Disharmony

Okay, look, I'm not saying that I'm going to do any on-line dating. I'm not saying that I have anything against it either. It's a fine way to meet people and when I lived in State College where my dating choices were limited to:

*18 year old frat boys
*Married men
*Poets

I decided that salon.com would be preferable. I went out on a few blind dates and every single one of them was interesting and funny, most often in an awful way. Really. I didn't have one date that wasn't note worthy in some form.

A few are:

*A gay professor. How did I know he was gay? I didn't. But I got a little suspicious when he brought up homosexuality about 5 times on the date and then told me that he believed gayness was something you could overcome if you tried hard enough. Then he asked me if I would like to meet his mother. I am not joking.

*Another professor and/or administrator who I met for lunch in the student cafeteria. Before we started eating, he pulled out a little black case. He said, By the way, I'm diabetic. Some people are weird about that. He pulled out a shot, filled it with insulin, and stuck it into his arm. Then he ate his sandwich. I didn't care if he was diabetic, but I feel like giving yourself a shot at a meal is somewhat like blowing your nose into your hands and complaining about your allergies.

*A prison nurses who drove about an hour to meet me for dinner. Right before the date, he emailed to say he no longer looked exactly like the guy in the photo he posted. He wrote, I'm now bald and I have a moustache. We went to dinner. He was interesting and nice and had lots of stories about prison life which of course I loved, but he was also bald with that halo of hair around the back of his head and with a bad little stache. I agreed to go out with him again even though I didn't really want to. On the way to meet me, he got into a wreck and totaled his Jeep. He wasn't hurt, but I was relieved. He said, Well, we can still go out. After I get my car towed, I could borrow my friend's car and come out. I said, No, that's okay. Later, I emailed him to tell him I didn't really want to see him again. He emailed me back a photo of his smashed up Jeep.

*A philosophy professor with two cats who wasn't quite yet divorced, but whose wife had cheated on him by finding dates online in a site called spank.com. We dated for six months until I said, I love you and he said, Oh, I think of you fondly.

But anyway, if you spend even a little time looking at online dating services, you'll note that some guys don't know what kinds of photos they should post. I don't know what mistakes women make, but here's a short list of photos that should not be used to try to get dates:

*The absolute best is when the person has a series of photos where his cheek is clearly pressed up against someone else's; someone who has been scratched or blacked out, sometimes in a violent way. Find a picture where you are by yourself. There has to be one. If not, take one. In a few cases, the man is dressed in a tuxedo and you have to wonder, Is that his wedding photo?

*Photos where he is in a group of people, and the picture is taken from far away so the only thing you can really tell about him is that he appears to be in human form.

*Pictures taken with any combination of the following: shirtless, standing next to a sports car or motorcyle, holding up a fishing line with a hooked bass at the end of it, smiling into the camera in full hunting regalia with your foot planted on the head of a dead animal.

*I saw a picture of a guy today that shows him on a ladder with his back to the camera. You can't see anything of his face. You can only discern that he has on jeans and a matching denim shirt which is bad enough. What is he hoping to illustrate with this photo? That he's overcome his acrophobia?

*My friend K. doesn't like it when guys post pics with their kids. I don't mind, as long as the kid doesn't look like the kid is just about to graduate college.

More later...