Chomping is for horses

Gentlemen, please, think about a touch of etiquette for first dates.  I had a first date this morning with Guy 11-K.  No date came out of Guy 10-D, so you aren't missing anything if you are keeping track.  But Guy11-K...BAD first date.

He's retired military and we went to a museum where retired military and their guests can get in for free.  But he didn't offer to hook me up so I purchased a ticket.  Absolutely I want to go dutch, but when I've already said I'm looking for a job, it shouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out it might be a friendly thing to hook me up with free tickets...especially since he picked the place.

I hate feeling like a snob...especially a word snob because I have problems with homophones and say words wrong sometimes.  But he was using large words in the wrong way, but then didn't know what I meant when I said a painting looked like the artist was trying to deconstruct his subject matter.  I can't think of a specific example of his improper word usage because I just wanted to brain dump the date, but I remember cringing more than a couple of times.

So we go through the museum and I decide I'm being needlessly critical.  He asks about lunch, I say okay, let's grab lunch.

Okay, for those of you that don't know:  it is impolite to smack your lips while eating.  It is impolite to talk with food in your mouth.  It is impolite to do the thing where you make your mouth an O to wipe the corners with a napkin...while there's still a huge bite of food in your mouth.  And there was more, but I think you get the picture.

He seemed like a okay person otherwise, so trust me, I really do feel I'm being almost bitchy about the whole thing.  But ugh.  And again, part of me hates that I think this, and it's not just the improper word thing, but also general lack of depth of conversation or lack of ability to participate in the conversation, but I also feel like there was absolutely no attraction on my part because he wasn't as smart as the last few guys on the list.

I do, however, get points for practicing my straightforwardness.  He hinted at a second date asking a couple of times and I moved the conversation away from it...because those were like within the first 10 and then 20 minutes of the date...and since we were walking a museum, we had hardly talked.  When he hinted at it again during lunch, I let the conversation go there and told him I wouldn't mind getting together as friends but that's all it'd ever be because there was no zing for me.  Yep, told him to his face, but in a nice way (I hope) that the attraction just isn't there...and the zing didn't exist even before the eating problems.

So then I have to ask, is it bad that I didn't pull him aside and say: dude this is how you eat properly.  Horses are allowed to chomp their food...that shouldn't be happening on a first date.