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I saw Piglet’s Big Movie on a date.

Let me begin at the beginning.

I was sort of in a relationship-ish-thing that...

No. That’s not the beginning.

I was living in a very rural area in Southern Maryland, and...

No. Further back.

I have been an animation fan since seventh grade.

There. I think that’s about it.

I have been an animation fan since seventh grade. And by “fan,” I mean that I know how many frames per second are necessary to create the illusion of continuous motion (16) versus how many are typically used in modern animated films (24), and I know that the actor who currently provides the voices for Winnie the Pooh, Tigger, Taz, and Pegleg Pete is the same actor who voiced Darkwing Duck, Monterey Jack, Bonkers, and Don Karnage (Jim Cummings). This does not mean that I am a fan of all animation, nor does it mean that I spend my days watching Oswald and Baby Looney Tunes. There is a subtle difference between, say, Gargoyles and Blue’s Clues, and that is that Gargoyles is a complex, well-written series incorporating classical mythology and higher-level concepts of what is right and wrong, and Blue’s Clues features a thirty-year-old man acting like a mentally impaired gerbil. In short, some shows are written for children, and some for those of us with slightly higher expectations, plot-wise.

On to the next bit of exposition.

I was living in a very rural area in Southern Maryland, and not especially enjoying it. This area somehow manages to combine the rampant ignorance and bigotry of the South with the cold arrogance, and bad food of the North. And the average distance that the inhabitants of my county live from a Wal-Mart is roughly 500 miles. You may think that there was nothing to do where you went to high school; there was only one movie theater in my entire county. That’s not city, that’s not village, that’s county. Knowing this makes it slightly easier to understand why we had over 30 pregnant girls in my school of 1600 students (there were also 13 or 14 pregnant guys. I told you the county was backwards...)

One last piece of background before we get to the story.

I’m terribly bad at interpersonal stuff. As if you couldn’t have already guessed.

Okay.

I was sort of in a relationship-ish-thing that I hadn’t meant to be in. One of my friends asked me if I might like to go see a movie sometime, and suddenly, without my conscious knowledge, we were an item. I didn’t really care for the situation, and after about three weeks I really hated it. But I am evidently a masochist, so I waited for about seven more months for the guy to end it.

Somewhere in about the fifth month, he decided we should go to another movie (we were only ever on one “date” that didn’t involve a movie. I’m telling you, there’s really nothing to do there). So, we went to the theater, and he actually went up to the ticket booth and asked for “Two for Piglet.” And sat in the theater with me. And didn’t lie when we ran into mutual friends coming out of whatever generic blockbuster action flick they had just come out of and they asked what we had seen.

The tacit understanding there was that it was my doing that he had just sat through an hour and a half of entertainment geared at four-year-olds. I hadn’t wanted to see it any more than he had, but instead of telling him – and our friends – this, I grinned and bore it because I a) didn’t want to be the one to break it to the guy that, after five months, he still didn’t understand his “girlfriend,” and b) at least in Piglet, there were enough children around that he wasn’t tempted to try anything.

So, the moral of this story that, in the end wound up being far shorter than the background information needed to tell it, is this: “Pay attention to your significant other's interests, but don't assume that liking animation means she wants to watch Winnie the Pooh for an hour and a half” (or, you know, other such gross generalizations, depending on what your particular significant other is interested in). And you should also be open with your significant other about things like having no interest at all in remaining in the relationship.

Oh, and don’t spread this story around too far because I’m still kind of friends with the guy, and I still haven’t ever told him any of this. So I don’t practice what I preach...