A Scarlett Letter

Okay, I'm feeling very conflicted about this whole dating thing.

So I go out with Paul the Virtuous on a real date. You know the kind with dinner and everything. It's a Friday night, which apparently for Paul the Virtuous means pizza and beer night. Which sounds fine by my. Who doesn't like pizza?

We order a pitcher of beer and a large pizza, cheese only on one side and pepperoni and mushroom on the other. As we start munching away, I notice that Paul the Virtuous is only eating the cheese side of the pizza. Turns out that every Friday since he can remember - ever! - he has eaten cheese pizza. His family had one of those religious types of things going on, so cheese pizza was the food of choice on Fridays.

This of course did bring up the question of religion, and as he is still doing the whole meatless Fridays thing, I figure he is somewhat devout. Not a problem, but not really my thing.

But he's not. Devout, I mean. He hasn't been to church in years. He's just a creature of habit, says he.

47 YEARS of cheese pizza every Friday? No tossin' in a pepperoni or slice of canadian bacon in there every once in a while? No. Never.

Well, okay then.

I'm thinkin' that this might be indicative of a slightly more rigid character than I had originally assumed, but hey. We've all got our quirks. But as the meal progresses, I begin to sense a theme emerging here. So I decide to throw a little curve ball into the conversation and see what he does with it.

He mentions that there is a pool at his building and I say oh, you should have told me, I would have brought a suit. Of course, says I, we could always shock the neighbors and go for a little skinny dip!

Now, I'm obviously just joking, this is a first date after all! Paul the Virtuous however, is not amused.

His face suddenly goes perfectly still and strained and he says with great dignity "There are only 3 reasons to ever be naked. Showering. Going to the bathroom. And The Having Of The Sex."

The Having Of The Sex?

And I don't even want to know why he feels the need to be naked when he goes to the bathroom! I'm not EVEN going there!

But I am rather astounded and feel compelled to ask, what you mean you never just dance around your apartment in the buff? Are you afraid of offending your cat? Three reasons he says, holding up the appropriate number of fingers, and looking appalled at the very idea of being naked in front of the cat.

What do you wear to bed, I ask? A t-shirt and sweat pants, says he. What do YOU wear to bed, he asks. A question to which I give the old Marilyn Monroe standard - Channel #5.

I swear to you on my mothers grave, that Paul the Virtuous looked like he was going to faint.

Needless to say, the date went rapidly down hill from there.

And when we parted ways, I'm not entirely sure, but I think that I heard him muttering something about a woman named Jezebel . . .

Mystery Date

First Dates are a bitch.

You never know what's going to happen, or what to say, and invariably it's a bad hair day. Now with this Internet Dating thing, it's like that game "Mystery Date" that my cousin Dana had when I was pre-pubescent and innocent. It was a really stupid game. All you did was roll the dice and open a little door to find out if your date was Mr. Wonderful (dressed in a tuxedo and carrying flowers, I believe) or Mr. What-Were-You-Thinking (a kinda Johnny Depp Seattle Grunge reject), or any number of different types in between. I have no idea why, but I wanted that game really really bad.

Ha! Be careful what you wish for . . .

After weeding out a bunch of the internet date prospects and conducting the obligatory telephone screening process, I set up a few coffee dates. The coffee date is our societies currently accepted way of meeting a blind date. With the coffee date you can always say Aw Gee I already made dinner plans, gotta-run-see-ya -bye. This way you haven't tied yourself into an excrusiating evening of dining with someone who keeps talking incessantly about their ex who left him at the alter or all the ugly, fat women who are pretending to be Jessica Alba, and how could they do that to him, never mind that HIS photo was taken his senior year of high school and that quarterback physique has long since turned to fat and there is more hair on his back then there is on his head.

So, anyway, I arrange to met this man, Bobby the Bearded, at a coffee shop. I get there before him and seat myself at a table and soon enough a man approaches me with that oh-thank-god-she's-not-a-dog kind of smile on his face. I look around somewhat frantically, hoping that there is actually some other woman that this man is smiling at.

Because this is not Bobby the Bearded.

And it was indeed yours truly that he was smiling at. Now, I have no clue who this man is, but he knows my name so obviously I must have set a date up with him.

My mind is racing and I'm wondering if I somehow set up dates with two men at the same time, and oh my god what if Bobby the Bearded shows up too and how in gods name did I get myself into this mess and who is this man?

People, you can't make this shit up!

Now, at this point it probably would have been a good idea for me to fess up to my mistake, apologize and say gee I'm really sorry but who the hell are you? But nooooo. I stand there dumbstruck with this idiotic smile on my face and quickly usher him to a table behind a palm tree where I am hidden but can see if Bobby the Bearded shows up.

Conversation is rocky at first, and I'm certainly not helping matters by having my attention divided. But as the minutes pass and Bobby didn't show up I began to relax and concentrate on my date. Now, by this point I have totally missed my opportunity to gracefully explain that I don't know this man's name without looking like a total moron. So I just stay quiet and hope that something he says will jog my memory and I'll be able to figure out who he is.

Before I know it a couple of hours have passed with some light and lively conversation, and when we are about to part ways, he asks if he could see me again and I say sure I'd enjoy that.

Of course I suddenly realize that I still don't know his name, and I'm thinking that this would probably be good information to have at this point, and I suspect that just calling him Bubba won't go over so well.

Thinking quickly (why I couldn't have thought as quickly earlier will forever remain a mystery) I ask him to call me the day before our date to confirm, cause you know how flaky people can be ha ha ha (oh if he only knew). See I figure if he calls then he'll have to say "Hi this is so-and-so". This way I will actually know his name when he picks me up and if that didn't work I figure I can always rummage through his glove compartment when he's not looking and find his car registration or something.

As we are walking to our respective cars, at long last, Mr. Mystery mentions his cat who has this unusual name and the light bulb, dim tho it may be, finally clicks on!

Sure enough, when I got home and grabbed my date cheat sheet, there he was, just below Bobby the Bearded. Paul the Virtuous with the cat of the unusual name. I must have written the date down under the wrong name.

I still don't know what happened to Bobby the Bearded. And quite frankly, I'm a little afraid to find out!

Internet Dating Part One

Okay, don't laugh, but I signed up for Match.com.

I KNOW!

I'm not even legally divorced yet, and quite frankly I'm not even entirely sure that I really want to be dating again. It seems like an awful lot of work. But everyone seems to expect it, so I guess I just kinda wanna see what's out there. You know kinda cast out a line and see what's biting.

And man-o-man are they biting!

I put a decent photo of myself on my profile. It's nothing special, just a couple of shots that I snapped with the camera built into my Mac. Certainly not the best photos of myself, but not the worst either. I guess that if I do decide to meet anyone, I'd much rather have them say "Wow! You're much prettier than your photo!" as opposed to "Gee. You didn't mention that you were an expert with Photoshop."

Now, this is not the first time that I've done the Internet dating thing. But the whole thing seems to have gotten completely out of hand. And I know that this is going to sound totally egotistical and like I'm one of those awful former cheerleader types that we all hate so much BUT . . . There are a whole lotta guys out there who if they saw you in public, wouldn't even DREAM of approaching you, who seem to feel that it's perfectly acceptable to approach you on the Internet.

And you KNOW the men of which I speak! Don't you turn your pretty little nose up at me and pretend that you don't know what I'm talking about! You know EXACTLY what I'm talking about.

These are the homely, if not downright ugly, men with room temperature IQ's, no job, no money, who will need to take the bus to go on a date with you. Now, I'm not trying to be snotty or mean, it's just . . . . really. Do they HONESTLY think that you'll go out with them?

Some of the men who have responded to my profile are truly astonishing. And I swear to you on my Mother's life that I even received an email from a man recently released from prison. Or maybe he's still in prison. I'm not entirely sure.

And then if you take the time to send out a polite little No Thank You Wish You The Best Of Luck email to them they actually GET MAD AT YOU. They send back hateful email telling you how shallow and awful you are and just because they are 5'2" tall, live in another hemisphere with 57 dogs, and have a perspiration problem does not mean that you should automatically discount them.

But of course if you don't respond to them, they sic Miss Manners on you for not replying. Or they sent a multitude of emails to you saying simply Well? as if you should have jumped to attention the minute you received their email . . . or . . .Are you ever going to answer you snotty b#@$#? (Okay so I just made that one up. No one has really called me any names. Yet.)

But you know what worries me the most? It's not that I could end up going out on a date with a man who put a 30 year old picture up, or that he'll turn out to be a perv or stalker. I worry that I could somehow end up being someone ELSE'S Internet Dating Horror Story. How awful would that be? I can just imagine being at a party somewhere and everybody's laughing about this story about a crazed woman who spilled soup in her lap and then talked about the way the logs were stacked up in the fireplace and then realize that it's ME that they are talking about. It's kinda like that dream where you out in public in your underwear. Only worse.

Because it really COULD happen . . .