A Second Rendezvous

Ah, Saturday night. The quintessential "date night". So I finally did something by the book. :-)

Saturday's date was dinner at the Cheesecake Factory. Trois started off the evening by being on time this time (yay!), while I was a minute late trying to find a place to park. The inner waiting area was pure chaos, so Trois and I went outside and talked for awhile whilst waiting for a table.

An aside: It seems that restaurants in Austin are ceasing to offer reservations between the hours of 6 and 8 PM. This is decidedly ridiculous. I wonder if it has anything to do with people failing to show or lack of punctuality?

So anyway. I had a slight advantage in the choice of restaurant since my C&J have gone there with me for happy hour several times. Little things like that help, particularly when the conversation is so stimulating that there isn't much time to look over the menus. I found out a couple interesting similarities between us, like how he dislikes the muddled mint leaves stuck in mojitos and the tapioca bubbles that come in bubble tea. Or how he doesn't sign the back of his credit cards in the hopes that people will check his ID (smart man). And how we both grew up in small towns with small-town drama (his graduating class was only 40 more than mine). And how we NEVER ever EVER want to end up in our respective small towns. (Glee!)

I related the story of how (allegedly) a cheerleader made threats that if I became valedictorian over her, she'd break my legs (her idea of joking? lame). And of Mars and I creating the dialogue to mock the lack of achievement of our high school "peers".

"School is fun!.....School is hard. I think I'll get a job.....This job is fun!.....This job is hard. I think I'll move back home to Columbus."

He told me stories about getting a TV tuner cartridge for his Sega handheld game system and being the "cool guy on the athletics bus with the TV", and then later learning to rewire it to make it serve as a monitor for another game system that he and his twin brother were forbidden from playing. I can tell that it makes both of us happy when we can make the other laugh. That's a great starting point, indeed.

Conversation wound around to souvenirs that we each collect when we travel, which led to Kinder Surprise Eggs (and how Hershey's has an embargo on all chocolate imports to the USA which is why we can't get them here). I was explaining to Trois what a Kinder Egg was, when the waitress came around and chimed in with "Were you talking about Wonder Balls?"

Oh. My. God. I had completely forgotten about those! I made a connection about why I'm so fascinated with the Kinder eggs - it's because I used to have a Wonder Ball every day at lunch (at school, anyway), and we'd take turns breaking it apart and eating the little Smarties candies inside. (They were Disney themed, so you got a hollow ball of chocolate, Disney-character-shaped Smarties, and a Disney sticker.) I had so many of them that, even though I ended up giving a majority of the sticker prizes away, I still had enough to almost cover my theater binder. Those were good times.

Hooray for happy nostalgia asides!

But back to the date. We kept the conversation going for a good three hours but called it a night as his twin was coming into town and I didn't want him to be a bad host and make his brother wait too long. He immediately asked me when my next days off are, and what time I wake up on my working nights. Plans!!

There was no goodnight kiss, only a goodnight hug, and plans to go see the new Sherlock Holmes movie on Thursday night. Thankfully I had some wonderful advice and perspective from a friend earlier that evening to make me less impatient about "when is this guy gonna kiss me already?". I'm going with "things are on a good track because we have lots to talk about and each date ends with plans for a next one". And that makes me happy.