The other thing I havent told you about PhotoGuy is that he is a "loller".
For those us who were born in the, for lack of a better term, perineum of Generation X and Millennials, we know that LOL was born as an acronym for "Laugh out Loud"...if you use any kind of social media these days, however, you know that lol is more often used as punctuation than it is to indicate that you found something quite funny and therefore actually laughed out loud (or, rather, snorted air out of your nose while slightly nodding your head once).
Using "lol" as punctuation is one of my top three pet peeves - along with loud chewing, and the saying "time flies when youre having fun" (as I type this I realised that I actually have about 10 top peeves and about 8 of them are grammar-related).
PhotoGuy was a loller.
Nicole: Hi, how are you?
PhotoGuy: Im good lol. You?
N: Good thanks. **something about my day or something else equally irrelevant*
PG: **Blah blah blah** lol.
N: Why are you laughing at "blah blah blah"?
PG: What do you mean lol
N: Since lol means laugh out loud, why are you laughing at blah blah blah?
PG: oh lol
PG: LOL
This is typically how conversations over Whatsapp went, and the more irritated I got, the more he lolled. It drove me around the fucking bend, and as he sensed I was getting irritated, he would become weirdly competitive about things. I must also explicitly state that PhotoGuy is 40 - so he should know - better than I do - what LOL actually means - or at least one would think.
On our last date, I had invited him over to my house for dinner and wine. I cooked a red wine and chorizo risotto, and I drank all of the wine that I didnt use for cooking, so by the time dinner was over, I was about a bottle down and feeling particularly merry. As far as I can remember, we watched Strictly Come Dancing (I think) and some other random stuff on TV and then decided it was time to get some sleep.
Disclaimer: If you are a parent, sibling or family member of time, I suggest you close the browser and read something else right now.
I brushed my teeth, we got into bed - and well, things happen as things do and...
Well, Im actually surprised that my bed made it out in tact.
And not in a good way.
I shant go into too much detail because, to be honest with you, I'd really rather not remember it, but what I do remember thinking at the time was that at some point, the joints on my bed are going to realise that there was a fucking elephant jumping on them and, because I have wooden floors with little traction, they would just split and slide apart.
I felt the same about my poor conchita.
Fortunately, after another night of little sleep due to the sounds of a coal-driven wood chipper crunching on broken glass that emerged from PhotoGuy's face while he slept, I groggily woke up to find that both the bed and my conchita were, in fact, still in fact.
Unfortunately, however, I was forced to talk to this person and to pretend like I was happy that he was still here because we, stupidly, had made plans to go on a "photo walk" (because, clearly, that had worked out soooo well for me the first time we did it) through one of the local forests that afternoon - which we did.
I basically spent the entire time walking around the forest being intensely annoyed by everything he said and did, and eventually, wishing he would just shut up, take me home and disappear into the abyss.
Which basically means, we were already 10 years into a 4 week old "relationship" (and, really, I shudder at calling it that).
Finally, we did head back to my place (I spent the entire car ride shouting SHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUPSHUTUP at him in my head) and, because he wasnt making any apparent plans to leave any time soon, I ordered pizza for dinner which he wolfed down...basically, there was nothing this bloke could do at this point that wasnt going to annoy the living shit out of me.
He eventually left around 8pm and texted me when he got home to tell me how "difficult it was for him to leave me while he had his arm around me" (again, the awkward cinema arm thing was happeneing...and the weird hand was out to play which made it super awkward). I told him to stop being soppy and that I needed alone time.
In the weeks that followed, our conversations via text became more and more competitive and rigid, and he broke out in full-on lol-ingitis, which, as you may have guessed, turned me into a frigid cow that made cutting remarks all.the.time - essentially, we'd definitely fast forwarded through about 15 years of a relationship and were now at the "together for convenience" stage - except there was no convenience, only resentment.
One magical day, however, he obviously had had enough of this and stopped texting me. Like full-on-apolocalypitcal radio silence.
I stopped texting him and that, my friends, was the end of that disaster.
I was free to indulge once again in poor judgement about someone else, and trust me...I did...
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