By As we may all recall from my recent posts, I recently went on a solo cruise AND I am terrible at talking to people. If you have no idea what I’m talking about I suggest you go back and catch up on the reading assignments from this week. (SEE: How Are You Still Single? Oh, That Makes Sense and I Made It Out Of My First Solo Cruise With My Organs Intact)
Turns out that those two things combined will lead to some very interesting situations, which is inevitably lead to something ridiculous happening to me.
On the first night of the cruise, I was feeling surprisingly awake and ready for an adventure so I decided to hit the LGBT Mixer.
I can only speak to Royal Caribbean on this but each night of the cruise; there is a self-led LGBT Mixer at one of the bars. For this particular trip, it took place at the wine bar, Vintages.
In an effort to make myself as desirable as possible, I first stopped at my room and through on a hoodie because I was cold. Frankly, there’s nothing that says “I would love to be approached and talked to” like a Halloween Horror Nights Hoodie.
This attempt at being social can be summed up with a single tweet:
It also did not occur to me that anyone who was planning to show up to this event, wouldn’t do so alone. There were plenty of people in the bar but they were all paired off in the peer groups they had come on board with. I was the only solo flyer and I wasn’t about to actually ENGAGE with people.
We know that wouldn’t go well.
I was about to leave when an older man joined me at the bar. We exchanged a few pleasantries and ended up chatting a bit about wine. He mentioned that he wasn’t much of a wine drinker so I eventually led him through what he might like and helped him pick out something to drink. We chatted a little bit about my former bartender life and I thought I would at least have someone to chat with while I finished the glass of wine I was in the middle of.
It would turn out that he would stare into the middle distance while silently nursing his wine than engage any further with me. I’m just sitting there like, “sir, I just helped you pick out wine LIKE A NICE PERSON!” Apparently, that is all I was good for.
Maybe he knew that I was tweeting about him…
I ended up getting lost in reading a book on my Kindle app and ordered a second glass of wine. (I was shockingly awake given the hour, I’m normally dead to the world by 9:30pm).
At this point, potential sugar-daddy had abandoned his own glass of wine and moved on with his evening, leaving me alone in my corner of the bar.
And then I got kidnapped.
I was wrapping up my second glass and ready to actually call it a night when a guy who had come in with a gaggle of others was up at the bar ordering a drink. He commented on my tattoos and asked if I was alone. The fact that I was solo was unacceptable to him so he invited me to join the herd.
They seemed harmless enough so I joined them. Turns out, they were a mixture of friend groups that had all met over the course of the day. I suppose that’s what happens when you bother to socialize…
As I was new to the group, I was immediately interrogated. I mean, it was more one of them screaming at me “so what’s your story” and me having no idea what to say so I went with, “it’s available on Amazon.”
We chatted for a bit and eventually people broke off from the group and did their own thing. I was left with the friend group of the guy who originally kidnapped me. Apparently, it was kidnapper, his friend and his friend’s ex all on a trip together. They had others in their group that were elsewhere on the ship.
I was having an enjoyable enough time until kidnapper made it weird. We had gotten into the line of questioning about whether or not I was single and kidnapper came back to me with, “I’m married but not on this cruise.”
It was then that his intentions were clear and I was having absolutely none of it. I politely excused myself to go to the bathroom and promptly ran away to my room to actually, finally go to bed.
Thankfully he was drunk enough that whenever he saw me the rest of the trip, it didn’t register who I was. Needless to say, I didn’t end up back at the mixer the rest of the nights.
They do also have a singles mixer but it’s open to everyone so I feel like that adds in a whole new level of awkward.
Maybe, MAYBE, I’ll give it a try on the next trip.
Avoiding Neverland 