I have a date on Friday.

This almost never happens, for many reasons.

I've been making fun of myself for a couple months, about how I'm too busy graphing esoteric things, or taking a red pen to badly spelt graffiti, or whatever it is that I do on Friday nights that keeps using them up. It would be funnier if it weren't mostly true (and I have the graphs to prove it). I've also been kind of avoiding dating. In the last six months, I've had three false starts. Two never got off the ground, because I just didn't even want to try. (One of them resulted in the aforementioned destruction of JANE. Lesson learned: never accept a date when you'd already planned a night of configuring your computer, like I did. It's trading a sure thing for a risky thing, and you probably won't come out ahead.) The other began too slowly, then accelerated too quickly and burnt out. Then I was fending off way-inappropriate advances from my not-quite-divorced coworker whose wife works in the same department...yuck. The evidence of boys' trips to Jupiter to get more stupider was mounting, and I was unimpressed.

I've been really apprehensive about dating anyone lately. I don't know if I'm overemphasizing how important it is to me that socialising not interfere with school. It seems like erring on the side of scholarship would be the wise thing to do. I'm also kind of disappointed with people, and it makes me reluctant to forge new relationships of any kind. It just gets so wearying to meet somebody and get excited about them, just to discover that you saw all the good parts in the first five minutes, like the trailer for a mediocre movie. This is part of why I have few friends, but good ones. And never go on dates.

But I "met" someone who seems, from what little I know about her, to be a really active, self-posessed girl who likes a bunch of the things I like, and a bunch of others that it'd be fun to learn about. I can't see how anything worse could happen than my making a new friend, and she's pretty cute to boot. My friends have never gotten kidnapped meeting people from the Internet, so I'm going to give it a try. It also totally helps that she made the first move, sparing me the agony of exposing my total lack of cool with girls I like. I'm almost as suave as a 13-year-old junior varsity wrestler with an overbite.

Wish me luck.