A Drip In Time Saves Nothing

It could be a hardship living across the hall from a hunk. He was tall, slender, and amazing. He had all his deep brown hair, a muscular physique, and was tall. At least six feet two inches Not to brag, but men seem to flutter around me like bees around flowers. Let me tell you that can be a problem at times. It seems that I often have to come up with creative ways of letting a guy know I am not interested without hurting his feelings. For some reason though, my gorgeous neighbor and I were just not compatible for some reason. We just could not keep a meaningful dialog going.  If we passed in the hallway, about the only thing we could reliably manage was a blurt of 'hello'. Sometimes there would be a change of gait, as if each of us was trying to think fo something to say, but that was it. Even Nora Roberts would have trouble spinning that into a lasting romance. I took the initiative a couple of times to strike up a conversation, but he would at most just answer my questions. There was never anything coming back at me initiated from his end. We just could not get past that barrier.

I was single and living a girl who had replied to my want ad for someone to split the rent. It is kind of tough for single women like ourselves who are just getting started in the work force to rent an apartment on our own, so like so many other women, we rented a two bedroom apartment and split the costs. We were reasonably compatible as apartment mates, and had even taken to warning each other on nights that we thought we might get lucky with some good looking guy we were dating.  Since my roommate was a sex screamer, I usually holed up in my room with my mp3 player on full and a good romantic novel. Sometimes I would just lay back and entertain myself with my vibrator. This lack of privacy that we had to endue at times had a good side. We ended up pretty good friends and would often use each other as sounding boards to share our hopes, dreams, and letdowns.

At this particular time, I was between boyfriends.  As many women have experienced, when you have nobody in your life on a daily basis, you start to slip up on the care and maintenance of your body department. I had not shaved my legs in quite a while, and it was getting sort of embarrassing when I put on panty hose. I only had so many pairs of slacks, and after a while it got boring wearing pants every day. So when my room mate went out one night with her current love interest, I decided to wash my hair, touch up my roots, shave my legs and take a nice long hot bath before they came home.

The great thing about our apartment was that our utilities were included, and one of those utilities was hot water. Try as I might, I had never managed to run the tank cold, so I would often take nice prolonged baths. So after I had touched up my roots, I had a quick shower to wash the excess dye out of my hair. Then I shaved my legs. At that point I drained the tub, had another quick rinse in the shower to get any stray hairs off of my body, and then filled the tub again for a nice long, hot bubble bath. I laid back with my eyes closed for about five minutes, when I heard the sound of a single drip. Another one followed a few seconds later, and another one after that. So much for peace and quiet. I sat up hoping to fix it. At first I figured that I had just not shut the taps tight enough, but I was wrong. They were fully shut. Then I realized that it must just be the shower draining back through the spout.

As I lay back to relax again, I heard another plop, and realized that I was not going to be able to enjoy myself as long as that drip persisted. So I rested against the back of the tub again, and lifted my toe up to the end of the faucet. The next drip just ran down my toe, down my foot and slipped silently into the water. It was successful enough that I just kept my foot there.  Pretty soon I was just laying there with my eyes closed running my toe around the end of the spout.  I must have dozed off a bit because I slid down and got some bubbles up my nose. I sneezed, and when I did, I jerked my foot up and my big toe got stuck in the spout.  No amount of trying would get that toe to move. It was like it had been glued in. 

I persisted for another twenty five minutes or so, but it was useless. I could not budge it. My whole leg was starting to ache. The water was getting cooler as I started to laugh at the incredible absurdity of the situation. An hour or so later, there was no more humor in the situation. The water was cold and I felt like I was freezing to death. Since I could reach my towel, I decided to let the water out and cover myself with it. My toe was pretty much numb by then, and my leg felt like my muscles were on fire. Every muscle in my leg was screaming in pain, but there was nothing to be done but wait for my roommate.

Fortunately for me she came in early. She had had a fight with her boyfriend. When I heard her come in the door, I yelled at her to come and help me right away. She tried to pull my foot down to get my toe out, but had no better luck than I did. I had been thinking about what to do when my roommate got home earlier, and had thought of the fire department. At first having a big strapping guy come to pull out my foot like my own personal prince charming seemed quite romantic. Then reality had set in, and I had imagined them using some power tool to cut my toe out of the faucet. That in turn got me on the line of what would happen to my toe if the saw slipped. Needless to say, when my roommate said she was going to call the fire department, I screamed, and pretty much nixed that idea.

Since I would not let her call the fire department, or the paramedics for that matter, she did the only other thing that she could think of. She went over to Mr Body Beautiful's apartment across the hall, knocked on the door and pleaded for help.  At least I was mostly covered when he walked in.  Of course when he tried to just pull my toe out, it did not work either. But it sure as hell hurt!  I screamed and he apologized. He looked so woebegone that he had hurt me that I had to forgive him. I mean what else could I do, he was trying to help! He seemed even more handsome than I remembered, and I loved his aftershave.

After pondering a bit, he asked for some crushed ice and vegetable oil.  Seemed strange to me, but my roommate rushed to give him what he wanted.  When she returned he cupped his hands around my big toe and asked her to pour some oil in. When they were finished, I had oil all over my toe, and there was also oil up inside the spout. He tried pulling gently, but it still was stuck. He told me that he was going to try chilling my toe in crushed ice hoping that the swelling would go down enough to pull it out. But after ten minutes of chilling that did not work either.

After thinking some more, he asked my roommate for a plastic freezer bag or something similar. She returned with a grocery store bag and a heavier bag from a woman's boutique that she frequented. He said the grocery bag was too thin, but decided that the bag from the boutique would be adequate for his purposes. At this point he disappeared for a couple of minutes and came back with a wrench from his apartment.  He removed the shower head, and after doubling up the bag and putting it over the pipe, he put the shower head back on. He said it was to keep the water from coming out. I was wondering how I was supposed to take my next shower with a bag in there, but I did not comment. Then he iced my toe again for about twenty minutes. It sure was getting cold by then. As soon as he was done he told my roommate to turn on the water, and he simultaneously pulled down sharply on my foot.  Out popped my toe. He slipped and fell on top of me and in the scramble my towel fell off.

So there I was naked in the tub under hunky guy.  I had to laugh. We were soon all doubled up in hysterical laughter.  I was so happy to have my toe free that I really did not give a crap that I was still laying naked in the tub.

In any event, we finally broke that conversation barrier that we had been having.  We chatted and laughed for the rest of the evening, and I maneuvered him into asking me out the next night before I let him go home.  The next night, I was still limping a bit, but I sure did enjoy myself, and so did he.

That was six months ago and everything has been doing great since then. Who would have thought that my date with a drip would have worked out so well.

For more funny dating stories see the following:

Humorous Relationships Advice for Women

Happy Guys Turn Leave Women Cold

So the University of British Columbia (that’s in Canada folks), did a study of just over 1000 people divided evenly between men and women of all ages, and found some rather surprising results. (American Psychological Association Journal "Emotion")
http://psycnet.apa.org/psycinfo/2011-10737-001/

The study had the people look at pictures of people of the opposite sex who had neutral expressions, looked happy, looked shameful, looked proud, or looked brooding. They then rated the attractiveness of each from one to nine.

Women liked a proud physical expression on a man, and younger women were second most turned on to shameful expressions with sagging shoulders, etc.. For some reason, all age groups were not that attracted to pictures of men who were happy.

Likely women are attracted to successful looking guys because of the security that they represent. With the nurturing nature of most women there is a natural tendency to look for a good provider to hook up with. Brooding bad boys are also quite attractive to younger women because in their hearts, they know they are brooding because they have not found the right woman and assume they will help them overcome that fault.

Because we are creatures of millions of years of evolution with just a couple of thousand years of social skills layered on, women are instinctively attracted to good hunters (successful men) who can keep them and their children fed. Bad ass dudes would be able to provide them protection.

Men dig fun happy women and find proud ladies a turn off. The happiness makes sense, because most guys put up with crap on the job all day and just do not want to face it at night as well.

Women with a shameful expression were also somewhat attractive to men. The shame thing might just be a hint that you have a bit of bad girl in you so they are curious to see just how bad you are.

Taken back to cave man terms, a man spends all his days hunting. He has to keep quiet. He is miserable most of the time and he is full of fly bites. Many days he returns empty handed and is worried about finding more food before they starve. When he gets back to the cave, the last thing he wants to hear about is that there are only berries for supper, what a mess the kids made in the cave and the headache that she has from all their screaming and yelling. And he never wants to hear that it is a good thing she is such a good berry picker because Blurg's lazy wife did not get any berries so he will have no supper.

So what can we derive from this study:

1) For Guys, you need to be a successful looking hard-ass dude with glitter and attitude.
2) For Women, acting like you are better than everyone else, running down other people, or complaining about work all the time are all sure ways to send any guy packing. You need to be seen as a smiling, fun loving optimist, eager to look for the silver lining around any grey clouds in your life, and be willing to try new things. If you cannot pull of the happy face all the time, then the other approach would be to act like you were just caught with your pants down in church. If you look embarrassed or shameful about something, then men think you likely have something to be embarrassed about. They will likely stick around to find out if you can both participate in other potentially "embarrassing" encounters.

For other relationship advice see:
http://www.top100datingpersonals.com/advice_for_men.php
http://www.top100datingpersonals.com/advice_for_women.php