Today was a strangely eventful day for your old pal DownToBuck. The good news is, I’m back to making highlights. The bad news is…well, you’ll have to keep reading to find out what the bad news is. Otherwise you’d stop reading here and I’d have written down all these words for nothing.
So, I’m gonna start at the beginning so you guys get the proper context. Context is critical here. And in this case, the context is that I re-entered the girl game at the beginning of the summer and got myself a new girlfriend.
That’s right. Even though I swore to myself that I was done with women forever, it turns out that my fragile male psyche puts up very little resistance when faced with cute, smart, funny girls who work at pet stores. All I was doing was making goo-goo faces at the little kitties in their little cages, and she walks up and comments how cute Mr. Paws is with his white fur with the little black socks, and I just blurt out “not as cute as you with your deep blue eyes and artfully styled bangs” (what can I say I think fast on my feet) and she gets all blushy and giggly, and when I told her I wanted to take her to get ice cream after her shift ended she said yes before I even finished asking.
Her name’s Stephanie, by the way.
So I took her to get ice cream (I had the seasonal key lime flavor and it was bomb, no lie, it had graham cracker bits in it) and then we were basically boyfriend and girlfriend. Me being the boyfriend and her (Stephanie) being the girlfriend. If I didn’t already have it in the bag by being so charming and, let’s just say it, handsome, I sealed the deal by having about a thousand pictures of my little kitty Japurri Purrker on my phone. Stephanie loves cats. By revealing the vulnerable part of me that likes the same cute things she likes (cats), I pretty much punched my ticket to Girlfriend City, population me.
Not like I’m saying she’s somehow less of a person because she was so easily manipulated into being my GF. As I already said, she’s a great girlfriend on her own merits, those merits being cuteness, intelligence, and willingness to tolerate my idiosyncracies. In her own way she was the one manipulating me with those desirable traits of hers. She manipulated me so good that I didn’t even think twice about reversing my “no women in my life ever again” stance.
So, you know, I was like, hey Stephanie, you wanna come hang out at my place some time and I can make us a fancy dinner from locally sourced ingredients that I got from the farmers’ market? That line totally worked, and I knew it would work because I could just tell. Girls who work at pet stores are also the kind of girls who appreciate dudes who care about responsible stewardship of the planet, or something.
Side note: all the ingredients were actually just from a regular supermarket. I’ve never been to a farmers’ market.
When Stephanie saw my apartment for the first time, the first thing she noticed (other than Japurri, who waddled up to her and meowed) was my impressive computer setup. I’ve got three of those curved 4k displays set up so it’s like I’m surrounded by pixels. When she asked me what I used it for I told her it was for programming and gaming, which wasn’t a lie, but I didn’t mention the fact that I’m the sovereign of an NBA highlights kingdom. It just didn’t seem like the time right then. I also didn’t mention how I’ve got the new Intel Xeon processor which has 24 cores, or how I’ve got a mechanical keyboard for the ultimate tactile typing experience, or how I just upgraded to 128 GB of RAM because I felt like it, or how one of my nicknames for myself is “RAM”, but in this case it stands for “Rad-Ass Motherfucker”. Instead I told her that the organic asparagus was coming to life being gently roasted in the oven on a bed of microgreens to expose the delicate flavors.
DTB’s girl tip of the day: always have fancy hand soap in the bathroom. It’s just one of those things where it makes your life look really put together even if your life is in shambles. In this case Stephanie was going to be my girlfriend no matter what, but in a different situation I would have been really glad for the soap. Bonus points if it’s organic and has jasmine as one of the ingredients.
When I asked Stephanie to move in with me like a month later, she said yes without even thinking. I never even visited her old place but I guess her roommate was a real bitch to her. So that’s cool, it made me feel like I was rescuing a damsel in distress, and if the roommate had been a dude I would have totally paid him a visit and punched him out. So now DTB has a chick living with him, and she’s really pretty and her shampoo makes my bathroom smell like one part tropical paradise and two parts elegant five-star day spa. That’s basically what it boils down to.
Fast forward to today, when the real story begins…