Would it be possible to miss some guy you just met twice for less than two hours? His lingering out of proportion silhouette your memory managed to contrive out of fragile bits of moments of careful awkward glimpses and basic mundane yet exaggerated demographic information about his age, his education, his work (his money); blatantly hovering like an unfinished conversation you don’t know how it got started in the first place or now to end with.
Then the answer is a definite yes, if you are that girl working out a way to move on from her bitterest close thing to a relationship a year ago that it propelled her into any attempt to find another fixation which included getting her ass in for the first (and hopefully the last) time to an overpriced speed dating program for the lonely lovebirds lost in this decadent jungle, they came up with the most satiric and municipal name called Urban Attraction, you felt like you are in a government sponsored programme in Singapore for ensuring the population growth and potentially rejuvenating its future market.
In the battle for finding the right one, the gentlemen were expected to shift from table to table after 3 minutes of getting to know the missus of each post. A dragging repetition of three little minutes of instant concoction and distortion of a personality, a quarter of century worth of life resume and delivered it in such a tiring rapport, you became quite uncomfortably professional in introducing yourself partially. But you never quite grasp the knowledge either your personality could surpass your modest post war look from recent small pox attack with cleavage of sporadic sad spots well-hidden under elaborate shawl; or barely outwit the rest of your Paris Hilton-esque chic and casually glamorous opponents (that is how they interpreted the casual dress code on the invitation) which consisted mostly socialite ladies in blooming and your high school girlfriends that seemed to stay singles just like you when you last saw them almost a decade ago. Then you had to have that self-deprecating comedic routine again of how you end up here which besetting your initial behaviour against being single is like being a leper, even though no one asked you to explain and actually after listening to their brief life stories, these girls were beyond your league and in total bewilderment on how they needed to go speed dating to get a guy.
And of course, there were those man targets to conquer. Those supposed alphas of our dreams. Such a subconscious carnal ambition blundered bluntly into tepid expectation as the mind numbing conversation and rapid rating analysis distracted us from actually talking with each other. Instead, we were busy shooting two-ways monologue of intermittent ideas of who we think we were to avoid formidable silence and uneasiness from dropping on us like bombs. And nobody told you to practice on your poor pictorial memory before meeting ten different guys that looked the same after thirty minutes. So you came handy to develop particular monikers based on what they do that you self-sabotagingly mentioned it out loud to their very ears and to see them cringed just because you thought it was so damn funny, you forgot and kept jumbling their names.
You had your lukewarm not-going-anywhere with banking guy which was too cute to be true, plastic guy or better known as the guy who ditched you for the hotter hostess, car seat guy who emphasized that he was in distributing, not manufacturing and he was quite jolly and carefree, Singlish guy who spoke like a true salesman with broken accent, few indistinguishable guys who just wanted to leave your table ASAP, then of course the Church guy whose first question you answered made it clear that one of you wasn’t going to any church nor having any future together.
You had your tragironic moments with intellectual guys who thought you were having a good time like they were: snack guy, a local snack distributor who happened to be an educator and the only guy who quoted Soekarno to make his statement about education and liberation and to impress a girl, only turned out to be a total self-centric dude in the room who regaling yourself with his wine only requesting it back after a sip; and the learning program guy who actually very nice but sought after for any business opportunity with you (which you were partly to blame since you came up with the company profile presentation-like approach in the first place after you did not know what else to tell).
After the long ride of short stilted minutes, we had to tick on our score card who we wanted to get to know further and their contacts for the host to quickly match us up while we were “freed” to join the looser session for longer conversation with whom we were interested. Yet we pretty much looked like lost cattle nipping and munching all the delicate snacks (since the last drop of wine drained out by the guys even before the session started), rolling over our eyes, fidgeting our feet trying to get into circular forms of some girls and some boys relating their unavoidable six-degrees of separation linked back to their hosts’ small social networks from which this love-business getting its participants and flimsy trust on their claims that they proposed participants that were credible because they knew them.
The latter so-called benefit could actually be quite a deficit when you realized the hosts’ tight social circles were inclining to almost stereotyping. The gents like the ladies could have been simply your typical high school friends but with better haircut. They came mostly from the same mould of some rich Chinese Christian entrepreneur families, graduated from US or Canada and now either working with big companies, having their own business or helping their parents’ since the local minimum salary rate could neither afford their degrees nor lifestyles. You might not want to complain about that since those actually translate to old firm establishment and all a Cinderella can ask for a safe bet. Still it was challenging to fend off the plausibility of dating one of the children of corn with high maintenance and certain narrow-mindedness and the slim chances of them accepting you and your vague religious stance and class struggle mumbo jumbos.
Yet you had fro-yo guy who interestingly left his corporate job for joining the line of frozen yogurt franchise gold diggers and made it seemed so easy to have jocular conversation with him. He was the only guy who you could free to laugh about and with. He was so familiar (and probably because he was once one of your friend’s best friend at junior high) and an Office geek that it bemused you to see him nonchalantly complaining why every women wanted men to be like Jim when he saw Jim Halpert wallpaper on your BB. You probably hooked him with your adventurous (jurassic) trip to Komodo and you always wanting to be a journalist and cinephile. Just like you, he probably looked for somebody different from the rest. And just like you, he might find himself disappointed in the end.
You met him again on his unexpected invitation out of the blue to his fro-yo booth, only to bewildered than be certain since he seemed busy with his work as food scientist/businessman promoting his baby masterpiece of endless variants of toppings and self-made tutti frutti exotic yogurt recipes and apparently the next hippest place for any reality TV set with one of them having a shooting session at the time. Then he got distant as his friend visited and he caught up twittering about the event. This made you reluctantly referred to this guy in Oprah saying if man likes a woman, he always has a plan laid. What was his plan? You could not decipher. He even cancelled his plan to take you to a movie.
Did he already take the conclusion? How to rejuvenate and perpetuate this? Does it worth a try? Simply to talk with him again, to contradict the unreal and isolate the atom of his real solid self, collect it like a scientist should for further discernment yet appreciate it freely like an artist would. To face the fear and clumsiness like a simple-minded girl could. Alas, the ideal world of independent woman can be so drifted apart from the sorry state you are in. How that promise of a better future with him just intoxicates you into futile day dreaming then early regrets of how you will never meet him again because you just don’t have neither the guts nor active mind of a spell binder and war strategist combined to approach him. Instead of calling him to join for some coffee or movie or saying all those pickup lines that seem so easy and carefree to spill out in the movies; you ended up abandoning your tedious works for a while only for jotting your gut out on paper in some coffee shop.
