A Funny Story From The Past (Pre-Boyfriend, of course)

I had a funny memory pop into my head today. One that revisits my mind on occassion just because it was so darn funny. It's the stuff that sitcom scripts are made of. The only reason I have decided to blog about my long-gone single life is because Boyfriend is familiar with this story. Remember, he was my friend for years before we became an item and heard this story the first time around when it was presently happening. Also, it is just too damn funny that even he can't deny it.

Flashback to sometime in the colder months of 2003. Since it was baseball season, I'm guessing it had to be around October. My former roommate that Doc and I simply refer to as Nurse Crazy and I went to Flying Saucer for a drink late night during the week. I couldn't sleep and she...well...she was just an alcoholic. We were the only ones there at 12 a.m. on a Tuesday until two guys came strolling in. Apparently, they had been having drinks at The B.U.S. which is the bar directly across from the ballpark since the game ended and they were slowly bar-hopping their way closer to their apartment.

It was like a match made in heaven. They were roommates. We were roommates. You would think, right? There was a glitch. The cuter one was pretty young and the other one was...let's see...not attractive. At. All. Oh, well. Anyway, I decided to flirt with the young one regardless. I was three years his senior. Nurse Crazy just proceeded to get drunker and drunker in order to enhance the other guy's hotness factor. It was a good attempt on her part, but she just became a drunken mess so it was time to go home. Young Guy and I exchanged numbers upon our good-byes.

Young Guy called at least two or three times for me to meet him up for a drink while he was out and about. I declined with lame excuses until one night he called and I thought, "Eh...why not?" So Nurse Crazy and I met him and his roommate at the bar across the street from our then apartment. While at Front Porch Pub, Young Guy turned from dorky guy I met a couple of weeks ago to the most entertaining guy in the room. I blame that the place was pretty dead and I was pretty drunk...details, details. And so the non-commital quasi-dating began.

Later down the line, Nurse Crazy and I met up with Young Guy and couple of his friends at another downtown bar. As we were sitting side by side sipping our cocktails and bobbing our heads to the music, I looked over at Young Guy and was perplexed. There was something amist! Something was wrong but I couldn't figure it out. Not that he was in a bad mood or anything because he was still head bobbing to the beats and ordering another drink. It took a few minutes of stealing glances at him when it hit me.

I turned to Nurse Crazy and asked, "Does Young Guy have a lazy eye? I think he has a lazy eye."

She looked me straight in the face with her eyes half-opened in her best attempt to look sexy while inebriated and said, "I was thinking the same thing. I thought you must have already noticed and not cared."

WHAT?!?! Noticed and not cared? Ok. I know I'm going to sound shallow, but I am what I am. HELL TO THE NO would I have "noticed and not cared." Although late, I now noticed and I did care! Leave it to me to go out with a guy for over a month and not notice a lazy eye! However, I was already fully vested in at least seeming as if I didn't care because I've already gone out with him a number of times. Oy vey! To prove I wasn't completely superficial, I decided to look passed the eye and continue to see him - (like the vision references? Witty, I know). Because by God, I am a good person, right? Wrong. It was like someone with a booger hanging out of their nose, broccoli in their teeth, or a huge bloody ax protruding from one's skull. I couldn't help thinking about it. I started to feel self-conscious about looking him in the eye because 1) I didn't want him to think I was staring at IT, 2) I didn't want him to feel like I thought less of him just because he couldn't point both eyes at me when we spoke face-to-face, and 3) I wasn't even really sure which eye I should be looking at when I spoke to him. Oh Jeez!

Now on to the more comical part... After having gone out with him one more time after my new-found revelation, I thought that it wasn't so bad. The eye wasn't such a big deal. Maybe we can get it fixed when he gets older and richer or if I win the lottery. I was on my way to taking this relationship to the next level...maybe even going public with it.

In an effort to do something not in a bar and not ending in me passing out after copious amounts of scotch, we decided to do a movie night. I packed an overnight bag and headed to his place. We watched Patch Adams. Ok, tip-off #1 should've been the blatant poor choice of movie. It was already a movie that was a couple years old...and who the heck chooses Patch Adams to watch with a girl you're still trying to impress???? After accepting that I will no longer allow him to choose our movies, we started the film.

His tv was at the foot of his bed so we were both lying on our stomachs watching the movie side by side. I kept looking over at him giving him a look as if to ask him "what?" after catching him looking at me in my peripheral vision. He finally turns his head to look at me and asks me, "What?" I quickly realize that he wasn't staring at me from the corner of his eye to get my attention. HE was watching the movie, but his LAZY EYE was watching ME! Eeks!!! Ok, stay calm. I simply played it off by saying that it was nothing. We continued watching the awful movie. The crazy thing is that as the movie played on, I would forget about his eye and catch him in my peripheral again and turn to him with that same furrowed brow look in a "what?" expression again. And again, he'd turn to me and ask me what I wanted. Jeez! Why couldn't I have layed down on the "good" side so that the damn eye would stop staring at me?!?! Well, leave it to me, but as the movie progressed, we did that what-what routine at least two or three more times. Can you imagine???? Looking back, it would've been hilarious for an outsider to be watching us as I goofed up every time and tried to recover.

I was so thankful when the movie was over. I told him that I wasn't going to spend the night because of an early meeting...even though I had so thoughtfully had a bag packed in my car. That was the last time I saw Lazy Eye (the name Young Guy was later christened). How would our love survive if I couldn't tell whether he was looking at me or not or that I always had to sit/stand/lie down on the "good side" in order to feel like I'm not being stared at constantly? It felt like he was always staring and judging.

Stories like this from my adventures of singlehood make me thankful that I currently have Boyfriend, but I will tell you this... I think my friends are the most disappointed as nothing comes close to the entertaining stories that came out of Rice Spice's dating life between the years of 2002 and 2005.