What's the male form of Bridget?

Somehow I had not one but *two* dates this week with not two but *three* women (I'll do the math for you in a bit). I don't know if you can tell, but I'm not as tickled as someone with my lame dating situation ought to be about the situation.

Frustrated with getting nowhere with She Who Would Deny Me and being the last week of the current rotation I decided some kamikaze-style dating effort wasn't entirely uncalled for - should I crash and burn at the hands of some lovely lady my ashes would soon be transported to rural Victoria anyway.

Kamikaze indeed - you might think I would try to give myself a good chance for the next one.

As they say in the NBA, you go hard or you go home.

I thought I would ask this other lovely health professional to coffee - a girl who I hadn't in fact laid eyes on in the last five weeks, and had perhaps only three verbal exchanges with in my entire medical career. Not only that, she worked on a ward that I had no medical reason to visit.

I strapped the bombs to my plane and took off in the direction of ward 15North.

As I approached her airspace she smiled at me but continued to talk to the health professional she was working with at the time. Needing to look busy I grabbed a portable phone and promptly paged my registrar.

She hovered by, files in hand, and said with a smile,

"Hi Dave..."
(She knows your name? Is this a sign?)

She continued,"...um, what are you doing here?"
(ABORT! ABORT! ABORT! DETONATE! DETONATE!)

I suddenly remembered the phone in my hand, and thinking it could be a good diversion, used the Force to make it ring. Or maybe, my reg just rang back at the right time.

"Oh sorry - I have to take this call, I'll talk to you later?"

Phew. I had a few hours to regroup, and paged her, mustering as much nonchalance into a text message as anyone ever could. She called me back,

"I'd love to have coffee, but I'm really busy today - what about something after work?"

This was problematic. I had already arranged with my high school mates to have dinner, but here I had an attractive, intelligent young lady on the phone happy to meet me. In my group of friends we've tried to foster a culture where we don't just ditch our friends for some dame, but surely - what else could I do - this cute woman was waiting on an answer from me. What else could I do?

I panicked. "Sorry, I have to have dinner with my mates tonight."

When I told this to my good friend Marcus later that night his face wore the sort of look that you have when you see a real ugly dude with a hot chick and you can't believe what's you just saw (or heard) - so, he probably would have had the same look on his face had I got the date anyway. He said,

"Dave, I'm about this close - " He measured out a the size of a bee's penis -"to slapping you up, you newbie! You're supposed to be out with this chick!"

I promised him that I would get her number the next day. And I did. And we had dinner and dessert. And I heard the words that no secular man wants to hear.

"I'd like my partner to be Christian."

Ah...drat.

Now let's not get all fired up about religion, because that's not the point of this particular story. It would have been similar, if somewhat weird, if she said, "I'd like my partner to have two heads." I'm not here to get on any religious soapbox - the only bad Christians are the Christians that think George Bush is a good Christian. The fact that this girl is Christian changes nothing about how attractive or intelligent she is, which is what makes this situation such a shame. But it's just the way it is sometimes - people are entitled to want what they want, and when it comes to faith and important values like this, I've learnt (sometimes the hard way) that you can't change someone just for what you want. That, and it would be slightly dodgy if I converted to Christianity just to chase some tail.

At the very least, I now know another lovely young lady, hardly the worst thing in the world.
***

The other date wasn't quite as enjoyable, and in fact made me feel somewhat like a piece of meat. A girl I know at work offered to set me up with her sister. Setups, as much fun as they are, are tricky things. They take some care, and whomever is doing the setting up has to be an invisible puppet master, so that the two people don't see the strings leading them to each other. Or, at the very most, only one person can be privy to the plan. Another nice pre-requisite is that the two people who are to meet should have some decent common ground.

Not, for example, as in this particular case for me, that the young lady was "young and pretty and tall" and that I was "a good doctor".

Can you guess the race of the people trying to set me up? I'll give you three guesses, and the first two don't count.

I was fairly reluctant initially, but my friend insisted, and I gave in. I agreed, with one caveat only - that my friend come with her sister to lunch, as a buffer. Who am I to turn down meeting a pretty, young, tall girl? No, really?

It was, however, all wrong. The sister was indeed pretty, young and tall. But she looked uncomfortable to be there, and I felt bad for her, not knowing how much she had been pushed into this meeting, and wondering what she thought of me - this random single loser swinging his MBBS around like it was supposed to be some sort of currency.

After a couple of hours at lunch, a couple of uncomfortable silences and long sips at my coffee I was really no closer to knowing who this person was that had been somewhat presented to me, and I felt sad. I think I had given it a decent shot, but it probably was a shot that should never have been lined up in the first place.

Dave: 0; Axis of women: 6