projector off Craigslist at the suggestion of my art instructor and it's opened up whole new worlds to me as far as taking images and doing something larger scale with them than what I've been doing. I can't draw realistically to save my life so it's good to know that I have a nice crutch and that what I'm doing actually looks like what I want to do.

And since I work at a job where I interact with a lot of people and I tend to make small talk with everyone. this also means that I get asked out a lot and it's awkward. I've lived my life so long being "just friends" with everyone that the whole "Can I take you out to dinner?" so quickly freaks me out. I think I'm just a sucker for the ones with better game than that, who take it a little bit slower instead of "you're pretty, will you go out with me sometime?"

I don't know what I prefer, but that's a little too much. I want a few months of casual conversation so I can get a good read on you, see if there's any red flags that come up. Even then, there's some that I've known for three years when suddenly something happens and someone's not who I thought they were.

I've made a lot of mistakes in the past and I don't want to make them again. Yet as we get older, the time gets shorter, and the stakes are higher, and everyone around us is pairing off for better or worse and so I understand the desperation. And I know we all get lonely.

They say the best person to end up with is your best friend. But no one wants to be your best friend. No one wants to have conversations and chill hanging out where we ponder deep things and laugh at absurdity and see where things go naturally. Is that too much to ask?

This whole let's go on a date to get to know each other because I think you're cute is so not the way I do things. I feel embarrassed when my meals are paid for and I'm given things when I know that my heart isn't in it that way. I don't do that whole playing games thing because that's cruel and I'm wasting someone's time. I feel bad when cross cultural signals get screwy and something seems to mean something that it doesn't or when it seems like they hope it goes somewhere so they can get citizenship and stay here. I can't tell you how many times this has happened too.

Maybe men and women just can't be friends once one gets attracted to the other.

And I'm cursed with this general English-major-ish interest in people in general. I love life stories and hearing perspectives and experiences vastly different than my own. But just because I'm interested and intrigued by humanity in itself doesn't mean I'm interested in you that way.