The One Who Was French, But Wasn't. (Frenchy)

I suck at blogging. But, never the less, here is( what should have been last night’s) Awkward Date Night Installment. This one is a rather popular tale with my sister, who is a Francophile, but I do so hope you will find the humor!

I am twenty three, single and living with my parents.

Internet dating was going to happen eventually.

Now, I wouldn’t say that I am an active participant in internet dating, but both times I actually followed through and met up with someone, it has provided me with a wealth of entertaining stories. I have decided that today, I would tell you the story of the Frenchman.

This was actually my second attempt at internet dating, so I was mildly apprehensive. But a young gentleman, who I shall call Frenchy, had messaged me several times. He had read one of my favorite books (Therese Raquin, by Zola) in the original French. Literate men are few and far between in this particular geographic location, so I was intrigued. He was a recent transplant to the area (which explains a lot), and he invited me to coffee. I obliged.

I suggested a coffee shop about halfway between us. The few days leading up to the meeting, Frenchy and I exchanged more emails, and I began to get the feeling that he was a bit pretentious.

I do not handle pretension well. In fact, I have two specific approaches:

• Act as trashy as humanly possible

• Out class them

Both of these are unsettling to someone who thinks that the sun rises and sets upon them. I strongly recommend that you try it, but I caution you that if you decide to take the second approach, the real skill is in the size of your vocabulary. If you’re not good with big words, don’t use them. Using an intellectual sounding word incorrectly makes you look like you’re striving for approval, and the pretentious individual will become condescending. And that will possibly make you have to punch them. And assault and battery is no joke.

But I digress.

So, I arrived at the coffee shop, and I was…worried. I had a strong feeling that something bad was going to happen. Now, I know what you’re thinking! Negative attitudes beget negative results. But the fact of the matter is, I have incredible intuition. I also have a lot of trouble following my gut feeling.

Frenchy was waiting outside the shop when I arrived. I moved to shake his hand, and he stepped back. “Nooo I do not do zee, what you call, hundshaake. Eet is far to beeznisslike for eh persenahl eencountahr.”

I am not mocking French accents. But this is what we like to call an important plot point.

I was not about to hug a stranger, and I certainly was not going to do the whole faire la bise thing, so we stood awkwardly for a few moments, then headed inside.

We sat at a table in the back, and there weren’t many people in the place, so it was quiet and had the potential to be a pleasant evening. We started chatting about our lives, what we were doing, where we went to school, and where we grew up.

Turns out, Frenchy was born and raised in Miami. Yeah, that’s right.

His parent’s background was French, and he’d spent a few summers there, and was terrified of flying, so rarely visited.

And even though he was obviously accentuating his accent, I was forced to spend the entire night leestening to eem tulk leek zis. Ee could nut reemeember must Eenglish wurds und would uccasionalee “forgeet” and sleep unto Frensh.

Eet wus focking annoying.

So now he was pretentious, fake, and irritating.

And then! He started talking about cheese. European cheese is so much better (I won’t argue that it most likely is.) Its fresher. In France, they eat cheese for cheese’s sake. In America, we eat it as a condiment.

Pretty sure no one eats cheese and crackers for the Ritz, but hey, maybe I’m mistaken. After all, I’m the kind of person who sits down with a block of cheddar and goes to town.

Then he started in on our grocery stores. And how he’d gone to Foodland and bought ground beef and took it home and it (shockingly) did not taste like beef tartar.

First of all, and I want you all to say it with me now, YOU NEVER BUY ANYTHING BUT PREPACKAGED GOODS AT FOODLAND.

Second of all, pretty sure that when you go to a restaurant and order steak tartar, it is not a plate of ground beef.

Third of all…who in their right mind eats raw beef? Sushi, sushi I get. But…oi. I just don’t understand.

Turns out, Frenchy got sick from the beef and had sworn off steak tartar.

But the best and most memorable part of the evening had actually happened at the beginning. When we sat down at our table, I ordered my cup of coffee, and my companion looked at me and said,

“Ooh, I do nit dreenk zee café. I meent eet more as a sing zat oo say. Oo knew, leek ‘leets git a coop uff café.’”

(By the way, if you need translations, let me know. Also, the fact that this guy didn’t drink coffee should have been my first red flag. Europeans drink that stuff like water. At least, they do in all the movies.)

And then he ordered whole milk. Now this is a coffee shop. They do not specialize in milk products, and so our very diligent waiter went and checked in the kitchen-no whole milk. Instead of sucking it up and drinking skim, or ordering something else, he did something that I have never seen before, and hope to never see again.

He drank a glass of skim and half and half.

I was in shock. I didn’t know what to say. I just sat there and stared in disbelief. It turned my stomach.

I stumbled through the evening, and finally managed to politely end the night. He walked me to my car (he was a very polite person, when he wasn’t being a priss.) And I said goodnight, hurrying away before there was any awkward hugging or kissing.

And I bet you thought it stopped there. But remember what I said about not being good at following my gut?

A week later we went out again. I won’t tell you the entire story, but a few interesting highlights:

When he invited me out, he was insistent that we go out in my town. I don’t go out here. A few of our most popular bars include the one with the metal detector and full body pat down before entering, and the one where the guy got lit on fire in the alley (for more details, feel free to ask.) I had to fight with this kid to go to a bar on the outskirts of town. It’s a very nice bar/restaurant, on the edge of a wooded area with lots of farmland nearby. I pulled into the lot and headed to the door, when I noticed someone wandering around the middle of the road that runs in front of the establishment. It’s more of a back road, but very windy and hilly and people (including myself) tend to go flying down it. I did one of those squeeze my eyes shut and hope that it wasn’t who I thought it was.

Of course, it was exactly who I thought it was. Frenchy.

He met me at the door and explained that it is his tradition that when he goes somewhere new, he walks all the way around the property. (It must be a French-I mean Florida-thing.) Then, he expressed his surprise and dismay at not being able to wander around the farm field across the street.

“Zere ees a fence! I culd not even geet into zee field! Zis ees a strange sing you Amerheecans do.”

I tried to very politely explain to him that no, he could not wander around the field, because it was private property, and the sole source of income for the family who owned it.

He started in on the wonders of socialism, and I started in on the gin and tonics.

Understandably, the rest of the night was a bit of a blur.

There are two morals I wish you to take from this tale, my dears. First of all, listen to your instincts. Because they are often more right than you are. Secondly, please remember:  skim and half and half do not whole milk make.

The One Who Didn't Know Where He Lived (TOWDKWHL)

I have decided to start a weekly feature that will henceforth* be known as Awkward Date Night, appearing every Saturday. Saturday, because Saturday is date night. I think. Maybe Saturday is party night and Friday is date night. I don't care. I make my own rules, man.

Awkward Date Night will be the dramatic (but true) retelling of an awkward date. And trust me, I've had some doozies. However, since a "date" in college usually consisted of getting drunk in some guys dorm room with his roommate, watching a movie (usually either a horror film or "The Notebook" because college boys are rarely creative or subtle) and then kicking said roommate out so you could hook up...I may run out of dates. So I've decided to include friend's dates or just generally strange interactions with the opposite sex. I will use nicknames for the most part, unless I really dislike the person, because if you're an asshole, I believe in public humiliation.

So I begin withhhhh: The One Who Didn't Know Where He Lived.

To begin with some background information:

I was raised Roman Catholic. There are varying degrees of Catholic: Fanatics, Socially Acceptable, Cafeteria Catholics**, and those like myself: I ended up with basically no theological belief, but all of the Catholic guilt.***

As Frank McCourt said:

There is no childhood more miserable than a Catholic childhood, 

except perhaps an Irish Catholic childhood.

This is not to say that my childhood was miserable. I just like the quote.

So anyway. The summer after my junior year of college, my church got a new seminarian (or as I called him, a baby priest. My mother did not approve.) He decided to start a young adult group. The idea behind it was to provide a fun (hah) way of meeting and bonding with other Catholics in the 18-25 set, since the church does a really bad job of engaging such folk. I joined because it appeased my mother (it made her much less likely to suspect the amount of hedonism that was occurring in my life) and because the guy at the sign up table looked so forlorn. (This is the young man who would eventually become TOWDKWHL.)

I went to the first meeting, which consisted of playing frisbee in the park near where I lived and eating some delicious chocolate chip oatmeal cookies. We prayed a little bit, and TOWDKWHL tried to rant and rave about the glory of Jesus, but The Seminarian (bless his heart) put the kibosh on that. It started to get dark, and most of the other people left. [Prior to the meeting, TOWDKWHL made a point of finding other girls to attend the meeting so that it wasn't just the three of us, because he felt that I'd be scandalized by spending time alone with two young men. He OBVIOUSLY didn't know me very well.] I mentioned to the guys that the park is under pretty heavy police surveillance after dark, because of a recent rise in drug trafficking. So we went back to the church and played poker (!) for a few hours. This was made all the more entertaining by the fact that TOWDKWHL kept insisting that they were Significant Catholic Figure cards, because Charlemagne was one of the kings.

That may have worked, if Athena wasn't one of the queens.

After we were done playing cards, TOWDKWHL asked if I could drive him home, as he didn't have a car. I agreed, and so we hopped in my ride and I started driving. I asked him where he lived.

He didn't know.

To be fair, he'd only moved to the area about a month prior. But seriously. He didn't know his own address. Or the street he lived on. Or what streets he lived near. He said he'd know it if he saw it. But there are a lot of roads in my county, and so this did not seem like a particularly solid plan. I pulled into the parking lot of the very same park we'd been in earlier so he could call his mom and get directions. This is the conversation that followed:

Him: Do you think it's ok for us to be here?

Me: Yeah, if the cops bother us we'll just tell them what we're doing. We should only be here a couple of minutes.

Him: No, I mean, you know...you're a young woman. I'm a young man. We're in a car, after dark. I don't want anyone to think you're promiscuous.

Me: ::disbelieving stare:: I think as long as you keep your pants on, we'll be ok.

That shocked him into shutting up. He called his mother and apparently she didn't know where she lived either (I became concerned about the mental health of this family) but gave us somewhat vague directions. We got onto the main road that would take us to where he thought he maybe probably lived. I asked him for identifying landmarks, such as the main highway near by, the dive bar where the army guys go on weekend passes and often end up arrested, or the old fashioned white church with the huge red neon "JESUS SAVES" sign.

None of these rang a bell and I began to wonder if he had actually traveled through a rip in the time space continuum to get to the meeting.

We continued driving. At that point I was on a pretty strong Say Anything kick, and Max Bemis was crooning some [mildly] offensive lyrics. At that point TOWDKWHL turned off my radio.

Now, I have a few rules that I adhere to pretty strongly. One of them is that YOU NEVER TOUCH MY RADIO. So I turned it back on. The kid turned off my radio again, and informed me that listening to such music would send me directly to the most fiery pits of hell.

First of all, I'm pretty sure the line that most offended him was "Jesus died a Jew" which is, in fact, true. Second of all, listening to risqué music is the LEAST of my sins.

I calmly informed him that if he touched my radio again, I would break his fingers, and then throw him out of my car. He left the radio alone.

I continued driving, and as we were passing aformentioned church, he shouted that we needed to turn. I almost spun my car. I very nearly broke his fingers and threw him out, just for being a moron.

And that was my first interaction with TOWDKWHL.

A few weeks later, I turned twenty one and had mentioned to the group that I would not be able to attend a meeting on that night, because I was going to the bar to celebrate my birthday. When I got home that night, I discovered this email, which I will present you in its entirety (with some editing to protect privacy):

Thanks for the info [my name] and happy birthday! 

 Be careful if you go the bar as you said in your e-mail. Just to let you know, getting "buzzed" where you start to feel the alchool kicking in is a venial sin, and getting drunk is a mortal sin, worthy of immediate confession to a priest, since you lose pretty much all of your rational faculties b/c you are under the influence.  I tell you this b/c I care about your soul, and I'm sure [The Seminarian] would back me on this.  So be smart, be cautious, and set an example for those around you.  Being a Christian is a way of life.

This was made all the more amusing by the fact that I was wrecked when I read it.

I went to a few more meetings, and then realized that it was really getting in the way of my drinking time, and lost interest. Never saw the kid after that.

I still wonder if he ever learned his address.

*People really don't use the phrase henceforth enough.
**These are Catholics who pick and choose which beliefs to follow, usually to best suit their personal sense of morality. I'm not particularly bothered, but whoooo-weee my CCD teachers were NOT fans.
***In my age group, I'm fairly certain this is the most common kind of Catholic. I don't think you REALLY become a socially acceptable Catholic until you have children and must adopt the appropriate beliefs so that you can torture your children with an hour of religious education on a Sunday, when they'd much rather be watching Ghostwriter.