At Least They're Committed

I didn’t mean it! I didn’t mean it! But it’s too late. It’s out there. Ugh! I looked up from my bench as people loaded on the bus and an outdoorsy skier dude walking down the aisle started chatting it up and laughing with an apparent coworker seated rows ahead of me. “This snow is nothing!” Ski Dude says walking past his bud. “Can’t believe they let us go home early, but I’ll take it!” This is the point where I notice his laugh and look up and he has a joyous face and an amazing smile and he looks down at me and, oh shit! MEC!

He does that circle thing men do, then pauses and sits down next to me and the entire remainder of the bus ride is an uncomfortable fidget fest where he’s thinking if he sits a certain way and I just turn a certain way maybe we can strike up a conversation and it’s not that I’d mind at ALL because I want to come across as a pleasant person and I really enjoy meeting new people but . . . I can’t. I’m not allowed. Sigh. Evil, evil MEC!

I had no idea what the heck MEC meant; I’d never even heard it before. We were in the Buckhorn Exchange for my birthday, six women stuffed in a 150-year-old mahogany booth with red velvet cushions, dead animal heads jutting from every inch of the wall (my vegetarian friends thought it would be fun and funny cuz I love meat! it was! they rock). A group of three men walk past. I look up because, in my peripheral, I can see one turn his face toward us. Do we know him? He stares at me, stone faced, I just look back. Don’t know him. The second walks by without so much as a glance, No. 3 stares harder, longer and smiles. I look away.

Cecile, our Southern Bell and most recently a transplant from New York City, nudges me and smiles. “Oh, girl that was soooooome MEC!” She winks. “Two of them!”

“MEC?” the rest of us say like a chorus.

Cecile tosses her perfectly coiffed, auburn hair and croons in her lovely Texas accent, “Why of course, ladies, meaningful eye contact!”

“Oooooh,” we all say. So now I’m still trying — unsuccessfully thanks most recently to Ski Dude — to figure out how to be friendly without being tooooo friendly so as to appear pleasant enough, but avoid MEC because as of 3.5 years ago I can’t help but notice MEC. And now, if anyone reads this, you’re doomed to, too! Heh.

Clarification: Note that men who initiate MEC are not the same as Starers (men who look at you so long you are finally forced to look back and then they keep staring as if to try to hypnotize you into thinking you want them . . . like that first time we all met). MEC also has nothing to do with the Watchers, a description of whom are detailed much earlier in this blog and are by far the most icky . . . especially when you can hear their coins jingling in their pockets as they stare.