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We’re all mad here.

2008-05-07

Just about every day during the second half of last week my (apparently) crazy ex, and co-worker, Katie tried inviting Emma and I to dinner with her and her boyfriend. This seemed strange for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I could still distinctly remember her saying she wasn't seeing anyone. Putting my reservations aside though, it seemed a fairly innocent request, and an effort at trying to get things off on a better foot. At least it did until she kept stopping by my desk and asking about it from Wednesday to Friday, the phone call I revived on Sunday, and a repeat of last week on Monday. Then it got weird. Not in an ‘I'm going to kill you in your sleep' way', but in a she's a bit too enthusiastic kinda way. In the end I just agreed and managed to sell Emm on the thing, though initially she wanted nothing to do with having dinner with her predecessor.

All of the above led to Kate and I leaving work together yesterday to meet up with our respective partners for dinner. Now I'd been spending the good majority of the day staring at a computer screen , so my eyes were worn out and I was feeling dehydrated like I'd just stepped off a twelve hour flight, so all I really wanted to do was crawl into a nice cool bar and down a few beers. But of course I'd made a promise, and so I found myself at a table at Orso (which didn't make my suspicions about the planning involved dissipate or anything). She didn't even let me grab a drink at B.Smith's before hand.

I guess this is when I started to think something was up. I mean I like Orso, and I'd missed going there while I was out of the city-and I actually regretted not taking Emma there yet, but...

This restaurant was one of the places Kate and I went to often, and if that wasn't weird enough it turned out it would be just the two of us initially. O.K, so I knew Emm'd be late because she's always harried at work, but in the cab on the way her ‘boyfriend' called to say he'd be late too.

So there I was stuck at the restaurant for half an hour with my ex-girlfriend on what seemed far too like a date. As a result I was forced into the same kind of ‘double-think' conversation as here. Her guy was the first to arrive, although this apparently had more to do with Emma's still improving navigational skills. The guy, who we'll call ‘Chad' is an advertising exec (peachy! My favorite kind of person), and blandly handsome in the same sorta way as the guy who played Cyclops in those X-Men movies. So there was me and Emma, and Kate and Scott Summers. The dinner was civil enough, but I couldn't shake the undercurrent suspicion that this dinner was a set-up to show me how much better she'd upgraded over me.

Now I've got no way of proving this, and so no real way to quantify and express how this felt; you just had to be there to experience it (I hate using such tired clichés , but this one's perfect). See, this is why I hate seeing a lot of my ex-girlfriends, things are always weird. A lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm a terrible breaker-upper. However in this case it shouldn't apply, not so much anyway, as Katie and I broke up it was pretty amicable. So I don't know what happened. Secondly, this guy ‘Chad' had the personality of a wet piece of cardboard, so I apart from his bland good looks, I don't know what exactly I was meant to be intimidated by. I'm not trying to be too hard on the guy, I mean he seems like a nice guy, just a little stilted and dull. Also I don't mean to take out that the dinner was adversarial, it wasn't. Plus my suspicions about the motives behind this dinner really only served to make me deliberately friendly towards ‘Chad'. In fact the more I look back on it absolutely nothing awkward really happened, beyond trying to remember who had what at the end. So really the only result was me wasting 734 words telling you about it.

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