An expensive day at the races
Since each of the members of my elite dating club need a name, but one which will provide a modicum of anonymity, I will share with you a description of a date with a man I’ve dubbed “Hippie Teacher”. It’s not that he teaches hippies, it’s that he happens to be a teacher and a self-described hippie. To make it even easier, I will merely refer to him as HT from this point forward.
For the sake of clarity, I will provide some context for the date I intend to tell you about. HT and I had met at a professional seminar and hit it off immediately. Unfortunately, though he is a brilliant teacher, he is clueless when it comes to women and failed to pick up on all of the signals I threw his direction over the course of our three day workshop. It took three months of MySpace messaging and the intervention of his friends to finally bring to his attention the fact that this girl might actually be romantically interested in him. Anyhow, we began dating at the beginning of the year and the date about which I write occurred roughly eight months later.
The date on which I met his family.
So it was a Saturday on which I was dragged to the races...not drag races per se, because these cars travel on what's called a 3/8ths circle, some hybrid of that concept. I don't know what a 3/8th circle is, but it basically looked like some high school’s a muddy track field. After asking HT repeatedly if he'd talked to his family so they knew when to expect him, he assured me everything had been handled and we just needed to be at his dad's place at 4:30. Somehow he roped me into taking my car - in theory because it gets better mileage than the mini van that he was driving this week in preparation for the cross country meet he was driving his school team to – the following day. By taking my car is became clear that the responsibility of filling it with gas fall upon my shoulders, which makes total sense given the fact that I'm throwing myself on the proverbial grenade so he has company on this sojourn to hell. HT is a good but impatient driver, and he kinda goes nuts when he isn't in the driver's seat, so I turned the keys over to him and planned to relax for the two and a half hour drive. A terrible presumption on my part. He began the torment with the iPod. He's so ADD that he can't listen through an entire song and insisted on changing 2/3rds of the way through each, requiring him to take his eyes off the road, dodging a multitude of orange construction barrels in the process. This annoys the shit out of me because: 1. I'm freaked that we're gonna crash, and 2. Not only does the song have to change every three minutes, but it's