Jamming versus Rollerderby.

I've decided you can tell if you want to spend time in someone's company within roughly thirty and no more than sixty seconds.

Call me judgemental, I suppose it is. But you just get so much information about person the minute you meet them. bam. like a wave. probably in your brain a trillion nerves are firing, areas are lighting up here and there, you're recognising them, relating to aspects of them, associating them with other things from your past. weighing them up. judging them.

This is not about looks, shoes, car... or even face, well it's not strictly about face.

It's the expression their face has taken on from all the years they've used it. It's the feeling that the muscles around a persons eyes give you about how they've received their life. You can tell a cheerful, aware, optimistic, observant person, from a person who wears blinkers all their life, and lives a tunnelled life, from the look in their eyes and the muscles in their jaw.

You can tell a pessimist from an optimist, by the way they hold their shoulders. Whether they lift their heart or not.

You don't analyse this at the time, you don't think it consciously, you just feel it.

And chemistry. You either have it, or you don't. Not just the bowchika wow wow type, but just a 'click', something that fits, a feeling that tells you were meant to meet this person. A feeling that you like them straight away.
Or on the contrary, a feeling of ambivalence.

Date one. Friday night. You like date one the second you meet him and shake his hand, and see how nervous he is, and how he grins stupidly because of his nerves.

Date one starts with smiling and laughing and easy rapport. Date one catches you off guard, date one is funny.

Date one is a good date. A feeling that you've met with an old friend who's been away along time, and you're eager to hear all their stories. And you've always fancied this old friend, and now providence has brought you back together.
Date one involves playing guitar together, and singing, and cider.
These are a few of my favourite things.
Date one is easy. It's comfortable, but exciting, like driving your trusty car through the winding roads to the coast. You've been here before, but it's exciting every time.

Date one has kisses. Kisses, and dancing, are two sure fire ways to certify whether you fit with a person. A kiss fits, or oh lord... it does not fit.
I described a bad kiss scenario to a friend yesterday as 'like eating a pie'
Cringe with me.
The least sexy thing you can imagine. All fat and no flavour. Excuse whatever filthy pun you are inventing in your head right now.
When, during the pie-eating-like bad kiss i heard my inner voice say: it'll be over soon. I realised, it was over right now.

Date one kisses are not like pie eating. Date one kisses are like lychees in syrup on icechips. Date one kisses are like getting static off your jersey as you pull it from your head. Like sneezing. Date one smells JUST how you like a man to smell, you can't put your finger on it, but when your face is leaning on his jersey with his warm shoulders underneath and there is that smell... you melt down into a little puddle and hope he won't notice. That smell is like pine trees at christmas, just, so, right.
Date one ends with you wanting more.

Date two is a sunday rollerskating jam. It begins with you losing direction in Mount wellington. Date two is polite. Date two seems a little, medicated, do you know what I mean? Date two doesn't look you in the eye properly. Date two has short legs.

To Date Twos great credit, he takes you rollerskating.
Rollerskating is seven years old, my little ponies, everything with rainbows on it and plenty of pink. Rollerskating is ice cold slushies, music and lights, rollerskating is a boy two years older than you that you JUST DIE every time you rollerskate past him, because you have the BIGGEST crush on him.

I am ready to have fun, you know? Date aside, it's ROLLERSKATING... how could this not be fun?!
But somehow... it is not that fun, it starts out fun.. you get your size 10 womens, mustard brown rollerskates shaped by many years of eager feet from the teenager standing in the room full of skates. You put them on and tentatively roll out onto the hard, shiny floor. You take little, sliding new born foal steps forward, you can move, you aren't falling over, and something in your brain fires up and says I remember this!!

And around you go. Around and around and around, and around. With Date two either trailing, or leading, or beside you asking you the dullest questions you have ever heard, so dull they make your stomach ache, so dull they make you instantly tired, like, so you work monday to friday then?

And a nasty, hot, painful blister begins to form on the inside of your big right toe, metaphore not lost on you.

I'm in two places, emotionally, one of me is a 7 year old child rollerskating around a dark skating rink with the smell of sweat and sugar in my nose and multicoloured lights dancing across the floor, tripling the feeling of fun.

The other of me is 31 year old on a first date thinking REALLY? I'm really on a date with this guy?? This is really what's out there for me?
I haven't really given you any real reason not to like him, here's one. There are a bunch of lesbians at the rollerskating rink. Apparently rollerskating is big in the lesbian world, you can kind of see why, and because there was that movie with drew barrymore and page whatsherface about young girls defying their parents and taking up rollerderby.... you still with me?

So the lesbians are clearly lesbians, and there's quite a few of them. They're wearing those black clothes that are meant for 15 year olds but somehow women in their 30's seem to think it makes them look young and cool to wear them, with grafitti on them and Misery type graphics. ANYWAY. I like a lesbian as much as the next person, which is to say, I just generally like everyone until proven wrong.
And Date two, as he slowly dwindles into a bottomless hole of boringness, running out of things to say even MORE so than in the start, skates in a bit closer to me and says, looks like there's a lesbian convention down there, with a sort of a snide smirk.

The lesbians, about 8 of them, are all standing at the end of the rink, chatting, probably about how they like to eat pussy you know. Cuz thats all those lesbians do you know. And of course my date has to point it out, like we've come across a cage full of vaguely dangerous monkey species at the zoo.
I don't know, am I being too harsh? To me, that is just not interesting, and furthermore, who cares, and furthermore, it starts with the lesbians and it ends with him saying let's not let so-and-so mind the dogs while we're away because you know (he's black and he might nick something). You have to watch for bigotry, it comes in many guises.

I do this thing, when i hear someone say something snarky or unkind I try to picture my brother kae saying it. Kae's personal goodness is A close to god's as a man's could be, mean, bitchy crap doth not depart his lips. And if I can't picture him saying it "check out the lesbian convention" I drop the hammer on the person who did.

So anyway. I make the most of the rollerskating, I can feel myself going off the guy and am having to work out an exit plaln. My inner thighs and outter glutes have taken all the nostalgia they can take. When I look at the clock to see if it's over soon, there's an hour to go. Bad sign.

I realise I'm going to have to lie to him. To get out of the date extension, because of course rollerskating has only been two hours, two interminable hours, there's sure to be a 'drink' afterward. I can't bear the idea. Call me selfish, it would be entirely accurate. Out of self preservation and nothing else, I cannot sit in a bar drinking cider across from a guy who is going to ask me 'so, do you drive a car?'. Nope. NOsirreebob. No can do.

Rollerskating comes to it's natural conclusion, lights go on, skates come off, shoes go on, everyone is a little sweaty, tired and elated. Hand in our skates and head outside and there in the parking lot I lie cold and barefaced to his face. I do, I know, I'm a bad person, it's true. He says, do you want to go get a drink or something, and i look him in his dry, chaffed, red little face and say, man you know, i've got to go catchup with a friend, because she's LEAVING THE COUNTRY, and it's really bad timing i know, i'm so gutted, but this was the only time i could see her, did i mention she was leaving the country?
EEEEEK.

It's horrible. It's horrible to lie to someone and them know it and you know they know it and...it's horrible. And he just says: on yeh. and gets in his car and disappears, as I plea into the air behind him it's been REALLY nice to MEET YOU!!!
Oh god.

What you want to be able to say is, you're a nice guy, you are, you're not an asshole and you'll probably find someone as lifeless and boring with a mellow case of bigotry just like you to spend your every day with until you just completely stop moving and become a sod of dirt. I appreciate you liking me too, thanks, it's always good to have a fan, and the date was not aweful, but I can tell you with total sincerity that we are never going to have a spark and end up in a passionate tryst tied to a bedpost, or spend our sundays reading papers while we stroke each others leg with our foot under the duvet, or reading books to each other in a tent. We have no future. So lets just cut our losses shall we?
That's what i wish you could say, but you can't, the world makes you lie.

So then i text date one, because i want to kiss him again, and i'm hungry, for food, and if there's one thing i like it's going out to dinner with someone i'm attracted to. Sitting across from each other sharing our thai meals thinking how if things carry on this nicely you might just end up reading the paper together on sundays.