Life in the fast lane

I did something sort of out of character last night. I went with a friend to a singles group function. It's meetup group (meetup.com) for single/divorced people. He goes to these all the time, but I've never really done it before. We met everyone at the 55º Wine Bar in Plano - there were about a dozen people including us. Most were around my age or a little older.

There were some interesting people: The group organizer was quite nice - she seemed to have her act together, and was friendly and talkative. That's probably why she got to be the group leader. There was one man who was obviously VERY intelligent, but didn't seem to have really great social skills. He didn't really know how to carry on a conversation without extreme silliness. I know, odd combination. Another guy was still fixated on trashing his ex. He didn't act mad, but he told story after story putting her in a bad light. Like the one about how she spent $20,000 on boob jobs, or the one how her tummy tuck messed up the hummingbird tattoo she had (it was drinking out her belly button before the surgery ), and then there were the requisite jabs about her current lovelife. There was one man who was quite overweight - seemed nice enough, but let's face it: all of us are superficial to some degree. Some of the conversation topics were: garage sales, British rock musicians, jewelry, yam oil, camping, lesbians, hitchhiking, bargain shopping...

One man struck up a conversation with me toward the end of the evening, went sort of like this: Him: "Hey, I know you." Me: "I've heard THAT one before!" Him: "I know you from that karate place." Me: "You mean Sidekicks?" Him: "yeah, my kids have gone there, but my ex isn't keeping up with the lessons. She won't take them, and I'm still paying for it." (could have predicted that turn of the conversation!) Anyway, he recognized me from a belt test back in the spring when his kids tested. (I have fans!) He then started trying to impress me with tales of when he was young and did Taekwondo and had patches all over his uniform from all the tournaments, and dropped names from jiu-jitsu (Machado) and started naming off MMA schools (trying to remember the names but couldn't). I'm about 3 inches taller than him. 'Nuf said.

You might get the idea from this that I didn't have a very good time - but I did. My friend was very nice - we had a few good conversations along the way - and just getting out of the house with other adults was good. For those of us who like people watching, it was a bonanza. The fact that it was a weekday wasn't all that great, but what the heck. The kids survived, and they can see that mom needs to have friends to hang out with too. I might even do it again sometime.