Okay, maybe I’m not AS done with bartenders as I thought

I’ve had a crush on the bartender at my favorite restaurant/bar for a while. He has a big time bromance with my roommate, so we see him often and hang out only when we run into him at the bars.

He’s pretty out of my league (in coolness) and his last girlfriend was basically a model. He’s just kind of the ultimate cool personality, haha.

One day a few months back we were brunching at his restaurant for a friends goodbye party. It was one of those brunches with unlimited minosas so you either get sick full or blackout ruuunnk. I chose the later, since being full didn’t sound as good. I don’t exactly remember leaving the restaurant except for a couple highlights. 1. I remember saying a tearfully dramatic goodbye to my friend (gotta love the public cry) and 2. looking for this bartender to say who knows what before I left.

Luckily, I didn’t find him, but I did seem to think a Facebook message was the next best idea. I said “Where you at Utah?” Yes, it could have been much worse, but still kind of embarrassing since I go to this place a few times a week.

I never got a response and somewhat forgot about it until a couple weeks ago when he gave me this weird look for across the bar. I’m not very observant of these things but I kind of got the vibe.

On Saturday, I ran into him outside of a different bar. He was hammered. Whenever we run into him hammered we never know what we’ll get (last time he picked up both me and my roommate at the same time). This time, he insisted on buying me, my roommate and our other friend a shot. We were fairly sober, so this was an unexpected turn considering we didn’t leave the house until after 11.

Post-shot, he literally takes out 4 or 5 of his top and bottom front teeth. This was a very Kid Rock/midwest moment, but pretty hilarious nonetheless.

Out of nowhere he tells me that I shouldn’t be wearing a crossover purse because “people just want to motorboat you, but I mean I won’t” HAHA. I’m really just wearing a tank top, nothing cray.

Then I walk away to hang with some friends who came in from out of town, and I overhear him talking to my roommate about me. He thought we were together, like beyond roommates (not surprising, we’re co-dep and everyone thinks so) and then started saying all kinds of cray shit.

Later he tries to kiss me and tells me he is leaving and taking me with him. In my historical first exercise of self control I have to turn him down (because I have out of town people and the stuff he was saying was really pretty ridic). I immediately look at my friend and say that I made the wrong decision, lol.

He proceeds to kidnap my roommate and take him on an adventure after asking me if he should (I said yes not knowing what that would entail/not my decision).

My roommate shows up an hour later, telling me that he is crazy (duh) and that he showed him a pic of his roommate and suggested a "roommate switch". 

The story ends there for now. Oh, and Fiesta is next weekend...

BG Part 2

Since the first BG put his full name in my phone, I decide to google him. He turns out to be a pro BMX dude with tons of pics/videos online. That made for a fun hour of stalking at work, and even though he was intense, I became rather intrigued by his “celebrity.”

I casually texted with him the next week, keeping it super vague because I was slightly intimidated by the idea of a meetup. By the time Saturday comes + 3 beers, it finally sounds like a good idea. I meet up with him at a bar (with like 20 friends randomly), and he ends up actually being pretty cool. We all go to a new bar, and the friend he came with really wants to leave, so he asks if he can message me later. My typical awk response was “um, maybe but I have a bunch of people staying with me.”

Fast-Forward like twenty minutes of me thinking I don’t care that he left and I suddenly care. I text him to come back and he does. We walk to 7-Eleven, and then back to  my house. I didn’t intend on bringing him home, but I obviously didn’t feel too strongly about it.

When we get to my house, my roommate and his cousin show up at about the same time. We all start watching TV and after a bit, the two of us are in my room.

I won’t go into details but here are some highlights:

- Me: “I don’t know if I want to be THIS naked”
- Him: “Can we turn on the lights?” Me: “Nope.”

Yikes. Needless to say, I haven't heard from him since besides a text or two. 

Finally Caught Up!

Alright! Those last few stories were a bit abbreviated, but at least we’re up to date.

A few weeks ago, my roommate comes home at around 10:45 on a Saturday night. I'm laying on the couch, in my pajamas, watching TV. He insists that we need to “go out and socialize!” which initiates a conversation about how going out does not necessarily mean we are socializing with anyone other than each other or our friends. Regardless, I agree to go out, and he suggests that we have a contest to see if we can meet people in bars. I immediately reject that idea since I've had a very low success rate of meeting people in bars. If you count getting mono as being successful, then I super win.

Anyway, we never agree on terms or anything, but we have a good laugh. We proceed to share a bottle of wine (predrink of winners with purps teeth) and head out to our new fav karaoke bar.

I manage to do a good amount of damage over the next hour, getting surprisingly intoxicated. This is unbenounced to me, however, because I think I’m really sober. Next, we run into some friends and hit the dance floor (and by “hit” I mean I probably dance awkwardly like usual).

At some point, I start to non-committally dance with this one BG (black guy, meant in the most endearing way, trust). As usual, I am semi-oblivious to what is happening, and my roommate mentions that I should talk to him. After that, my roommate disappears, I’m like - fine, I’ll try this one time.

I As we're chatting, I drop my phone and as I go to pick it up, I finally realize I’m not just that cool sober person I had imagined. Next thing I know, I am making out with him in public, next to a dance floor. Keep it classy.

Not too long after, it gets too intense and I’m like GTGKBYE. I get his number, etc.

Next bar, I meet another BG on the dancefloor (something that never happens, ever). I have to say I don’t remember too much about him, but we bumpbumpygrindgrind danced for a bit and insisted on getting my number.

He texted me something like “it was cool meeting you, we have to hang out soon” at 3AM and I never heard from him again.

Conrad

Remember Conrad? Read back a bit if you don’t. Well, I’ve seen him a few times since the last post, but not in an effortful way, more like in a hey our friends are all friends so we end up at the same events type of way.

He came up to Santa Barbara for the weekend a while back and we actually hooked up SOBER. Sadly, my drunken hookups/mistakes/shitshows drastically outnumber sober happenings, so this was exciting. So exciting that I felt the need to say “Hey, we’re sober!” Gotta keep it awkward.

I don’t have too many good stories other than that, but I decided before he got to Santa Barbara that I was definitely going to hook up with him and also that he was not really into me. I know this sounds dumb (and perhaps is one of the definitions of slutty), but that was what was happening.

I think since I was sober, I never had second thoughts on this decision, and I still don’t think it ended up being too problematic.


Why not?

Coworkers

That “don’t shit where you eat” really hits home for me these days. This next story was not a high point, but it’s an important development to include here. Please pardon my seriousness.

I spent the majority of last year working for a fairly small company. We had about 15-20 people in the office at the very most. One day, we got a new coworker. He was cool enough, though I never really found myself particularly drawn to him. We had a lot of crazies, so it was nice to have someone who seemed fairly reasonable around.

This particular co-worker seemed to laugh at my jokes a lot and pay particular attention to what I was saying. This is not something I noticed initially AT ALL; I tend to be oblivious to a lot of stuff like this. Also, he was engaged, so it really wasn’t on my mind at all.

One Friday, some co-workers and I decide to meet for happy hour after work. Anytime I leave my house alone to go to a bar, whether or not I have plans to meet people, I now call a “solo mission” (I have since tried to avoid solo missions, FYI).

To make this infinitely long story tolerable, I’ll tell you that I met up with this co-worker at a bar with his friends and things went downhill from there. After the first bar we went to the second, and then we went to a bar that I only go to/is only fun when I am blacked out. I remember being in the bar partially, but I have no recollection of leaving. The next thing I know, I wake up in bed with probably the worst feeling I have ever experienced (as a result of my own actions completely) FUCK.

FUCK FUCK FUCK.

Next, I get a text “I guess work won’t be awkward now.”

Since I can’t get my head at all around whatever happened, I finally force myself out of bed at 2:45PM.

The next week, and probably for the following two to three months, I went through a period of extreme shame. Sure, everyone has their drunk fuck ups, but this was not some random person, this was unfortunately someone who I sat NEXT TO at work and was engaged.

Enough dwelling on that. It finally becomes funny/alarming when I realized his level of obsession with me. I entertained some hilarious texts I probably should have ignored, and get all kinds of crazy messages at all hours of the night.

My favorite series suggested that something was happening with my roommate. After my lacking text response, I get a text saying “moustache ride?” which is saved in my phone.

This happened almost a year ago, and it took me about six months to be completely over it.

In case you were wondering, him and his fiance are no longer together. I highly doubt that this was because of me. I also happen to know that I was one of many of his indiscretions.

Glad to be done with that one.

Bartenders

Let me just preface this with - I am done with bartenders. I got to this point almost as quickly as I was into the idea of bartenders. Actually, I don’t know if I was ever really into the idea of bartenders as much as I was into one particular bartender.

He worked at a small bar across the street from my house. I say “worked” because he no longer works there. In fact, he hated his job while he was there. Anyway, he worked at this bar and was also getting an accounting degree. I know this because one day I tried to convince him the career path that he was (almost finished) pursuing was boring. Yeah, I’m pretty cool and helpful.

Moving on, I liked him (and the bar obviously) because he would make my friends and I fun drinks and charge us almost nothing. If he was in a particularly good mood, or if he had a shitty customer, he’d just add out bill to the customer. Nothing really came of this except one night I attempted to get his number. I failed because the number I got looked like XXX-XXX-XXX, rather than XXX-XXX-XXXX. So yeah, I missed a number.

On the same night, my friends and I left his bar to go to a different, bigger bar. This was actually a quite hilarious night that turned somewhat deadly.

At the new bar, we meet up with my roommates old friend who happens to be dating a significantly older woman. Her age is of interest because my other friends and I bet on how old she was without figuring out how we would actually figure out her age. As a result of my level of drunk (it was high), I decide I can check out her ID in her wallet when she walks away. I know, SUUUPER fucked, but it happens. This age-check had to be done in phases since we were all playing darts and going to and from our bar table. Long story short, she ends up being ten years older, but more importantly, my roommate catches me and gives me his classic look of disapproval. Being somewhat over the events of the night and still drunk, I decide I’m dying of thirst. I walk over to the bar and order a water. This is the beginning of the end.

After I order the water, I proceed to chug it and order about three more. The bartender then tells me that I “seem thirsty”, haha. Then, since I’m still drunk, I decide it would be a good time to tell the ID check story. At some point in that story, my roommate signals that we need to leave (duh, I needed to leave before I got there), and the bartender asks for my number.

Since he’s pretty cute, I do it and then he texts me a couple days later - on a Monday. Next, I meet up with him after he gets off work, so he’s still in his polo with the bar’s logo and khakis - keepin’ it classy. He seems fairly buzzed so I decide to catch up. We both end up pretty drunk and you can guess how this ends. The next morning I drop him off at his house (on my way to work, so drive of shame) and notice that he’s pretty bruuuuuuh.

Fast-forward three months: I have death mono. I miss three weeks of work, lose almost 20lbs and visit urgent care 5 times for IVs, blood tests and to get on various medications. On visit four I learn I have Strep Throat as well. If this doesn’t seem that serious, I basically didn’t move from my couch and watched ALL 10 SEASONS of Ally McBeal in that time.

I can’t be sure that this bartender gave me mono, but since this was the beginning of the slut awakening, I have few doubts.