Pink Rose = Friendship?

So, how's everyone? Have(ing) a nice Christmas (or whatever you celebrate)? I'm ok, except for the raging neuroses.

I guess you saw in my last post I went on a blind date. Since then we've been to lunch twice, he came to my church for our Christmas choir thing, I went to the church he attend here's Christmas choir program with a birthday dinner for our mutual friend before hand, and a random dinner* with our mutual friend, and one dinner and a movie. By my count that's 5 dates, more than I've been on in the last ten years.

All this romantic attention has my inner voices in overdrive - Am I sending the right signals? Bad body language habits! Are the signals confusing? Don't cross your arms! Smile. (not hard to do in his company) Am I sending any signals? Make eye contact. Don't ramble...- you get the picture.

Tuesday night when he walked me to my door I practically stood in it rather than let him come in. Not because I actually didn't want him to come in but because I was trying to figure out if it was too late to invite him in for coffee/tea/hot cocoa (I had to go to work the next morning) and wondering if he was going to hug me. Then he's leaning in for a hug and I'm thinking "kiss? on lips or cheek? Should I give him a peck on the cheek? hmm, his head hits right at my shoulder. Kiss now? Crap, missed my chance." Then Wednesday after the kind of random dinner I got a one-arm, diagonal, friend-hug, which starting me worrying if that meant something or not.

I've been feeling so much better the last year or so. Comfortable in my own skin, more confident, (usually) feeling competent at work, all that good stuff. This week I've gone back and forth between embarrassingly giddy because maybe a boy likes me to being terrified that I'll somehow screw this up (whatever 'this' becomes) to telling myself I'm being silly because I've known him less than a month. Basically I feel a bit like I'm 15 again. I suck at dating. Part of me wants to tell him that I haven't dated much (understatement of the year?), I'm not good at 'reading' people, etc while the rest of me shouts that bit down with "we don't want to freak him out"**, and one small part says "relax, deep breaths, you've only know him a few weeks, it will be OK, breathe damn it!"

I think the worst is those inner voices have started up their positive feedback loop of negativity, again. The loop gets interrupted when I get unambiguously good signals, like an email saying hi. (If it's not on the level of hitting me over the head with a club and dragging me back to his cave, it is up for interpretation.) Or if I distract myself, which is hard to do this time of year at work.



*Our mutual friend is the grad student who does fieldwork with me, RA. I was dropping RA off after field work about 5 and he'd invited me to eat with them, then mention CR would be there... I'm hoping CR didn't think it was weird I showed up.

**God help me if he finds this blog - he'll think I'm completely insane. Maybe I should have picked more anonymous screen name, made this a more truly anonymous blog. Too late now.