The trouble with “hanging out”

Men, please be more clear when asking me (or any other woman) out on a date. When you say you want to “hang out”, I really think we’re just “hanging out”. When you ask if I want to grab dinner, I’ll assume that I can show up in sweatpants and last night’s makeup – and I will probably assume that you think I’m skinny and want to feed me. But nothing about “hanging out” and “grabbing dinner” makes me think that we’ll be going on a date.

I get tricked into dates often. I don’t know if the guy’s intention is to trick me, but it happens. I go on dates without realizing they’re dates until I give my friend recaps of my night, and they ask me,

“So, did you sleep with him?” And I answer, “What the hell! We were just hanging out!” To which they’ll say, “Hanging out IS dating, you stupid ass!” To which I’ll reply, “Owned.”

Nine months ago, when I was finishing up my second to last quarter of college, I met a guy from a friend. I’ll call him Bravo. Bravo and I got off to a rocky start. I found him mildly attractive (but I think I was pretty desperate at the time – I was dumped only 2 weeks earlier, and definitely on the prowl for a rebound), but it was more because he was tall. You should note that I find pretty much any guy attractive if he is over 6 feet tall. I once dated an anorexic guy with a conjoined twin, and he had awful breath. I saw past all of this because he was 6′3. I kid. But seriously, I have low standards.

Anyway, our mutual friend, who I’ll call Randy, IMed me late one night, asking me to play wing-woman for one of his conquests. I delightedly said yes, because there’s nothing I like more than helping a good friend get some ass. Hopefully someone will pay the same favor forward to me.

Randy tells me, “Sweet. You, me, her and Bravo will go out for sushi.”

I love sushi. Definitely not going to say no to that.

To make a long story short, I was still completely unaware of the fact that I was on a date, so I acted like myself. According to my guy friends, everything about me acting like myself is unattractive and unsexy. For starters, we were having sushi, and I don’t eat rice. I insisted on only eating the good parts (the inside of the roll), and by the end, I had a mountain of rice on my place. Talk about spoiled and wasteful. I also burped. And spit. A lot.

After dinner, we went to a club that only hoodrats frequent (someone told us that Nick Cannon would be there). Due to the extra short dress I was sporting that night, I kept asking Bravo if I looked like a chicken-head, to which he exasperatingly replied “NO!” each time. When I wasn’t busy making sure that Randy and his conquest were hooking up with each other (they weren’t), I was drinking massive amounts of alcohol and bragging about how I could get the DJ to play anything I wanted because I have so much game (I don’t have any game, and the DJ took an hour to play my song).

After we left the disco, I talked some sleazy guys into buying me a hotdog (all in front of Bravo, because, you know, I really had no idea that we were on a date!), which I ended up dropping in front of a homeless man. Because I consider myself to be a compassionate person, I started crying hysterically and apologizing profusely to the homeless dude, and hugging him. I didn’t stop crying about that damn hotdog for about half an hour. All four of us ended up at Bravo’s place, where I vomited and passed out on his bed.

Of course, if I had realized that this was a date, I would have behaved differently.

I came home at 4 AM and was immediately interrogated by my best friend.

“WHERE WERE YOU TONIGHT!??!”

“I’m so drunk. I had sushi with Randy, his conquest and Bravo.”

“Did you sleep with Bravo?”

“What the hell! We were just hanging out!”

“Hanging out IS dating, you stupid ass!”

“…..Owned.”

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