Well, as you will discover with this blog, I am world renowned (okay, in my world at least) for my abilities to never succeed on a date, especially the first date. I am exceptionally thick with women, as every man is (or at least claims to be to not have to listen to them), but pretty receptive to at least trying to get along with them. This particular story is about a girl and a foreign film she wanted to see.
I happened to meet a girl in a bar one night and struck up a pretty decent conversation with her. Now bear in mind, this was during my college time, so for me a "pretty decent conversation" probably meant that I didn't fall asleep or throw up on her. That's a feat in and of itself, because I was generally highly intoxicated at bars and would have to have been to be talking to a girl (you see, in addition to being terrible with women, I am terrified of them). Well, we exchanged phone numbers and I actually followed up and called her a couple days later. Eager to go out with this girl, I suggested a pretty standard first date: dinner and a movie. I let her pick the restaurant and movie as I am nothing if not a consummate gentleman. She chose the restaurant (nothing too fancy, but a decent little sit down place) and I asked what movie she would like to see. This is where my woman skills start to shine through.
It's no secret to those who know me that I am a huge horror movie fan. In fact, I've started a horror blog in addition to this one here. So, there happens to be a great Japanese director named Takashi Miike who is pretty well known for being the reason people say "Japanese people are fucked up". His movies are generally very violent and often strange, but well shot and interesting. He had a little movie called Audition that came out in Japan in 1999. Well, a few years later (ie. when I was on a date with this girl), it had finally started making an appearance in the states. The movie is about a man who holds fake auditions to meet women after his wife dies. He meets one and really likes her, but finds out that she is batshit insane, to the point of keeping a man in her apartment in a burlap sack and feeding that guy puke. She ends up torturing the guy in a pretty gruesome scene. Now, it's an unsettling movie at best, hard to watch, but incredibly well done and very tense. It's a movie I greatly admire and still find it enthralling, but hard to watch. Miike has also made some other great movies like Ichi the Killer, Visitor Q, Imprints, and my recent favorite, Sukiyaki Western Django.
So, this girl mentions that she heard there was a great foreign film playing at the student union that night. Well, I bet you can see where this is going. She said it was called Audition and she had heard it was a bit of a thriller. Now, I have already seen this movie at this point, so what I should have said was, "Hmmm, I've already seen that and I don't know if it's a good date movie," or at least warned her about the graphic torture scenes and the overall theme of the movie. Instead, what I said was, "I would gladly see that movie again. Let's go!" Yup, dating mastermind.
The dinner was quite good and we headed to movie theater in a fairly pleasant mood with full bellies. The conversation over dinner wasn't quite as enticing as I had remembered from the night before, but then again nothing is when you aren't drinking. She also managed to say a couple of things during the date that struck me as a bit shallow, like asking me to admire her Prada purse her sister had given to her. When I asked what Prada was, I was met with a stare of contempt and amazement (at the time, The Devil Wears Prada was just a book I hadn't read, not a movie I hadn't seen). Oh well, she was still okay, even if she did mention to me that I didn't really match what she had worn. Well, I apologized for not coordinating outfits with her, which got a bit of a chuckle, but I had the sense that she really wasn't kidding about that comment. On the way to the movie I was planning on warning her a bit about the content when she said something to the effect of thinking farmers were selfish and taking up government grants (I don't remember how the topic came up). Now, I am a farm boy, born and raised. I paid my way through college by milking cows, so I know that farmers don't make that much money and quite frankly could use the grants. But hey, that's just me.
So at this point, she's made it pretty abundantly clear we aren't working out as a couple. I decided not to tell her the content of the movie. Well, at the peak of the torture scene, I happened to exchange glances with her and if there were a way to say "I'm never going on another date with you" with your eyes, hers said that to me right then. We walked out of the movie and she just laid into me about how I should have said something to her to warn her about that and how she couldn't believe that I had agreed to see that with a girl. I shrugged, said I still liked the movie. She said she was going to go home and responded by walking away and saying "O.k."
Needless to say, there wasn't a second date.
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