I Am TOO OLD ...

for this wrenched from sleep every hour nonsense.  I'm posting this here instead of Facebook because people will worry, but really, if you would just follow directions, you wouldn't have spend the last four hours two hours from my house.  Brothers.  Should I blame this on the homeschooling?  Like homeschooler math, maybe direction following is not our forte.  When I tell a person, four separate times, to turn right off the exit, and that person has just spent two hours driving through god knows what all, mountains and such, because he missed his first exit, wouldn't you think that he would then turn right off the exit?  Evidently not.

Discouragement

I guess it's fitting that I couldn't find the message upon which I was going to base this post.  Dating discouragement is the name of the game these days.  Three messages seems to be the limit of a conversation.  Is it something I said?  Am I not interesting enough?  Too interesting?  Just not putting enough energy into it?
The ex told me he found one of my profiles, which means several things: 1) He's looking at dating women other than his long-term girlfriend, with or without her knowledge.  I have no idea of their relationship status at this point, although I did notice that he was texting her yesterday when I went to pick up the kid.  That may or may not mean anything.  Both of them love drama and have texted obsessively since the beginning.  Whenever that was.  2) He's seen my profile.  Maybe he'll see my other profiles.  I fall into his desired demographic, after all.  Should I change anything about the way I'm presenting myself?  If so, what?  What's the balance of being open to new love while not exposing myself unduly?  Should I just give up this nonsense if I can't do it anonymously?  Or should I forge ahead, ex be damned?  It's not like I'm looking for hookups or to be tied up and flogged.  Not that I don't respect that as a kink, it's just not what I'm looking for.
With that said, what am I looking for?  Kindness, empathy, joie de vivre, height?  A willingness to wash the dishes?  Hmmm.  Sounds like another blog post in the making ...

Because more dating advice was what I really needed ...

A friend of mine emailed me a link to this video, which we both, at first glance, found somewhat disheartening.

(watch it first)

I mean, come on.  Is this what successful dating requires?  I only put in that kind of work for research papers.  

On further reflection, though, my takeaway is this: be picky.  Now be even pickier.  Know what you want and don't be afraid to ask for it, and believe that what you want is worth both wanting and asking for.  Warm and fuzzy enough?

Now all I need is the time to revamp my profile ... sigh.

A Date is a Date ... or is it?

This post is brought to you by procrastination, yurts, and mediocre Mexican food.

Once upon a time, a few weeks ago, a girl met a guy in a coffee shop for an introductory date. 
The girl knew a few things about the guy. One of the things she knew was that he owned land in New York, on which he had built a yurt. She knew this because he had told her. Twice. She also knew that he was uncircumcised.  It was right there, on his profile.  When she replied to his email, she mentioned, facetiously, that guess what! she was too!  He replied seriously that he was thankful she had been spared the trauma of female genital mutilation.  This maybe should have been her first clue. FGM is serious, and worthy of serious discussion, but there is a time and a place and maybe if you don't appreciate snark we are not meant to be.  The second clue was that he showed up in board shorts (in case anyone is in doubt, a GROWN ASS MAN should never show up to a first date wearing clothing which was originally intended for an athletic activity), sporting a braided mustache and carrying a skateboard.  Any of these things, individually, is not a dealbreaker.  However, the overall impression was a little too Peter Pan for this girl's taste.  Also, when a girl spends a good portion of the day grooming herself to a state of irresistible hotness, she expects at least a tiny effort in return.  The third clue was that, within minutes of meeting, they were embroiled in a (not so) riveting discussion about the extraction of wisdom teeth. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained, so, bolstered by her excellent Americano (shout out to Muddy Waters!) she gamely agreed to walk to the water and then grab dinner. In her defense, she was starving, and perhaps harbored a hope that the conversation would pick up over food. A vain hope, as it turned out. After he had told her not only the diameter of his yurt (17', if you care), but the diameters of his friends' yurts, their names, much of their life histories, their PARENTS' names, and exactly how he had portioned out the inheritance from his grandmother (a third of it went into building the yurt, again, if you care), she began to have vivid mental pictures of the kinds of movies which, at a certain stage, feature montages of women subject to excruciating blind dates. Yes, she was living out her own romantic comedy ... not, however, the way she might wish. It became hard for her to keep a straight face. Long story long, after uh huh'ing her way back up the hill with him, she formed a desperate plan. At the top of the hill, she (to her eternal shame, perhaps) lied about the location of her car, gave him firm handshake and a vague reassurance, and fled into the night. The moral of the story? Always start a first date with good coffee, to provide at least a degree of redemption. Alternately, never trust a man who doesn't laugh at one's wisecracks. Nothing wrong with yurts, though. As long as one has the conversational skills to back them up.

Dear Prudence ...

So I went on a date, a week ago Sunday, and now I have a small dilemma.  Dude was entertaining, to a point, but he was also three inches shorter than his profile said he was.  Now, I don't actively go looking for diminutive guys, but neither am I such an asshole that I will dismiss them out of hand.  The shortness is not the issue.  The lying is.  "But it's just a small lie," you might say.  "Maybe he thought this was his only chance at getting any attention at all!"  Maybe so.  I know that while largeness tends to be problematic for a woman's self image, smallness can be similarly difficult for men.  However, I also know that the solution (at least theoretically, ahem) for personal happiness hinges greatly on self acceptance, and that lying about one's areas of insecurity only delay the inevitable and risk creating feelings of betrayal in the other party.  Which leads to my dilemma.  I like closure (don't we all?), so I emailed this guy and asked him his thoughts about the date and how it went.  Only when he answered did I realize that what I was really looking for was an excuse to confront him about his "little (heh) white lie," which seems to me to be remarkably close to ambush.  So ... thoughts?  State my issues (what would be a tactful way to handle such a conversation?), or, given his hesitations about distance, let him down easy, free to repeat this self defeating pattern?  See?  It's really all about helping him!

Part Deux (Duh)

I never answered the message.  Rightly or wrongly, I felt that if one was going to lead with a kink, one should go to the kink part of the singles site, which does exist, for the very purpose of connecting those who wish to practice their kinks with those who wish to be practiced upon.  Or something.
A year later, I had started another profile on another, larger, dating site, under another name.  Lo and behold, the fourth message I received was from our foot friend, using basically the same phrasing, with a notable absence of foot.  Learning from experience, clearly, although his username still featured the word "foot," and was, in fact, the same name he was using on the other site.
I figured, what the hell.  Dude's persistent, messaging is free, give it a shot.
Wedges and clogs made a quick reappearance, and became a recurring theme, as did my hind end.  I pointed out that while I was ok with his kink, it was not mine, and I had made pretty clear in my profile that I also wanted to talk about things other than my feet and my ass.  He told me that of course there was more to him than that.  I told him that I was going out of town and would be in touch with him when I returned.  He told me to have fun, feeling it necessary to add, "and just so I am sure..... you are a bbw with a big ass correct?" *headdesk facepalm*  (The extra ellipses are all him ... it's hard to pay attention to punctuation with your head up an ass.)
Footnote: although I never answered him, and although his profile disappeared shortly after, he reappeared twice more, under slightly different names, the first time asking if I remembered him and the second offering to pay me money for photos of my "hippie feet."  Repressing the urge to give him a large piece of my mind (why waste something he obviously had no capacity to appreciate?) I showed great restraint in asking him simply, please, never to contact me again ... and reported him to the website for solicitation.  It's been three months, and so far he hasn't popped up again.

In the Meantime ...

I'm pretty sure I just found a profile belonging to Borat.  He never did end up with Pam Anderson, did he?  Breaking news: Borat is on the market!