Story Sent in by Jake:
Deanna was a painter who I met online. We spoke for a little while, I checked out her art website, and I asked her out.
"I want to paint you," she told me during our first dinner.
"I'm flattered," I told her, "Whenever you want."
She asked me over to her house for the following weekend. I arrived with a bottle of wine, she thanked me, then led me into her little studio. It was a sun room lined in newspapers all over the floor. Her easel was all set up, and she had a chair waiting for me.
I sat down, she posed me, and she went to work. I was really excited — no one had ever painted my portrait before.
After a little while, I heard her moan and groan a little bit. I asked, "Everything all right?" but she didn't answer. I didn't want to distract her any longer, so I sat in silence for about another hour.
"Ready for lunch?" she asked after a bit.
"Yes," I replied, "Is it done?"
"Uh..." she said, and stepped away from the easel. I came over to look at it.
It was a landscape. A lake in front of mountains and pine trees. Certainly not me.
Disappointed and confused, but hoping to make light of the unexpected situation, I said, "You captured me perfectly."
She replied, "It's not a portrait of you. It's a landscape from my mind."
"It's nice. But I was under the impression that you were going to paint me."
She said, "Yeah, it's not really my fault. I tried to draw you five times, but it just wasn't inspiring. You kind of… uh… have a boring face."
I gave her a look. "Thanks. I'm going to head out, then."
"What?" she said, her manner changing, "No! Don't go! That doesn't mean I don't want to hang out with you. It's just that your face isn't really draw-able. Know what I mean?"
"No, but I don't think I need you to explain it to me. See you."
She jumped in front of me and said, "Wait! It doesn't mean that you're boring or that I don't want to hang out with you. It's just that some faces are naturally not attractive… not artistically attractive. I'm sorry. It's not my fault. You want to blame someone, blame your parents. Seriously. Not me."
"And you let me sit there like an idiot for an hour while you painted this?" I asked.
She said, "I just said to not blame me. What did I just say? It's not my fault that you have a face that just defies artistic expression!"
I was halfway out the door by the time she finished that statement. When I returned home, I called up some friends who have no problem with my face, they came over, we cracked open some beers, and laughed about the whole thing.
Incidentally, not long ago, I visited her art website again, as I had it bookmarked. She had posted up a new version of that landscape. It was titled, "Not a Boring Face" and priced at $2,999. I'd have titled it, "Not Underpriced."
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Thanks to ABCotD fan Jenna for sending these in:
A truly awful, sketchy email.
and
Watch out for this guy.
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ReplyDeleteActually, I felt the same way Kam, although it's hard to put my finger on quite why. Maybe it's the way she kept apologizing and he kept being repeatedly offended by the most trivial statements. I mean, in a relationship people will sometimes do insensitive stuff by being thoughtless, but if they deliver a sincere apology generally it's best to accept it and move on. I thought that Deanna was really inconsiderate in how she made the OP wait, but I felt like OP was way too sensitive about his artistically boring face.
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ReplyDeleteShe has no social skills. He's too sensitive.
ReplyDeleteTeam "I Want to See a Rebuttal" here.
Why should she have to apologize for telling him his face is "not artistically attractive?" The only thing she has to apologize for is wasting his time, and I never said she was blameless in that regard. If he's ugly, the dude needs to suck it up and learn to deal. I'm not the most conventionally attractive person myself (as I mentioned earlier, I'm bald and look vaguely like Lex Luther) but I've still had some ridiculously attractive women, partially because I have charisma and partially cause I'm not hypersensitive to trivial stuff.
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ReplyDeleteWhat TheGnome said.
ReplyDeleteOK Gnome, that's a fair point. I retract my earlier comment.
ReplyDeleteWolfie, saying you look like Lex Luthor is no way to convince me of your unattractiveness, because then I start thinking about Michael Rosenbaum, and then I need to take a cold shower.
ReplyDeleteWell, one advantage of being bald is that for every girl who finds it a turn-off, there's another girl somewhere who really REALLY digs it. ;-)
ReplyDeleteThe OP here may be slightly obnoxious, but there are a few reasons I prefer to focus my ire on the date. First, she brought up the matter of painting him - he didn't ask. Second, if she didn't realize until he sat in her studio how unpaintable his face was, no biggie. Just tell him and it would have been fine. Third and arguably most important, she was trying to sell her landscape (that wasn't someone else's boring face) at $2,999.
ReplyDeleteYep, that settled it for me. She's a douche.