A flat tire and Staten Island

So, it's Friday night, a good night for a date. True. However, I am taking 2 of my 3 New York teacher licensing tests tomorrow morning from 8 am until 5 pm.. so, I wasn't planning on going out tonight. However, in true dating fashion, I came home and checked up on some of jdate potentials. There is this one guy who had looked at my profile pretty frequently, but never did anything about it. And I have a little bit of an issue with age where I really don't like dating guys that are younger than me, and this guy is at most 6 months younger than me, not a big deal, but it was enough to keep me from contacting him. Crazy, aren't I? But after reading his profile again, and deciding that he seemed to be a billion times cooler than any of the other guys I've been out with.. Sure, why not, I'll click the little heart which will send him an email of 5 girls, telling him that one of the 5 clicked him... blah blah blah, and if he clicks the heart for me, then we both get a "click alert". Complicated, no? So I clicked the heart, and about 5 minutes later, he clicked as well, and we "clicked". So he IMed me and we got to talking. He likes the same types of books as I do, has read a lot of books that I've been meaning to read... He seemed really cool. and of course, I can't pull off cool. I've just mastered witty/sarcastic, I'm a long ways from cool.

Anyway, we some how got on the topic of the convenience versus the pain of having a car in the city. He was going home to his parents house in Staten Island for the weekend, and was telling me how he had to take the train into Manhattan to catch a bus back through Brooklyn to get to Staten Island. I have a car in Brooklyn, and mentioned while I enjoy it most of the times, it's not always convenient, especially today since I had a major flat tire.

At mention of my flat tire, Jdate boy has an ingenious idea. He will come over and change my tire to the donut tire if I'll drive him home to Staten Island. I needed my tire changed before my tests tomorrow... so, it seemed like a fair trade to me. We've had no phone conversation, no email exchange, just a brief IM conversation to go on. This was either going to be the best meeting or the worst.

I didn't have enough time to do my usual preparation, since he lives only 4 avenues away from me, and I had to shower. I went very casual, t-shirt, jeans, zip up hoodie, wet hair, minimal makeup. Definitely not my best effort, but true to life for me.

He came over, and it wasn't weird even for a second. We had a very natural give and take in the conversation, and I think the fact that the first 20 minutes of meeting him was revolving around actually doing something (changing the tire) made it seem like we had been friends for a long time, instead of having just met. The conversation was great the whole drive to Staten Island, and he made it safely home.

I honestly, truly was not expecting anything out of this, physically. I mean we kind of bartered services and I figured if there was any interest it would amount to the discussion of a real date... if not, no harm no foul.

We're sitting in front of his parents' house, and he was like, I'd invite you in - but it's my parents house... Clearly I am in no way ready to meet any member of his family. I was a-ok with no invitation in. He leans over to hug me good-bye. We hugged and my foot which was on the break slipped and the car jolted a bit, which made me pull away from him. Once I was pulled away, I figured he would just get out of the car. But he stayed. And we kissed. and it was SO good. (anything compared to the fish kiss from last night would have been ok... but this was "butterflies" good.) And then he left. He made mention of doing something later in the week, but who knows. I'm just reveling in the good right now.

And that ladies and gentleman, is the one and only good jdate story I have. It's not as funny as my bad ones. But it's much better to live the good ones than write about the bad ones!

Whether it goes anywhere from here, who knows... but at least the good is there. I was losing faith there for a bit!