I have done something this past week and a half that is quite strange for me… I haven’t dated. Instead, I’ve spent my spare time hanging out with friends and in one case an ex-boyfriend that I’m now friends with. My ‘date nights’ have turned into ‘friend nights’ (or ‘drama-free nights’).

Last weekend, my friend Amelia and I spent an entire evening discussing the finer points of religion, the new Harry Potter book, and what it would be like to be armless. It was great fun and became even more fun after we finished off our first bottle of Chardonay. Our second bottle had us sitting on the floor trying to drink our glasses of wine with just our feet and toes. The experiment was a failure, but we laughed so hard it made us snort.

The next evening I met up with my friend Margo. It’s been ages since I’ve seen her, because she travels so much for her job. Margo is my ‘romantic British flick friend’. Last Christmas her mother-in-law gave her the A&E Romance Collection DVD set. (Her husband refuses to watch them with her.) Throughout the year we’ve worked our way through mini-series after mini-series. We finished up ‘Emma’, ‘Tom Jones’ and ‘Pride and Prejudice’. Our next conquest is ‘The Scarlet Pimpernel’.

On occasion we try to mix things up. Once we interrupted our ‘romantic British movie’ night with the Sci-Fi Channels production of ‘The Legend of Earth Sea’ (Margo and I share the same terrible taste in television). Another time (when I was depressed about the ’40 Year Old’ situation) we watched ‘The Sweetest Thing’. (Did you really think I could go an entire blog entry without mentioning him?) Anyway, we love that movie and Margo always jokes that she’s Christina Applegate (sexy and savy attorney) and I’m Cameron Diaz (non-committal blonde)…. (Awe, sookie sookie!)

Last weekend was one of those occasions when we decided to divert from the norm. (Don’t worry Colin Firth, we won’t neglect you for long.) We decided to see ‘Fantastic Four’. The movie was so-so, but the fun part about hanging out with Margo is going to the super market before the movie, buying all of our candy and goodies cheap and then smuggling the items into the theater undetected in her Gucci purse. I love living on the edge!

As I mentioned earlier, I even hung out with an ex-boyfriend this past week. It’s a surreal experience to hang out with an ex. Especially when he reads your blog. It was really nice. We sat on my couch for four hours, watched PBS, ate Dairy Queen and discussed each other’s current dating situations. Some of his insights into my dating predicaments were quite refreshing.

Now, I’m sure some of you were wondering what ever happened on my date with Keith. Let me tell you… nothing. Keith has a demanding job. He didn’t have a lot of energy left on the evening we were supposed to go on our date.

Instead, we just met at his townhouse, sat around, watched Comedy Central and joked for a few hours. (It’s really hard to pull yourself away from the T.V. when Reno 911 is on.) He was really tired and to be honest, so was I. It was great to catch up with him and I had a good time, but it wasn’t much of a date. We’ve been emailing and calling each other a few times a week since then. But, we’re starting to run into the same problem that we had the last few times we tried dating… we can’t get our schedules to match. Hhmmm… maybe we are destined to always ‘just be friends’. (Bridget has actually been saying that for a while…)