on not caring.

While watching the movie the librarian lent me, it occurred to me that the film (which was excellent, by the way) was all about a guy who's obsessed with the girl who operates the elevator in this office building, while she in turn is having an affair with his married boss in his apartment, and I wondered if he was trying to tell me something. But what? He is the guy on my commute who I'm obsessed with, who asked me on a lunch date and canceled and never rescheduled, and now I sit by him and talk to him several times a week during our commute and we just swapped DVDs. When I told my roommate the story, he said, "That's stupid, why didn't he just ask to watch the movie together?"
"Because he's not into me."
"Oh." (look of uneasy sympathy)
"It's okay, I don't think it's actually going to happen."
I've always thought my first impression needed work, because people tend to like me better once they get to know me. This must be the only case in documented history of my life that a guy seems into me before he talks to me and gets over it as he gets to know me.
This morning he sat with me and for the first time there was zero even imaginable flirtation, granted he said he was feeling sick and would leave work right after his meeting. Don't worry, I'm over it. Let's just hope I get my movie back soon.

Last night my roommate's Freemason buddies came over, including the Berkeley grad student who is trying to have a tacit arrangement with me where he acts like he's my boyfriend when he sees me and then doesn't call me ever. We ended up drinking tea at the Fairmont, which is apparently just the way they roll. When the check came I actually laughed out loud - a cup of tea was seriously like $5! I don't know if it was my not-boyfriend's behavior or the fact that their conversation was so intense and cryptic that I didn't know what they were talking about for 20 minutes at a time, but I needed out fast and turned super cranky when they were taking their time bringing me home. I thought I was intense. It's nice to know that there are always people in the world that are crazier and more intense than you are, and entire secret societies to accommodate these people.

The other night I met up with a friend of a friend for a drink in SOMA - He said he'd be in the neighborhood because he was riding the Caltrain while his car was in the shop. I'm not sure if it was datelike - I guess it was borderline. Actually he insisted on paying, but who knows what that means. This is the first time in my life that dates and quasidates seem to be falling into my lap, and definitely the first time in my life that there's been so much ambivalence. He was pretty cool, and I wasn't attracted to him per se but I wasn't unattracted to him either - like I could have been, and if he'd tried to kiss me I would have probably rolled with it. We had a great time and hung out for a few hours. Then he said he would walk me home the 12 blocks, but I said I'd rather take the bus than walk through the sketchy part of SOMA. I don't know if he took this as rejection. He's moving across the country for lawschool in the fall, not that I'm out to necessarily get in a relationship and not that he's asking, and not that I know if I'd be into it with this guy. On the bus he said we should hang out this weekend, and I said sure, and I told him I was busy Friday night and part of Saturday, which again, he could have taken as rejection or not. I might have been rejecting him, but I'm not sure. I'm not into him enough to try to make it happen but I'm not against it - when did I become so damn ambivalent?
It feels like ambivalence is the official dating disposition of the decade. Whenever I'm really excited about a guy it never gets off the ground (most likely because I am too intense for them).
I'm getting some attention from guys, and actually having fun dating around, but I'm somehow surprised that everyone seems to want to be in weirdly casual, sporadic, noncommittal, text messaging and not calling, dating-around thing. This shows you how new I am to dating - I'm sure that I'm just a million years late realizing that this is what dating is, and I've just consumed too much media and maintained some delusion that people should actually be really excited about dating each other and want to do it with that person only, and as a consequence I've only been in a couple of intense relationships and almost never dated.