My Date With a Stereotype.

Grad School Guy: He’s super nerdy. But he’s sort of cute. He’s got that little 3-day scruff on his chin. He wears glasses. (Small, dark-rimmed glasses.) He’s not a big guy – he’s thin because he’s a vegetarian. Mostly for ethical reasons. You know, opposed to factory farming, pesticides, and animal cruelty. But he’s got some nice lean muscle to his body because he walks or rides his bike almost everywhere. His hair’s outgrown his haircut just a little too much. But he’s made a little effort to dress up for the date with sort of faded, skinny, black jeans and a shiny dark blue polyester button-down shirt.

He’s extremely socially liberal (he prefers the term “progressive”), atheist, all about women’s equal rights (overly concerned with offending me “as a woman”), in love with the environment and animals (smiles at dogs when he sees them and recycles), deeply respectful and appreciative of the beauty of all different races and cultures, fascinated by obscure art in all forms, and is a wealth of knowledge about some esoteric academic subject.

He doesn’t know how he turned out this way, because he was raised in a small, racist, rural town by his religious, uneducated, patriarchicical, military family.

He doesn’t watch much t.v., maybe the History Channel. Or the Discovery Channel. He prefers documentaries and only goes to independent, art house movie theaters. He doesn’t really drink too much, maybe a couple bottles of wine shared with some friends on a Friday night when they get together to philosophize. He doesn’t follow sports. For pleasure reading, he reads classic literature – Hemingway, Chekov, Faulkner, Thoreau. But he doesn’t have a lot of time for pleasure reading, because he’s working on his dissertation. (For those who aren’t familiar with “working on a dissertation,” it involves a lot of hanging out at coffee shops, reading, and using the phrase “working on my dissertation” in a variety of contexts.).

He’s a little pretentious. And unfortunately predictable.