Pattern Recognition

I've had some odd first dates. One girl introduced herself as a socialist, and then talked nothing but socialism for an unholy hour, only to stop to touch my eyebrows for some reason. Another so didn't resemble her online profile picture that I walked out without even realizing it was her. My favorite, however, was a University of Wisconsin psychology student who used our first meeting as an opportunity to test my IQ.

I had never been given an IQ test before, and was more than a little curious. She administered the exam in the basement of a local library. After some small, small talk, we got down to business. The word association stuff went well. 'You're so abstract,' she kept saying. I couldn't really tell if this was a compliment.

I cruised through the similes, metaphors, and vocabulary drills. I was starting to feel quite brilliant, convinced I was impressing her with my keen intellect. About an hour into the test, and no discernible problems.

Then she started jotting cryptic notes in a Steno-pad, which was very distracting. My eyes wandered. In a moment she suddenly became very serious and somber. She asked that I pay attention and keep my eyes on the paper. She jabbed at her notebook with a fat, red pen and told me that we still had a lot left to do. A feeling began to dawn on me that she might not be ideal girlfriend material.

Then we got to the puzzles portion, wherein tetrahedrons, dodecahedrons and other multifaceted shapes were rearranged, and I had a minute or so to reassemble them. I'm not good with spacial-relations. Hell, I can barely figure out how the bread gets in the toaster. Within seconds, I had yanked down my tie, furrowed my brow, and was gritting my teeth.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see her write 'subject is showing visible signs of frustration.' Yes, I thought, frustration about this lame-ass date, and frustration over having spent thirty-dollars for a wasted Match.com membership. After five agonizing minutes, I gave up, and quit the test. She told me it would take a week to score it, scribbled another novel's worth of notes, and we parted ways.

This was to the be the high point of our mating ritual. After I kicked her out of my apartment for lying about being engaged, our second date ended with her sobbing on my front-porch, then returning an hour later to repeatedly ring by buzzer and text message 'why can't you love me' over and over. I had to shut off my lights and crawl around like a captive in my own home.

I never did get the test scores.