I attended a baby shower for a dancer friend of mine today. It was unusual in many ways. For one, boys who have reached double-digit ages are rarely invited to such things. For another, the vast majority of attendees were her coworkers.
The original plan was to hold it at a local indoor playground place. The hostess from the club had organized the party and apparently not realized such places are packed on Sunday afternoons and had not reserved a room or table. There was nowhere for us to sit. We moved over to Chuck E. Cheese's about a block away. This is when the guest of honor realized she didn't have the phone numbers of everyone who was coming to tell them about the change. In fact, as invitation was largely by a dressing-room posting, there was no telling who was planning to come. Luckily, the lady at the counter did agree to redirect people to their competitor.
We weren't the usual Chuck E. Cheese crowd. Two people were wearing Hustler t-shirts, one with the slogan "won't stop 'til the panties drop." We started off the party passing around a digital camera with homemade porn on it. Two of the girls talked about getting up on stage to dance with the robots, but it didn't happen, which I suppose was fortunate because we would have had to find a third location.
One of the managers (who didn't actually attend) had apparently told her he would get her a vibrator for her baby shower. She said she already had plenty and the baby can't use that. I said you twist them and they shake and make noise. Babies love that kind of stuff. Her roommate then started talking about teething, causing the conversation to be abruptly ended.
Things somehow turned to how the guest of honor had not had sex in three months. Everyone started asking her why and she said it was because she hadn't gotten any good offers. I brought her food on Valentine's day and lay in her bed with my arms around her for about an hour afterward and couldn't get a reaction. Perhaps the problem was that we were watching The Devil's Rejects, which is not the most romantic of movies.
I got to meet a lot of the people you don't meet around the club, like people's kids and parents and girlfriends. Despite not knowing half the people and not really being in a traditional space for men, I was perfectly comfortable with things. The only other customer invited was twice my age and comes from a more blue-collar field and pretty much sat at the end and didn't join in the conversation.
Afterward, the guest of honor, one of her friends and I headed to a local bar where a drunk guy proceeded to give her a pep talk about how she was strong and trying to get her to repeat after him. If I'd realized she was as irritated by him as I was, I would have found a way to get rid of him, but she was acting interested and only complained when he finally left. Perhaps this is one of those stripper things you sometimes forget to turn off.
As of now, she'll be on her own when the baby is born as she only knows the father's first name and phone number. I work in collections and tracking people down is a good part of what I do. The phone is a Verizon cell and I have no contacts there, and the first name is pretty common, so I'll have an uphill battle.
She was talking about her exes. Most seem to be abusive jerks. For instance, she spoke of one who tried to block her when she was walking out on him, then tried to grab her and lock her in the bathroom. An hour later, his mom called to beg her to take him back. My mom never helped me get my girlfriend back, but I suppose I never thought to ask her. She had the good sense to walk out on these assholes, but not to spot them ahead of time and avoid them. It did immediately get me thinking about how, for all my better qualities, these guys were more superficially interesting than me. Of course, the reasons they were interesting are mostly the same reasons they were bad boyfriends.
This girl has kissed me on several occasions (all before she knew she was pregnant), calls me sometimes on thin reasons like she's driving and doesn't like to be alone in her car, talks about me enthusiastically to her coworkers and sometimes relies on me to help her out of jams. On the other hand, she had no reaction to my (admittedly fairly mild) advances on Valentine's Day and usually doesn't return my calls. When we do talk, it's usually a good long time, though. I'm not entirely sure what to make of it. Is she not interested, or is she just not always showing it because of her clinical depression? (I don't expect you to be able to answer, of course. This is just my thought process.)



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