7th
College Football Archives: Apt 2 1/2
I have met a lot of the men I date online. In L.A. it’s just easier to sort through profiles of people who claim to be available, go through the trouble of creating a profile with the necessary information and looking at pictures of them in various locations than it is to crisscross the city going to places where you could spend hours talking to someone who doesn’t even live in L.A. or isn’t even single.
Don’t get me wrong, I meet people out in the world, but I’ve been in L.A. for 4 years and have never been to a party or event where I’ve met a single, attractive, available straight man looking for a relationship. Sure I’ve met single and attractive, but emotionally unavailable. I’ve also met available and looking for a relationship, but not very attractive. Those four items aren’t negotiable. He must not be married, like girls, wanna go out with me and not make me sick at the sight of him. Doesn’t seem like much to ask, right?
Welcome to L.A.
Many people have met someone elsewhere and carried on something long distance until their partner could move here. I’ve heard this works, we call it “importing” them. Also, I know plenty of people who moved here as a couple or one of the couple moved here and decided they can’t live without the other and moved them out here. Not quite importing, but close.
The real find, is when you meet someone who has JUST moved here. They’ve got their job, they just finished furnishing their new apartment, and NOW they’re online or out in the world looking to meet new people. For the most part, these folks left someone behind and took the time to get over it before going on a website to “get back out there”. This is the time to strike while the iron is hot and before someone else “discovers” them. It’s fresh meat and it doesn’t stay on the shelf for long.
Imagine my luck when I met a very sweet guy who’d just moved here from Atlanta, GA. He was working in TV production and loved Atlanta, but he was offered a great job here and gave him the distance from his family he needed to really make his own way.
We talked for about a week on the phone and I almost liked his accent by the time we decided to meet up. I suggested Ethiopian food, since I lived right near Little Ethiopia.
A side note about me, dating and Little Ethiopia… Around this time, I’d been on enough dates to know it wasn’t worth it for me to set dates too far from home. Sadly, most of them wouldn’t make it through dinner anyway. Either the conversation went flat, he revealed something awful or just by looking at him I could tell he’d perpetuated a lie (just wait for the chapter titled: “I’m Six Feet Tall”). I lived within walking distance of the 6 greatest Ethiopian restaurants in the city. I figured, if they’re not going to MAKE a plan and use the whole “it’s up to you” idea, I might as well suggest something I can get to and from in a matter of minutes. This of course meant that the proprietors of those restaurants would see me often and always with a new guy. One of them memorized my complicated drink order and brought it to me without me even asking for it. A sly smile let me know she was pulling for me (and knew I needed the drink when she saw my date arrive, lol).
So we met for Ethiopian and at first I was not sure if I liked the look of him, but after talking with him for a while, he grew on me. He was smart and funny and didn’t let me get away with much. The accent was way better in person as well, so I decided that after dinner I would accept his invitation to go to a pub we both liked. We arrived at the bar and continued to chat and get to know one another.
It was time for the date to end and he drove me home, laughing at the location of my apartment in proximity to the Ethiopian restaurant. We exchanged a nice hug goodbye and decided to meet again in a few nights for dinner.
The two texts in between were kind and not creepy. I was excited to go out with him again.
The next date was set for a place up on Wilshire. It was not exactly a restaurant I would have picked, but he selected it because he lived not far away as well and wanted to try something near his place. Again the conversation went well, but this time I noticed that he was a bit more one note. A lot of the things we talked about the other night were brought up again and it didn’t seem like he had a lot more to say. I felt like we’d found the things we both liked all on the first date (maybe because we’d seen each other’s profiles) but in the grand scheme of things, his life goals and mine didn’t quite match. For example, I want to travel as much as possible and he doesn’t have a passport or plans to leave the US, ever. Or I want to have babies, and he’s dead set on having one ONLY, if he even decides he wants to have kids. This is a major dealbreaker for me because I know I want to have a family. Either way, the evening was pleasant. He suggested walking down the block to his place so he could show me some piece of sports memorabilia he wanted to show me. It wasn’t late or far and he was nice enough to pay for dinner so I obliged him thinking we probably wouldn’t be a match.
His initial description of his apartment was “I have a one bedroom place, living room, dining room, kitchen and bathroom with a HUGE closet.” This wasn’t exactly true. It was a downstairs 1/2 address apartment (which is ok, not judging), but it was a SMALL studio. Now I have friends who live in NYC in studios and they are small. THIS apartment was small by NEW YORK standards. There was a seating/living room area and kitchen across the room from his bed and a bathroom. And of course there was a HUGE closet.
He told me to have a seat and he opened the doors to the closet. Inside there were not clothes as I originally thought (guessing those were in the small wardrobe/dresser combo in the corner?). Instead, it was burned DVDs.
Now a girl of my intellect and resourcefulness could come up with TONS of possibilities for what could be on ALL those burned DVDs. It must have been THOUSANDS, no joke. We’re talking about a two door closet that looks like it used to hold a murphy bed, with shelves built inside that held filed side by side DVDs two rows deep. There were at least 10 or 12 shelves. It looked like this:
There were a few sports related things in there as well: a signed football, one clothing rack of jerseys and t-shirts that all appeared to be signed or worn by a SUPER fan. Also there was a tall bank and a few other random things. Those of you who know me are acutely aware of my soccer obsession, so I can usually relate to the SUPER fan, however there isn’t a fan that nauseates me more than the college football fan. This is usually someone who gets WAY too psyched about their alma mater or the local school in their town and often paints their face, flies to other cities just to cheer on their team and typically gambles on the games. The brackets, the tournament, the competition… I’m sure it’s JUST as annoying as I am with soccer. I can’t explain why I hate it, I just DO.
While he was hunting for this thing (which I think as I recall was a boxing glove signed by Oscar de la Hoya), I asked, “Hey, so what are all these DVDs?”
I knew as soon as the words left my lips, I was going to regret asking.
“Oh, those are all college games. I have copies of all the college games burned and organized,” he said very matter-of-factly.
“Well you mean ALL college games? Ever?” I said.
“Yes, well everything I could possibly get my hands on. And I’m VERY organized with it, I can tell you who won and the score and the date and most of them where it was played. Go ahead, pull one out and have a look at it. It’ll say the date, teams, score and location ON the CD itself. Give me one or two elements and I’ll do the rest.”
I was already standing in the insanity, so I dutifully pulled one off the shelf from the middle of a full row. “Millsaps College…October 27, 2007,” I read from the DVD written in marker on the DVD.
“Oh that’s SUPER easy! That’s the Mississippi Miracle — that was Millsaps vs. Trinity University at Harper Davis Field — the score ws 28-24 - Trinity won it. Btw, that was also the game with a play in the last few seconds that was likely the longest recorded play in the history of American football.. hmmmm you must be on the shelf second from the top on the left. That’s the Legacy series. Move down a few shelves to get into random regular season games if you want to be really impressed with how well I know em.”
It was at this point he was looking through the drawers in the dresser on the other side of the room which didn’t in fact have clothes, it had binders with the stats from ALL of the DVDs on them. It was in this drawer he found the boxing glove.
I can’t TELL you how freaked out I was by discovering that this guy had this very startlingly odd collection. Also the rate and accuracy by which he could recall totally random games seemed downright scary, but also gave me the impression that he probably spent a LOT of time on his own in this apartment cataloging all of this.
When we talked about his job, he said he worked in production for TV shows and that he really liked it. It was clear to me standing in the closet-o-college-football (btw the largest ANYTHING in his apt was this collection of DVDs and the stats to support them) that he spent the majority of his free time watching, burning, recording and archiving this system of DVDs. When I asked why he didn’t just get a big hard drive and store them all on there, he slid a hard drive from under his bed to reveal that he had done that and the DVDs and binders were merely the hard copies of the games.
I can’t imagine what kind of catastrophe he thought might befall his hard drive, the archives at ESPN or the sports libraries of all the universities in the United States, that he would feel the need to keep hard copies of his games. But never the less, he was prepared for such a catastrophe.
I couldn’t honestly imagine spending another minute in that oddly prioritized den of isolation, so I told him I was tired and asked him to take me home.
He was just was not my guy. But somewhere out there is a completely obsessed female college football fan who would fall in love at the sight of his closet. I just pictured one hell of a fight over the remote control on Saturdays.
