Now, that’s all well and good, and I’m hardly close to hitting the point of “god, I’ve had too many men,” but I realized something amazing and horrifying today.

For quite a few months now, I’ve forgotten someone.

Now, there are plenty of reasons for forgetting – he was my only one night stand, I was sorta drunk, yadda, yadda, yadda. BUT, there were also plenty of reasons for remembering. You see, he was a pretty old friend at the time and we had made this bet that we’d sleep together if we were ever both single at the same time. Since I was actively pursuing the lifestyle of a serial monogamist, and he continually fell into a series of women, that really seemed quite unlikely. But, I somehow ended up at a farewell party for him, and we were both amazingly single at the time, and after a few hours of peer pressure(and beers) we found ourselves at the house I was housesitting and quite naked. I drove him back at about 6am the next day and I haven’t seen him since. Either way, it wasn’t a bad story at all.

But I had forgotten. Just flat out forgotten. And today, just sitting at my desk, I suddenly remembered – oh shit! I did sleep with him!

So, instead of trying out ginkgo biloba, or any other remedy for my memory, I think I’ll just have to limit my escapades by agreeing not to sleep with more men than I can remember.

I take great pride in being able to say:

“Well she may be young, but I’m cuter.”

“At least I’m less of an asshole”

and

“My boobs are better.”

I know, I’m not supposed to be in competition with these women but I can’t help it. It’s partially because I’m insecure, it’s also my way of justifying that I can do better than him, if he can’t do better than me. Sometimes I worry that I won’t find someone better than what I had before before, and by seeing what comes after me I know that I can do better.

Other times, it’s all about entertainment. Take for example today’s browsing, I found a guy I knew in college. He was charming, fun, attractive. Then I see the girl he is dating, she looks like she’s out of Thelma and Louise. Big puffy bangs with what appears to be shiny extensions, some sort of weird outfit, and yeah, she was 10 years his senior. That was surely one of those, Look how much better I am doing. The men I date are way more attractive, successful, and not 10 years my senior with a wardrobe stuck in a time warp.

That picture is from American Apparel. I blame American Apparel. While, I like some of their stuff, they are purveyors of all that is wrong with fashion. They are trying to sell a style that only looks good on about .8% of the population but yet everyone tries to mimic. Most people aren’t going to look good in these shirts. The model can’t even pull of the shirt well. If even a model can’t wear it well – and it’s their job to do so – then what hope is there for the rest of the population?

Every time I go out, I see more and more men in these shirts, and I want to cringe. Please stop. For the love of all that is holy, please, please stop.

My big gripe is that after the women of my family slave for hours to cook a delicious feast on little sleep, they still have to serve the men in the life. The husbands, the sons, the fathers, the boyfriends, the brothers all get their meal handed to them on a perfect plate with a napkin, fork, and just the right right amount of chili on their rice by the women of my family. I can understand the little kids and the older men with the arthritis in their hands from years of working being served, but really my 18 year old cousin doesn’t need his plate put together by his mother simply because he has a penis. The men in my family have working legs, arms, and opposable thumbs. they can scoop out their own damn beans and take the husk off of their own tamale. My aunt once told me I needed to serve my dad his Christmas dinner. I looked at her in shock. He had been there for hours and he was apparently waiting for someone to serve him. It may sound a little selfish, but it isn’t my job to do so. He’s a grown man who can take care of himself, but at these family dinners he (and the other men) are treated like kings and babies who can’t do the simplest task for themselves.

It’s surprising to see this happen. I see women with graduate degrees bringing beer and food to their cousins, feminist college students preparing a meal for their teenage brothers, and all this is done without complaint and without questioning. I just don’t get it. I also don’t understand why this still shocks me year after year.

This is my life. This is how it always goes.

To the outside world everyone thinks you’re a couple, but in reality you aren’t. I once carried on with a guy for 4 months. We did everything together: lunch, dinner, TV, movies, parties, nights. We were dating, but at the same time we were not officially dating. There were no rules that said you cannot hook up with someone else. There was nothing that said, you had to keep the lines of communication open. And that is where the problem lies. It ends in the most bizarre ways. This one ended with what was supposed to be a makeout session interrupted by, “I can’t, I’m seeing someone.”

Everything ends at some point but when you aren’t really seeing someone you really don’t have to say it’s over. Things can just peter out and one person can stop calling or they can start seeing other people or they can do whatever the hell they want because they owe you nothing.

As with the end of anything(life, relationships, really awesome TV shows), there is always some grief. It is just as gut-wrenching when it ends and it hurts just as badly as a typical break-up. However, if you aren’t really a couple are you allowed to mourn? In these situations, I have found myself depressed, wanting to cry, and confused. I used to refuse to allow myself to express these feelings because what was I really crying about losing? I realize now that it really was the end of a relationship. This time I’m allowing myself to be upset and reflect on things. I’m also finding that those around me are more understanding than they have been in the past. Now when I talk about these strange situations, I’m finding more of my homegirls going “oh yeah I hate it when that happens” and “I know exactly what you are talking about!” As rough of a situation as this can be, it really is nice to know that there are so many other members of the club.

I’m sure this will get more interesting with time, as I move past the basics like OKCupid and Match, and on to more lol-provoking entities such as gothscene.com, interracialsingles.com and whatever that sugar daddy site that Allison and Tracy found earlier in the year was.

But we’ll start with OK Cupid, because I was taking one of their quizzes. My profile(and a truthful one, at that) is here.

Quality of Site: A-

I was pretty surprised at the easy navigability and user interface of the site – it made sense, really – which I think is somewhat rare nowadays. The quizzes are distracting enough to take away a chunk of my evening, but I am perturbed at the fact that my results were generally none too flattering. My Dating Persona is The Priss, by the way, in case you were wondering. Sounds flattering to you? No, not really.

The search is a “fuzzy” search, which is awesome, not because the word “fuzzy” in this context implies a cuteness on the level of attentionwhore cats, but because it means that you’ll probably find what you’re looking for, if it exists.

I didn’t bother trying to figure exactly what their metrics used for their match percentages were, but after clicking around some profiles that I shared a high percentage of commonality with, I could pretty much agree that these were people that I would at least have a reasonably pleasant online conversation with.

Quality of Users: B

For every intelligent, well composed message, there was another that would fall firmly under the category of “meh.” However, as the former is harder to write, I am still rather impressed at the ratio. I find that the majority of people actually attempt to pick up on a particular interest you may have listed(wow, they read the profile) and come off as intelligent and funny. Not bad at all.

Good Subject Lines:
“Comic Sans killed my mother”
“You hate the Eames Lounge chair”

Bad Subject Lines:
“hey”
“Ok now”
“no subject”

Points for the guy that said he disliked Comic Sans.

Points off for following it up with “If I see one more inappropriate use of that damned font (meaning outside a comic book. A retro comic book) I’m gonna lose it.” This clearly points to not knowing type OR retro comic books(I’ll even venture that NO comic book has used this font) OR Wikipedia, which will tell you that the font was released in 1994.

Hi, I’m a bitch. But a correct one.

But he was cute, so whatever.

Overall…

In under 24 hours(the n00b rush, I’m sure), I’ve been contacted by:

- a ton of people who write grammatically correct sentences(and employ commas with ease and elegance) .
- one with a Beowulf reference in his name.
- one that sent me funny Wikipedia articles.
- one who holds an opinion about the Eames chair(the opposite of mine).
- one who picked up the throwaway Plato reference in the “three adjectives” section.
- about five that were actually quite good looking.

All of which were within 20 miles of me. That is actually pretty amazing, if I were inclined to pursue anything at all.

Okay, that’s it for this one – I swear, they’ll probably get more interesting. I’m pretty sure there’s a Juggalo dating site out there somewhere. Ugh.
More updates soon.

OKCupid.com (my username is notadinosaur)

Mediocre typography is almost a standard found in the men that I date, which is generally surprising because my circle of friends contains a number of type snobs. Aside from a “Ban Comic Sans” flyer pinned to my cubicle wall, I’m reasonably tolerable, although my enchantment with certain men have certainly taken nosedives after witnessing appalling type decisions on their end. My friend Matthew, who is certainly more insufferable of a type snob than I am(as I am barely one), once refused to walk into a restaurant after already having walked a couple hungry miles down Melrose Ave. because the menu, and signage were in Comic Sans and Arial. Despite being rather famished myself, I could not disagree with any particular point.

I was having dinner with the aforementioned Matthew a couple weeks ago when this topic, and that of an ex boyfriend came up. “He signed his emails with Comic Sans,” Matthew said. I nearly fell off my precariously perched barstool. “What?” he followed, “I thought you knew and liked him anyway.”

I didn’t know, because I disabled rich text and HTML for years in all my email applications. It truly bothered me to realize that a relationship that went on for far longer than necessary, and did me no favours (although it was not an unpleasant relationship) could have had about a year and a half shaved off it by merely having different preferences in my email client.

I wouldn’t have dumped him just because of that, of course. It’s more about having that first “wow, he has no taste” to break you out of the delusion of infatuation. The abject use and abuse of Comic Sans is a very good way to halt the creep of infatuation.

Later, after that prolonged, unnecessary relationship, I met a wonderful boy who was sweet and creative and intelligent and liked beer and we got along quite well. That was, until I discovered his penchant for Papyrus. I mean, I still liked him but…all you really need is that first seed of “this ain’t gonna work out.” I still consider him a friend, and I appreciate him as a person, but I think our our typographical leanings were just too dissimilar.

You know, what I’m totally okay with, though? The “default” boys. No, really. I will never fault you for Times New Roman. Some ordinary serif will make no worse impression on me. So write me a love letter in Times, if you have to. I’ll still read it.

I fall in love with words easily – I obsess over perfect paragraphs and the people who write them. I don’t like wasting time trying to think about the perfect man, because those sorts break your heart and leave you slightly different in all the wrong ways, like the relationship between Microsoft and Helvetica, so I divert my attention by lusting after the perfect serif. I don’t know what it is yet, but when I meet it, I will know.

Luckily, I rarely made it to brunch. However, I do remember walking in for dinner or lunch on many an occasion and feeling the eyes of people burning into the back of my skull.

I’ll admit, I was pretty easy. If I was drunk, I probably would have made out with you. If you were capable of having an intelligent conversation and/or I thought you were attractive, I probably would have done more than make out with you.

Everything seemed so simple when I was making the my decisions, but by the time it came to go grab a meal, nothing was simple anymore. Everyone was friends with everyone and I was always within a few degrees of someone I had previously hooked up with. Of those 750 people on campus, I always managed to hookup with a friend of someone I had hooked up with previously and everyone had something to say about it.

If my social life was built like a nuclear power plant, it would have been Chernobyl with its shoddy engineering and its inability to contain an exploding nuclear reactor.

Three years later, I’m out of college and I’ve seen a big difference. My life is now like Three Mile Island; there is no fallout. Or rather, the fallout is minimal. I’ve been reasonably irresponsible in my current situation. I’ve been going out, doing my thing, and not thinking too much about “how will this play out on Monday?”

If I learned anything in college, it wasn’t about Plato – it was about hookup damage control and management. I guess I forgot all about that when I graduated. Walking in on Monday afternoon, I expected the whispers and stares I was so used to in college.

Turns out that didn’t happen.

There was no Chernobyl-like meltdown, the fallout was minimal. I was not used to this. It had the potential to be disastrous but it wasn’t.

I know, I’m lucky.

After years of nuclear power-plant like fallout from my late night night adventures, I am glad to finally dealing with less problems. It’s like my life has turned into Three Mile Island, it’s definitely engineered better now that it was 3 years ago.

<– Me (present day): Pretty, clean, no sign of deviant behavior