“I’d wish you good luck, but you wouldn’t know what to do with it if you got it.”

I was passing by my favorite bar tonight, so I decided to stop in for a happy hour beer. I figured if there was no one else to talk to, I could talk to my friend, who tends bar there most Mondays.

There had been a guy standing outside who looked like he could be my friend’s younger brother: same surfer look, blond hair, and plaid shirt. He came back inside and sat down next to me, then immediately got up and start affixing something to the door. Me, my friend the bartender, and a couple other guys started talking about fried chicken. You know, as you do with strangers at a bar.

Hot surfer dude sat back down, and we started chatting. It turns out he’s from my home state and not that far away. I think he’s right out of college. (My 15-year reunion is in May.) We talked about fake IDs, he told me his foolproof method of faking the ID from our home state (a key element is having a friend who works at Blockbuster, because they use the same lamination technique), what we did for a living, NASA and rocket scientists, the cellophane he taped over the broken window in the door, other random things. Did I mention he was hot? And nice? And hot?

I realized, however, two things:

1. I have no inner cougar. Some girls do, some girls don’t. My friend J, who calls this kind of hot young thang a “puppy,” does. I admire that. A lot. I mean, it would be kind of fun, right? It seems like it would be fun.
2. I am not a closer. Even if, at some point, I thought, “I want to smooch this guy” or, perhaps, “I want to see this guy again,” I have no idea how to get the conversation headed in the “exchanging phone numbers” direction.

I suppose “closing the deal” should be baby step #10 or something, but I’m really so hopeless after the eye contact thing that I don’t know the proper order after that. So I apologize for the non-sequential baby steps. Expect more of the same. #22 will probably be “Introducing yourself” or something.

So how does one close the deal? Should a girl let a guy do that? If so, how does she pave the way? Thoughts?

As a sidenote: Ooh, young Alec Baldwin. So hot. So angry.

When I read that a woman needs to make eye contact with a guy 13 times before he’ll approach her, I had a dating epiphany. Though, like most of my dating epiphanies, it takes a long time for me to go from realization to implementation.

A couple of months ago, after my band played a show, I noticed a guy checking me out. I initially had to congratulate myself on recognizing that he was doing that. (My general obliviousness is my biggest dating obstacle.) But then I thought, “Wait a second! I can, with my actions, actually encourage him to come talk to me!” So I made eye contact. Twice. The second time, it was like I had sent out a homing beacon. The guy came right over. Nice!

We chatted for a bit about various things (nothing particularly memorable two months later). I don’t know how old he was, but he had the awkwardness of a guy in his mid-20s, complete with goofy nervous laugh punctuating comments that weren’t really funny. It’s OK, though. He might have been nervous and I was nervous, and he was nice and I was nice, and it was a pleasant conversation. No sparks, though. He said he’d come see another show I was playing that Saturday, he asked if I wanted to hang out before then, I said I couldn’t before but I could after. He seemed disappointed and asked for my number, which I’m sure was his way of making a graceful exit, and I was fine with that. I think we each realized, after talking to each other for about 5 minutes, that nothing was going to happen.

But the end goal wasn’t the point. The point, for me, was that I made eye contact with a boy! Yes, this is stuff I should have figured out in high school, but for some reason I haven’t. Baby steps.

Ladies, you know what I mean by "hot girl" jeans.

Viv, over at Bread and Boys (my new favorite single-girl blog), just wrote a really great post on date weight. She writes:

But the term “date weight” takes the form of many names. Among some girls it’s also known as the “Hey baby” weight. It’s different for every girl, but it’s the size & shape you achieve when random people on the street eye you once-over and yell “Hey baby!”

Last summer, I was on fire. Well, as “on fire” as I get. Dudes were all over me, as much as dudes are ever “all over me.” But I dated two guys that summer and smooched a third that year. I haven’t done that well since college. I’ve been wondering why this year, I’m so off my game. Or rather, why I have no game. When I read Viv’s post, I realized it’s because I’m no longer at my “Hey baby” weight.

Like her, no one in their right mind would call me big. But I was running a lot more last year. I was fit and strong, and, probably more important, I was confident–I knew I looked pretty good.

The barometer of my “Hey baby”-ness became my pair of skinny “hot girl” jeans. When I bought them, they were like a trophy–a recognition of my physical accomplishments. I wore them out a lot last summer, and I looked gooooooood. By November, I could fit into the hot girl jeans, and they looked…fine. I wore them to a holiday party in December and kept asking my friend, “Do you really think I can pull these off? Maybe I should run home and change.” (Yeah, I was that girl. Annoying.) By January, they were not to be worn in public.

And that’s about where I’ve been ever since. Time to start hitting the pavement! I need to get my game back. Time’s a-wastin’.

Photo by bluryee. CC 2.0.

At brunch the other week, my friend KP and I started talking about dating, as we always do. She told me about a friend of hers who had just moved to Chicago from San Francisco. “You know what’s different about Chicago?” he said on a recent visit back. “When you go to bars there, you don’t just talk to the people you came with.”

That is so true. I remember one night when KP and I were out with a group of other single girl friends. We were going to meet boys. Our friend T., who has a longtime boyfriend, found a spot where we all could sit–on the kegs in a side room–and we all rebelled. No guy is ever going to talk to us back here! But we were looking at it at too micro a level. No guy was going to talk to us, yes, but not because we were hidden away. It’s because we were in San Francisco.

It’s not that people here are unfriendly, it’s just that it’s not a “talking to strangers” culture. It’s a “I go out to have a good time with my friends, and, maybe, their friends” culture.

I realized what I needed to do: I needed to learn how to talk to strangers.

Here’s the other insight about dating in San Francisco that I recently gleaned from a friend: no one’s got game. “You go to New York, you go to L.A., and guys know how to ask for your number,” she said. “Here, all the girls are all third-wave feminist about it. They try to be interesting.” At first, I wanted to disagree. But after about five seconds, I knew she was right. I try to be interesting. I talk about New Yorker articles and how effed up Iceland’s economy is. That’s interesting and challenging and life-partnery. But it sure isn’t sexy.

So I’m starting a whole new tactic with this blog. I realized that–like sports, like learning an instrument, like anything, really–if I want to improve, I need to work on my fundamentals. I used to have OK game. Now, I have no game. I need to get game. Talking to strangers is step 1.

Tonight, after a slog of a day at work, I decided to take a detour on my way home at my friend’s bar. I went in, said hi, and immediately A., a fellow musician who I’ve met before, said, “Sit down, have a beer.” So I did. We talked about music, remote islands, pirates, the East Coast (he’s from Pennsylvania). It was fun. Then he got up to start playing the house piano. Mission accomplished.

I was about three-quarters done with my beer and thinking of heading out when J. sat down. Out of the corner of my eye, he seemed kind of cute. I saw he had a hardbound book. OK, I can do this, I thought. “What are you reading?” I finally asked. We started talking about language, linguistics, where he’s lived, where he lived with his ex-wife, and where I’ve lived. And, also, his girlfriend and her two kids. After a while, I had to head out and he had to head out, so we introduced ourselves in that oddly comfortable yet still odd way that comes at the end of a long conversation.

As I hugged my friend goodbye, he said, “Did you get that guy’s number?” I told him about the girlfriend and kids. But it wasn’t about that. I was pretty excited about the basic, though boring, achievement of just talking to someone I’ve never talked to before.

Baby steps. Next up: remembering how to flirt.

On Cinco de Mayo, I was chatting a bit with D., my newest bro. He made a joke, we all started laughing, and he said, “There it is!” “What, my laugh?” I asked.

“Yes! When I first met you, your laugh freaked me out,” he said, “but then I really liked it.”

“And then you wanted to make me laugh just so you could hear it?” I said.

He pointed right at me, shocked that I had read his mind. “Exactly!”

In that moment, I suddenly understood, at least partially, why I constantly misread signals. Guys try to make me laugh because I have a really loud laugh (as anyone who knows me or has heard the podcast knows). There’s nothing more validating to your sense of humor than to have someone laugh uproariously at your joke. I do that for people.

In fact, at my friend Liz’s wedding, our friend Dave came all the way over to my table at one point to make some joke. He looked disappointed when I only laughed a little. “I bet those guys that they could hear your laugh all the way over there,” he said, a bit crestfallen. He wasn’t disappointed that I wasn’t laughing; he was disappointed because he had just lost $5.

When a guy repeatedly tries to make me laugh, I think he’s interested in me. But no. It’s purely for their ego. Or, alternately, to win a bet. I don’t factor into the equation at all except that I happen to be the vehicle for my obnoxiously loud laugh.

I feel oddly better now that I’m aware of this, even though it means that I was misreading the one signal I thought I could actually read. Why did no one ever teach me this stuff?