you win, ana punye!

here is the rest of my story.

so we got to the shanghai tunnel, and as soon as we sat down he was again complaining about the dark and the smoke. i ordered a beer, he ordered a vodka cran (another red feminine drink), and we got some noodle dishes. i probably do not even need to say this, but he complained that his was too spicy. then when it was time to pay and walk to the movie theater, he offered me cash if i would pay with my card. i'm not really one to get my meals paid for by boys all the time, by which i mean i never expect it, but i'm also not really one to drive some dude across town to pick up a computer he had bought on a date. so it threw me for a loop when i took a closer look and the amount of cash he had handed me was way short of the cost of his dinner.

at this point, i had completely checked out of the entire thing. it may have been before dinner, when he spent the ten-minute walk between the first bar and the second complaining about smokers. not just smokers in general, but one or two friends he had who were smokers. he implied that by smoking socially, they were throwing their lives away, and appeared to come to the decision to burn those bridges while we were walking. i never suspected that he was trying to take me in any way - that he had needed a ride, and now he was paying for like half his dinner and getting a free movie and a ride home out of the deal. this guy was not slick, not even a little bit. i'd like to think that if he was slick enough to play the not slick role and get away with it, something i have encountered before, i would be able to tell. my grocery-store peek into his current lifestyle (overweight, fooling himself) is proof positive of this conclusion. had he actually been slick, i would have been extremely upset but playing the naive fool and plotting some volleys of my own. as it was, i couldn't wait for the whole thing to be over so i could ask jake to take me back because i had realized that other people are terrible and not for me.

so we walked to the movie theater, where we sat down to watch "kontroll," which was playing as part of the portland international film festival at the independent theater. it was the perfect date movie. a little spooky, a little magical, a little romantic - it's a great movie. i couldn't wait for it to come out on video. when you go to an independent film in portland, it's mostly an aging hippie crowd, and the entire theater is talking and really into it. it's sort of an experience, and you really can't be a codger about it. at first, when my date stopped shushing the people behind us, i thought he had just given up - actually, he had fallen asleep. when he woke up at the end of the movie, he said it had been "too dark." i dropped him off and never, ever talked to him again. and then i saw him in the grocery store yesterday and felt good that he was fat, and now i've completely ridiculed him on the internet.