The Worst Date of All Time: Part 1

(Note-This Worst Date of All Time was such an epic Worst Date of All Time, I’m dividing it up into three entries)

Part 1: So I forgot to tell you. I’m blind.

I was talking to a friend the other day about how I'd rather lick a homeless guy's shoe that date strangers and I think it’s time for me to tell you about the Worst Date of All Time. Do you think your worst date is worse than mine? You’re incorrect. Unless you were murdered. If you were murdered on your Worst Date of All Time, speak now. Unless you're Candace Cameron. Date rape-murder movies don't count.

So last summer I started dating. It was really weird because I had been with the same person for eight years and being around people that weren’t The Person You Have Been With For Eight Years was a lot like putting yourself in a box, shipping that box to northern Azerbaijan in the winter, jumping out of that box, and then being forced to kill a polar bear for food using a spoon while riding a unicorn. It wasn’t easy and it made no sense.

Fig. 1.1
Me, after being shipped to Azerbaijan, fighting a polar bear with a spoon on a unicorn.

I went on a couple of ok dates and a couple of bad dates and then I met this guy named Bodie. I didn’t know a whole lot about him. Which is good. Because I didn’t know him. If I had known a lot about him, it would have meant I was stalking him like some Creepy McCreeperson. I imagine Crispin Glover is a Creepy McCreeperson. ( I do not know Crispin Glover. I have never spoken to Crispin Glover. I do not know anyone who knows Crispin Glover, but he looks pretty sketchy to me.)

Fig. 1.2
Crispin Glover: Creepy McCreeperson. He's probably under your bed right now.

Let me preface this by saying that My best friend's sister's boyfriend's brother's girlfriend heard from this guy who knows this kid who's going with the girl who saw Ferris pass out at 31 Flavors last night set him up with me. So no one knew him that well. Still, I hope that person has to live in agony with this horrible mistake for the rest of their lives. Like Brad Pitt has to live with finding Gwyneth Paltrow’s head in a box in Seven.

Fig. 1.3
I couldn't find a picture from Seven. Just pretend like He-Man is Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Pitt is really upset off camera somewhere.

Anyway, his name was Bodie and I thought his name was amazing and that we would obviously get married because he had an awesome name. I later found out that, contrary to my original belief, you should not marry someone just because they are named Bodie.

Bodie and I talked for a while on the phone and he passed the serial murderer test, so I agreed to go out with him. The following are things he told me before we went out:

1) He was a history teacher
2) He lived in a house in Cypress
3) He made good grades in school
4) He loved to read
5) He was 34
6) His name was Bodie and I thought that was awesome

The following are things he neglected to mention before we went out:
1) He was legally blind.

I found other things out, but this was the first, and most shocking, in a series of shocking revelations throughout the evening. Here’s how I found out:
Me: So what time are you picking me up tonight?
Bodie: Oh, you’ll have to drive.
Me: Um. Ok. Is your car in the shop?
Bodie: Oh, no. I don’t drive
Me: …
Bodie: …
Me: Any particular reason? (At this point, I believed that he must have drank six bottles of Everclear and run down a bus full of Catholic school children on their way to a field trip to the zoo where they were caring for abandoned baby seals.)
Bodie: I’m legally blind.
Me: Oh. (translation: this should have come up before. not that it matters, but this should have come up before.)

So I got directions and left my office to pick him up at his house, which is where I found out another shocking revelation: He lives with his parents. At 34. On a teacher’s salary. I know you’re mad at me because he’s blind. As it turned out, though, he wasn’t that blind. trust me.

So I went to pick up my date at his parent’s house. Which is where I found this out: he hadn’t “worked in a while” because “he wasn’t sure if he liked kids”. I guess he thought, “ok. I’ll be a teacher, or I’ll throw in the towel and never work again.” Convictions.

Back to the “he’s blind” thing. I expected a full-on Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman.

Fig. 1.4
I did not expect Chris O'Donnell to be there. It would have been a bonus.

He had glasses. That was it. He didn’t touch my face. He wasn’t counting steps. He didn't have a cane. He didn't have a dog with a vest that tells me not to pet it. He said, “you look great! I love your zebra-print shirt! How do you walk in those heels?” (translation: I can see you! Look at me and my working eyes go!)

So I thought, “ok. Maybe his problem is in depth perception, so he can’t drive and it would make sense that I just picked up an unemployed 34-year-old man from his mom’s house to go out on a date”. Remember that blog I wrote where I said I suffered from either incurable optimism or you-are-the-biggest-idiot-alive disease?

I am the biggest idiot alive. Bigger than Glenn Beck.

Fig. 1.5
Look at this idiot. Get a hold of yourself, idiot.

Then came the time for us to solidify what we were doing.

Me: What do you want to do? (translation: where do blind dudes go to have fun? I can’t read Braille and I only saw Ray twice.)
Bodie: Let’s go to the movies. Then we can go to Barnes and Nobles, if you want.
Me: Ok. (translation: there’s no effing way you’re blind.)

So I started driving us to the movies, convincing myself that he has no depth perception, until he says, “you’re going to turn left in about 20 feet”. Which means that not only does he have depth perception, he doubles as an irritating GPS. I ignored it, because, like Julia Roberts, if you don’t believe in something, it just goes away. Until Robin Williams claps you back to life.

Fig. 1.6
"I played a fairy to clean up my act after playing a hooker!"

So we went to the movies. And like a good date, he asked me what I wanted to see. Then, like someone you’ve been dating for a while, he completely ignored my suggestion and took me to see Harry Potter and The Movie I Wasn’t Interested In Seeing, or something like that, where he proceeded to receive texts all night and kept trying to nonchalantly (translation: extremely obviously) hold my hand like I was in the seventh grade. ("What? Oh no. I sit with my hand upturned on the arm rest all the time. It's comfortable.)

You may have noticed that I said he was receiving texts all through the movie. I didn’t ask him about the texts for two reasons. One, I didn’t care. Two, I’m not crazy. Your texts are none of my business, no matter how rude you're being. As it turns out, I didn’t have to ask. He told me. It would have been better if he didn’t.

The texts (that he could READ oh his PHONE) he was receiving for a solid three hours, were from his mother.

He beamed. “She wants to meet you!”

Have you ever felt your entire body go cold and start shaking, then you feel your stomach twist, then your mouth tastes like pennies and you feel light headed and all you want to do is get blackout drunk and listen to House of Pain? Like probably the way Michael Caine felt when he saw, and then realized he was in, Jaws 4? That moment felt a lot like that.

Fig. 1.7
"Holy Christ. I was in that movie?"

How do I fight fire? That’s right, folks. With fire.

A couple months ago, I almost set my entire apartment complex on fire.

For months, my family has gathered at my parent’s house on Sundays to enjoy the pool, grill some form of delicious deceased animal and relax. I thought it would be nice to return the favor and have them out to my apartment near downtown

There were five immediate problems with this that should have alerted me that there was a 70/30 chance that this might end in disaster. Let’s review them.
1) I don’t have a barbecue grill.
2) Most of them weren’t going to be able to make it.
3) I live furthest away, and because they inexplicably love me, my mom, sister and brother had to drive out to me.
4) Horrible storms called by the wrathful hands of Zeus himself were predicted for that day. (So not only did they have to drive out to me, they had to drive out to me in torrential rain.)
5) I know how to cook. Not. (Did I just revive ‘Not’? You bet your sweet ass I did.)

Did any of those warning signs stop me? Did I see any of them as a roadblock that couldn’t be crossed? Was there, at any time, even a second when I thought ‘Gee, Jen. Maybe this isn’t such a good idea’? No, no! A thousand times no! I suffer from something that’s clinically referred to as either ‘incurable optimism’ or ‘you are the biggest idiot alive’ disease, depending on which doctor you’re visiting. It really all depends on your insurance.

So the day before everyone came out, I made a trip to the grocery store. Remember how I said that I know how to cook-not? That means that a trip to the grocery store for more than a frozen pizza or some other type of food I can put into the microwave is a lot like showing up at a port, getting on a random boat, sailing to a different country, getting to that country and realizing that not only does no one speak English, but each person has made up their own language, they are all talking at the same time, and half of them are screaming at you. (Seriously Whole Foods. You’re not as cool as you think you are. Please stop trying to force me to buy chickpeas in bulk and get your bearded employees away from me. Your aisles are very scary and I can’t find anything.)

I managed to navigate my way through the store without a yak and a Sherpa (don’t act like you don’t have them, Whole Foods) and came home with enough ingredients to make hamburgers and potato salad for, rough estimation, fourteen John Goodman’s. (I panicked. I have absolutely no idea how to make a normal quantity of food. I’m either confused as to why two hotdogs didn’t feed sixteen people or irritated that eleven pounds of mashed potatoes is far too much for a dinner for two. I’m not a mathematician. Or a chef. Sue me.)

The next day, everything seemed to be going smoothly. My mom was over, my sister had just gotten there and my brother was on his way. I put the hamburgers in the oven (which is also a broiler, because, remember, I have no grill and it was raining. Also because I live in a ritzy apartment where they combine the oven and broiler. Classy.). The first set was perfect and I beamed over my culinary prowess. Had anyone ever made hamburgers as exceptional as these? Nope. (Probably.) This is when things started to go awry.

I got so caught up in beaming, I didn’t think about changing out the greasy foil for new foil, considering I was about to put greasy foil directly under an open flame. Whatever. People make mistakes all the time. Google it.

A side note and something that’s going to be very important in a second: I have no sense of smell. I don’t want to talk about it, just trust me. It’s because I have no sense of smell that I have left gas burners on and hung out in a room with a chlorine leak. It’s also because I have no sense of smell that I have candles burning all the time when I have people over. How do I know if my apartment smells like tuna steaks that were left in the back of the drawer in the fridge for three months because I forgot they were there and my brother had to tell me that he thought something died in my kitchen? (This is hypothetical) So on this day, a candle was burning on the stove.

About five minutes after I put the second set of burgers in the oven, I noticed that the room was hazy. My mom said, ‘it smells like something’s burning’ and I looked over at the stove.

From each of the burners billowed a gray-black pillar of smoke, like a horrible pantheon in Hell where they made burgers all day.

I opened the oven and my sister said, very calmly (much more calmly than my shark situation) “There’s a fire”.

I’ll interrupt here to tell you that my sister is very, very experienced with setting things on fire. Ask her how long it takes to burn hard boiled eggs. My point is, when she says something’s on fire, it’s probably on fire.

No sooner had she alerted me, when fire ERUPTED OUT OF THE OVEN LIKE MOUNT VESUVIUS OVER POMPEII. If I stood there a second longer, you’d be visiting me 100 years from now in a travelling museum exhibit forever frozen in whatever horrific pose I struck seconds before I was petrified in burger grease and flames. I turned around to grab my fire extinguisher and left the oven door open. Why? Because I DON’T REGULARLY SET THINGS ON FIRE AND I PANICKED. DON’T JUDGE ME.

Amidst the fiery hell flames licking at my face as I fumbled for the fire extinguisher pin, my mom said, very calmly, “Jen, shut the door”. Apparently she’s had experience with setting houses on fire.

Here’s the thing. When you’re about to be set on fire, you don’t do anything calmly. You just make moves. Sometimes those moves are far too spirited. “Shutting the door” quickly and easily transitioned into “slamming the oven door shut with the exact same amount of force it took Dolph Lundgren to break Skeletor’s staff and send him into the pit of pink lava at the end of the He-Man movie”.

This started a chain reaction. The slamming oven door rocked the oven, which knocked over my bamboo salt and pepper shakers, which knocked over my frog-head pot holders (jealous?), which bumped into the candle burning on the oven, which sent the candle toppling over, on FIRE, onto the stove, which was already on fire. Wax (which I assume was grapefruit scented) went spilling all over the stove. I tried to beat the shit out of the burning candle with a towel in one hand and a fire extinguisher in the other. Guess what doesn’t put out fires. Hopping up and down and waving a towel and fire extinguisher at a fire.

My sister somehow got the stove fire out ( I must have lost time because I have no idea how she did it) while my mother, with presence of mind, instructed me to turn off the broiler. In the end, the burgers weren’t even burned.

Moral of this story? I will do absolutely anything someone tells me to do if my apartment is on fire. But I will do it with the exact same amount of strength as He-Man.