I’m spending my Saturday night camped out at a Starbucks with my laptop and Chai Latte, solely here to work on articles for TheNeave.com and to scavenge sound samples for music production. In Seattle, it’s downright shameful to give a huge corporation my patronage when there are literally hundreds – if not thousands – of independently-owned businesses serving up some of the best coffee in the world. However, Seattle’s city-wide free wireless, while awesome in theory, gets a crappy signal from my new apartment, and I won’t have my private Internet service turned on until Tuesday.
To further set the scene, I’m not exactly dressed to impress; my hair isn’t even brushed, for fuck’s sake, and my face is wearing its best pretend-I’m-invisible-and-don’t-fucking-look-at-me scowl. Add a wedding band to the equation, and I’m pretty much equipped with some professional-grade Armor of Unapproachability. Or so I thought.
I’m queued behind an older man who keeps craning his skull backwards to stare at me. After he pays for his crap and turns around, he pauses to flash his teeth in my face, and I nod courteously, side-stepping him to place my order.
No sooner have I set up my stuff and begun typing away when I get sudden the itchy feeling that someone’s watching me. I ignore it for a bit, but pretty soon the dual holes being burned into my head grow unbearably uncomfortable. So I look up. The previously-mentioned doucher is smiling broadly at me, sorta like the way little boys gaze proudly into the toilet after taking a gigantic shit. Speaking of little boys, he’s here with whom I assume to be his son, asking the kid loud questions that are difficult to avoid over-hearing.
“Has this weekend been fun so far?”
The blonde child stuffs more of his Rice Krispy treat into his face and nods silently.
“Well, think about what you want to do in two weeks when you come to stay with me again, okay?”
The kid nods again, infinitely more interested in the fake wood surface of the table than in his pop’s nondescript face.
I continue to write without missing a beat, lost in what I’m doing. Suddenly, a business card is shoved under one of my typing hands. Startled, I glance up to see that Father of the Year is already retreating from my table, calling over his shoulder that he never does stuff like this and similar hot air. Sure enough, there’s scribbled handwriting across the back of the card, filling up the space with “I’d love to have a coffee and chat with you – or a fun dinner or something” and the like.
“Oh god. I am sooooooo married,” I drawl with unnecessary emphasis. Then, to soften the blow and feel like less of a cunt, I politely tell him, “But thank you anyway.”
He apologizes and I tell him not to sweat it, knowing that the dude sitting at the table next to mine is mortified for his fellow man, but most likely thinking, “Better him than me.”
Mostly I just feel sorry for the young boy. It’s bad enough that his parents split when he was barely out of diapers. On top of that, his whore of a father can’t take a break from chasing pussy for the mere six days a month that they’ve been allotted to spend quality time together. What kind of message does that send to a child?
“I didn’t love you enough to request more visitation days, and I’m certainly not going to let you get in the way of my potential sex life.”
Lame, lame, lame.
Hey single dads! Of course you deserve to have a social life, but not at the expense of the spawn who look up to you. Also: look at a woman’s left hand before hitting on her. If there’s a ring on her finger, leave it alone. Just because your own marriage didn’t work out doesn’t mean I’m not taking mine seriously.
If given my druthers, men would hit on me exactly as shown in this video.
haha. wow. good one.
so you get turned on by getting turned off?
I get turned on by my husband. The video, while obviously a joke, was meant to illustrate that I don’t like getting hit on, period. It was annoying when I was single, too. Classy guys know how to present themselves as human beings instead of hound dogs…and respect wedding bands.