As part of the free service that www.statcounter.com provides I can see what keywords people are entering in Google to find my website. Here are some of my favourites:
Since failing to meet the requirements that secure my money back guarantee, not to mention being stood up and having thrown up, my match.com subscription had finally rendered itself useless, usurped finally by MySpace and that other playground of romance, the real world, in which I had recently found some success.
Suzie, affectionately referred to in a previous post as “the one that came along,” had been coming along rather well, for want of a better word. That is, we’d been seeing each other for a few weeks. Anything beyond a few dates is somewhat miraculous for me, having dated women with children, ex-husbands and mental illnesses. (A background check revealed no history of these things.)
Excited by this and, hedging my bets somewhat, I made my last move on Match.com to, remarkably, decline a date with a not unattractive young lady. “I’m sorry,” I wrote. “I met someone.” Imagine my surprise then when that someone uses the same online service to send me a virtual wink (see Can’t buy me love) and essentially invites me to view her own match.com profile.
“22-year-old woman,” it began, “seeking women 18-35.”
Now, we’ve not yet had that talk about our “relationship”, whether indeed there is one, and whether, of course, we are seeing other people. By sending me a virtual wink via match.com, Suzie answered some of those questions, sure, but raised others too. Let’s start with what we do know. We are, I guess, seeing other people. In fact, we’re actively seeking other people. We are actively seeking homosexual relationships.
By alerting me to her match.com profile is Suzie suggesting that I am a) “women aged 18-35”, or b) dumped, ceremoniously, with a wink and a new agenda or, rather, a new gender?
I’m sorry that I haven’t written for so long. I guess I haven’t done anything stupid in a while. Not since seeing She’s the Man, sleeping with my ex-girlfriend or making excessive international calls on my mobile, all of which are detailed below and, incidentally, involve members of the opposite sex.
It was only a matter of time that one would come along; I would do something stupid and, if nothing else, get to share it on my blog. Luckily for me however, Suzie, the one that did come along, finds the stupid things that I do quite charming. (I’ll give her ‘til the end of this blog entry.)
“The female of the species,” so wrote Rudyard Kipling (and sang 90s band, Space), “is more deadly than the male.” And though they’ve not yet proven fatal (though I hope that’s how I’ll go), just being around them is something of a scarring experience for me. Quite literally.
I wrote in Your Hapless Hero of the nosebleed that ruined a barbeque and in Word of Mouth about the mouth sores that precede even the slightest chance of sex. I was suffering from neither come my date with Suzie when I stepped into the shower, and the elaborate routine that is my getting ready, to find I had no hot water. This is, to me, like having no water at all. How was I to double-shampoo, apply my leave-in conditioner, have a hot towel shave?
And while these are issues that concern the metrosexual male, plumbing is not. So I set about getting some help. And when it finally arrived, three days later, it was exactly as I imagined. The plumber’s name was Kev, and he said things like, “ooh, this looks like a bigger job than I thought”, “I’m going to have to order another part”, and something about football that I didn’t understand.
Either way, he left not having fixed my plumbing and with the realisation that, worse than a nosebleed, worse even than the mouth sores, I stank. I hadn’t showered in days. And I had a second date with Suzie. What was I going to do?
I decided I would shower at my gym. But then I realised I don’t have a gym. I know a gym, sure, but it’s not mine, I’m not a member, and I’ve never got beyond the gym tour or over the stitch that it gave me. But this was a matter of personal hygiene, I told myself; personal appearance. And so I called ahead and asked if I could.
Worse than the idea of exercising was the thought of taking a communal shower. But once I got there and changed out of my clothes, I stumbled in blindly, without my glasses, and found there were curtains that divided the shower room into cubicles. Better still, there was no-one there. Pulling the curtain to, I began the first of two shampoos. This was great, I thought. As I applied the leave-in conditioner, I read the ad that hung on the wall. “Stay shower fresh all day,” it read. That would be nice, I thought. And how do I do that? “Use Always Ultra Panty Liner.”
Just then, two female voices entered the room, their pedicured feet showing from under the shower curtain. Thinking mine were conspicuously hairy I edged back towards the wall (and the panty liner advert) and wondered what the hell I was going to do. The female of the species might be deadly, but, when it comes to personal hygiene, apparently they’re no match for the metrosexual male. One shampoo and no conditioning later they had left and so too did I, squinting as I did to see the ‘Ladies’ sign on the door.
