Case of the Doggie Bag Creep

I learned something new about one of the friends in the council president’s friend group that validates my gut reaction to this individual. This is significant because one of the things that I had to relearn and regain was listening to and trusting my gut. My instinctual response to the people I meet and listening to my intuition. It cost me a long time and a lot of self-forgiveness to get back.

So many things were overridden during the toxic marriage that resulted in me ignoring my gut when it told me that things were wrong. So much was ignored when the red flags were waving that I just saluted them and moved on. I had a lot to forgive myself, and that took a long time. Starting with not beating myself up over the glaring omissions of the past, but instead celebrating when I notice things now, and trusting that I (on the inside) know what the fuck I’m talking about when it looks like a red flag, even when all visual signs are giving green lights. 

There’s no better time to relearn yourself than midlife. The last several years have been a revelation. Something about entering my formative crone years really changed my perspective on life, my past, and what I want my future to look like. It appears I have proof that the resolution moment has arrived. 

Meeting Mr. Creeptastic

When I first met this friend of a friend, my gut said this dude was a creep. From his initial interaction, where he seemed a little too interested in me, asking me how I spelled my name, wanting to know if I knew the root meaning of my name? Who asks that when first meeting someone? I found it weird, and for a moment I thought it was strange that I was having this adverse reaction to someone who was a close and personal friend of a person that I mostly respected at this point and was getting to know: the council president. 

However, as the evening passed, on the first night that I met him, all signs confirmed my initial reaction: that he was just a weirdo with a strange obsession with single women, even though he was no prize pig. Funnier still were the stories that the council president shared with me on the drive home that evening. Apparently, he has a history of dating women who use him, and he seems perfectly okay with that and seems to enjoy the attention, even if his taste in women (according to her) is questionable. 

Jack Sprat and all that nonsense 

The next time that I ran into him, it was with much drama. Same council president, this time a different set of friends, but the same guy, except that he showed up with a woman, and they whispered as they approached our table together that they didn’t think he was still seeing her since he was supposedly seeing someone else. Drama!  

The night was super awkward, but the one thing he and his date did was keep ordering drinks after everyone else at the table had already finished all their drinks and appetizers. This mattered because of a custom I’d learned and still hate: everyone splits the check evenly, no matter what they ordered. This is, in my opinion, a bullshit rule that only benefits whoever stuffed their face. So the person eating lean ends up paying for someone else’s meal. Which was how it ended this evening. 

Douchebaggery detected

The creep and his date ordered at least 4 drinks versus the one drink that everyone else ordered, and then he refused to separate their drinks from the final check and actually acted offended that we didn’t want to pay for their part of the check. His behavior, plus the council president’s own complaint about covering a portion of the check she never touched, confirmed my suspicions. He’s an opportunistic douchebag.

The council president is taking a learning annex course for adults to learn to cook new cuisines. As it turns out, he is in her class. In this course, they’re cooking international menus, and after the meal is prepared, they are supposed to bring dishes to take home the foods they cook.  So she tells me she brought her dish; she showed it to me, a modest-sized container, about the size of what I used when I was meal prepping. That’s when she tells me: he showed up with three takeaway dishes “to save the leftovers”. He’s greedy. That is what he is. Who shows up to a cooking class with multiple pieces of Tupperware for themselves? Someone who fully intended to take advantage of the situation. Just like he helped himself by letting other people pay for drinks for him and his date. 

The irony being that apparently growing up in a patriarchal machismo Latino society doesn’t make you more of a man; it just ensures you will rise to the top on the backs of the women in your life. Fuck that. Those women can have the douchebag if that’s what they think they deserve. It makes me laugh because it confirms what I suspected about him, and it validates my initial gut instinct. It’s a small win on the long road of gut rehab.