Lissette Elizabeth Escariz

Is the name of the girl I am currently...well, perhaps I could describe her as...er, it's only been just over a week, so...

I have gone out with her twice. And I am currently absolutely flippin' obsessed with her.

I mean it. I've never felt this way about a girl before. We connect on every level. Emotional, mental, physical (Eventually? So far, all we've shared is a goodnight kiss on the cheek), everything. She's easily my match in terms of intelligence, if not my superior, she has a fiery independent streak that I can't help but respect, she can listen as well as talk (and she's teaching me how to listen as opposed to just waiting for a gap so I can begin to talk again), and whenever she takes down her hair out of the ponytail she traditionally wears it in and shoof-shoofs it around her head, I lose track of everything I am currently saying and/or thinking.

I, of course, am no mind reader. I don't know how she feels about me. But from the conversations we've had and what we've shared, if I am any judge of character at all...well, I can hope really hard, anyway. And I believe my hope has some merit.

In any case, my week has gone sort of up-down-up-down. Saturday, I went out with Liz for the first time, and in case it wasn't already blaringly obvious, that went extraordinarily well.

(I knew, KNEW that the ballistic approach to dating - ask every girl that piques my interest and rely on the law of averages to ensure I'd find a suitable match - would work. I'm just stunned that any method worked well enough to bring Liz to me.)

I met her on the bus, in case you're wondering. I was headed home from Publix, which I went to on a whim with Zak. There were no seats, so I remained standing. I noticed I was sort of standing directly over this cute girl (who had her shirt on inside-out, that's the sort of detail that lodges itself in the mind), so I apologized for looming. She said it was no trouble. A few minutes later, I asked her about her Gator Growl necklace-thing, and we began talking. By the time she got off the bus, she had given me her phone number. We met on Saturday. Went to a sushi restaurant, where I decided to eat something new and had a raw quail egg. Not bad, but I'll certainly not have another. Serendipity itself, the bus ride, I think - had I not decided randomly to go to Publix with Zak, we would never have met, and I would still be as lonely as I was two weeks ago today.

I've just realized that I'm sort of going about this the wrong way. I'm thinking about her as if I have finally scored some important goal - that I've reached some objective, gained a MacGuffin. And that's not it at all. I have certainly reached my personal goal of finding a girl with whom I can connect, but it's not as if I beat a level in a video game and got a prize for it. I've gotta break out of that way of thinking.

Ill-formed line of thought aside, I gotta continue with my story. Sunday was down, for the downstairs toilet exploded. Not burst into pieces, but...was overwhelmed, let's say. Yes, it might have been my fault. Yes, I should eat more fiber. That is so far from the point that you can't see the point from it on a clear day. A lot of mopping and swearing ensued, and I gotta thank Mike for this one, for knowing how to deal with a mess such as I have never encountered. So...thanks, Mike. Our squabbles aside, you do know a lot of things I don't. (Now I just gotta hope you read this, it would be way too self-aggrandizing to mention it.)

Monday was up again. I got 25 points of extra credit in a class in which I had recently scored a 76 on a test, so that promoted my C to an A+. I like that. Tuesday...Tuesday, my landlord called me to tell me that the people who own the place directly downstairs from us complained that their roof was leaking. So that was down, because technically that might have been my fault. He said probably not, but he'd have to see.

Interesting things happened on Wednesday. I saw Liz again, we went out to lunch, and enjoyed each others' company some more. I really do enjoy spending time with her. (Details are sparse, yes, but I'm not entirely sure how comfortable she is with my relating any sort of details on this blog, so until I get a solid opinion from her one way or the other, they shall remain sparse.) So that was up. Also, game club, which is endlessly entertaining.

I believe I have successfully reached a low point today, given that work was an endless tedium of sorting games and putting games away, and I might, might just have to pay for the water damage downstairs. Hopefully not, probably not...but might. Oh, I voted today, but I'm not saying for whom I voted. No matter what answer I give, I'm going to piss half of the people around me, so I'm just clamming up. (A conversation with my mother, unfortunately, indicates that this will just instantly cause people to assume I voted for the person they didn't want to win, so it's sort of rendering me worse off than I would otherwise be, but a man's gotta have principles.)

If the past is any indication, tomorrow will be up. Which is fortunate, because tomorrow is Halloween, and I fully intend to don a badly put together ninja costume (I love my badly put together ninja costume) and gorge myself on candy at various parties. Hell's bells, I don't drink any more and I'm cutting down on fast food, I have to have some kind of vice.

If there was anything that amazing that happened between last Friday and my last blog post, it has escaped me. It probably wasn't that worth mentioning.

I'm still raving about Liz to anyone who will listen, though. I'm presenting a calm face to her, and my ravings aside, I'm really not all that jazzed up - excited, yes, but not manic - but I have literally never felt this way for a girl before. I take the lamest of excuses to talk for hours, why not take an excellent one?

(Intriguing, isn't it, that every paragraph in this blog post - except one - has begun with the letter I? Excluding punctuation? I noticed that for the first few, and just started to run with it.)

...

...

I see what you did there. You went back up and looked for the one that didn't start with I, didn't you. And if you didn't then, you're probably either going to do it now or are going to refuse to do it just to spite me. Since I can only assume that if you're still reading this far without knowledge of which paragraph it was, it's the spite option, I'll just go out and say it - the tenth paragraph began with "Monday".

I'm sorry if this post is a little more "meta" than mine usually tend to be, I just finished reading a comic strip called 1/0, which is the most interesting experiment in metafiction I've ever seen. Read it at http://www.undefined.net/1/0/ but immediately hit the "First" button if you don't want to see the last comic first. It's not a big spoiler, by the time you get to it you'll already know what's going to happen...but first things should come first.

I'll see y'all later.

(Heh, finished on an I.

...

Dammit.)