3461

Whoa - I thought I was the only one with an irrational fear of redheads. I understand I shouldn’t generalize about an entire group of people based on one seriously unstable ex, but I still have scars. :)

3462

Oh, it’s not a fear. Much the opposite. Seems like every time I’ve made a really bad decision where women were concerned, a crimson-tressed Jezebel was involved.

Which is odd, because I don’t necessarily see redheads as a “type” that pop up as more attractive or less or that there’s some ephemeral shared quality - it’s just weird anecdotal data.

Or that they’re just out to destroy me. I haven’t ruled out that remote possibility.

3463

Only hot redhead I know is my german TA. Which is both awesome and also sucks, because German-speaking women are fucking awesome, but she’s my TA, so I doubt I could snag her and remain professional in the classroom.

3464

I have an extremely strong and baffling attraction to redheads. I can distinctly remember three of them that I tried to (or at least hoped to) woo romantically over the years:

#1: A girl. I was barely a teen, I was fooling myself and she hung out with me until she got bored, then pretended we didn’t know each other. Were all girls like this? I didn’t hang around to find out.

#2: This time a guy. I was barely into my 20s. We became good friends and one night I confessed my True Feelings™. He confessed to not feeling the same way at all. At least he didn’t tell me he was straight. He ended up moving out of downtown and we lost touch, but the friendship was a wee bit awkward at that point, anyway.

#3: I was still in my 20s, but barely. This time it was a diminutive guy in college I had dubbed Little Red. There was also a Big Red but he was pretty much a basement-dwelling freak who regularly wrote long incensed letters on various topics to the local papers. Little Red, on the other hand, was cute and did not exhibit any outward evidence of psychosis. Then I overheard him talking to someone about how hot Janet Jackson was. So much for having any kind of ‘gaydar’.

I don’t see a lot of redheads on the sites I check now but when I do I make a mental note and that note reads “STAY AWAY”.

3465

Was it Harry Knowles?

3466

I’ll answer this again, because I will jump at any chance to drive business away from these jackasses. Avoid. For several reasons, which I will list in no particular order:

  1. You know how much fun taking a standardized test was back in high school? Well, imagine all the fun of meeting weirdos off the internet combined with that and you’ve got the formula for eHarmony. Seriously. Your first action in most cases on that site is to send your potential match (whom you are served - there is no “search” feature) a bunch of multiple choice questions. I’d think that it was a website designed for people with Asperger Syndrome (because that actually seems like a decent idea to me), if it weren’t for the fact that…

  2. You better damn well be “normal” or you are not going to be using their site anyway. The basic way that their little dingus over there functions is that they run you through a gargantuan personality test and attempt to pidgeonhole you into one of like seventeen categories, which then govern all of your future matching. All of it. It’s about as sophisticated as astrology. It took me like four tries on burner email addresses before I even managed to convince them that I wasn’t some kind of weird serial killer that they couldn’t match with anybody.

  3. If you think that the profiles that you read on OkCupid are a giant steaming pile of gorilla shit, that site will make you feel much better about your fellow humanity. I swear that like ninety thousand percent of all women within two hundred and fifty miles of Houston, TX either have the writing talent of a poorly educated bonobo or are copy-pasting their text from some kind of joke site.

  4. The service is expensive as shit. Seriously. Like, five to ten dollars more a month than anybody else.

  5. The founder is kind of crazy Christian, and I cannot help but think that this informs their system design to a certain extent.

  6. There was also that whole “we don’t like no queer-mo-sexicals around thexe parts” lawsuit that they just got done settling. They ended up essentially being forced to let gay people play in their sandbox, but as far as I know they have relegated all of the Uncleans to a secondary service for same-sex matching. I’m guessing that if you’re bisexual, that means you get to pay two gargantuan fees every month to use their crappy service, but I had washed my hands of the whole thing a couple of months before that dust up started.

I tried them for like six months and got absolutely nowhere. I encountered exactly one prospect that I didn’t find utterly reprehensible, and she was in San Antonio, which, if you are not familiar with the geography of Texas, is not a location compatible with dating a dude in Houston. Pretty sure I ran across a couple of robots, too, so the pay wall obviously doesn’t do much of anything to keep that noise out. I remember reporting them, anyway.

Oh, yeah, and my profile so you can make fun of my pictures and poor writing ability. Though I will say that the reason I don’t have many pictures of myself is because I’m not a picture guy. I don’t take them and I don’t know people who take a lot of them, so pretty much every image that I have of myself has to be something that I deliberately generated for the purposes of demonstrating what I look like, and it turns out that I am a truly shitty photographer.

3467

Brian, those all sound like positives to weed out the weirdos to me. Sign me up!

Broomball keeps paying off, that’s the best dating strategy I’ve ever seen.

3468

Sort of. Of the women I encountered who weren’t trying to run a Nigerian plane ticket scam, most were just boring. Just…horribly, horribly boring. And likely to have more cats than friends in a couple of notable cases. It would appear that when you exclude crazy people who bake cakes made out of their own hair and have imaginary tea parties, you also exclude anybody with even the slightest bit of soul to them.

Chemistry has been marketing itself as an alternative that’s more friendly to people who are crazy/not one of the seventeen pre-cooked personality profiles that the eHarmony Pigeonholing Council tries to shove you up - has anybody tried that one?

3469

Gotta watch out, though, Guapo. Broomball is fraught with peril.

My neighbor shattered her ankle playing it, back in junior high, and still has the screws to show for it.

3470

“screws” huhuhuhuhuhuh

3471

Yeah, I know, I was walking into that. Hence why I deliberately avoided also including the word “bone.”

3472

For real. To hear Guapo tell it, many of the women he plays broomball with also have screws to show for it.

3473

We need a “that ElGuapo fucking things” thread, it seems.

3474

Hardy har har.

Let’s hear some more weird dating stories!

3475

I put an ad on Craig’s List and got a few responses because, well, the competition is so easy to beat. Most men write the dullest ads. I wrote something snappy.

So I emailed these women and met a few, but here’s the bad date story. I emailed back this chick and less than a minute later she replies, says we should talk on the phone sometime. I’m always ok with that so I give her my cell number, not thinking much of it. I hit the send button and BAM! she calls me 60 seconds later.

So we talk for ten minutes and it’s a nice enough conversation. At the end she says, “I’m disappointed you didn’t ask to meet me.” This is a woman I didn’t even know existed twenty minutes ago. We haven’t exchanged pictures or anything like that. I decide why not, though, and offer to see her. She wants to meet right away – I should have expected that, but I was still surprised. Ok, I say. In for a penny, in for a pound of trouble.

So we are meeting in Forest Park (which is bigger than Central Park in NY – bit of trivia and St. Louis pride on my part). She meets me and has a blanket and we sit on the grass. First thing she does is open her purse, which is the size of a wooly mammoth, and pulls out three bottles of beer – it’s not a purse, it’s a portable bar! I have a bottle of water so I decline, so she starts drinking.

Next she pulls out a pipe and some marijuana and asks me if I want to get high. I’m like, no, I think I’m already high because this doesn’t seem real. So she starts smoking. I’m already trying to come up with an exit strategy at this point.

What next, I’m wondering? Apparently we are going to talk about sex now, because she starts in on that. I’m an adult and I can handle a little sex talk, and it’s all very general stuff. Do I like sex? Um, yes. That kind of thing. Out of the blue she says to me, “Does it excite you to watch a woman play with herself?” I’m not making that up! Dear god, what is going on? I don’t even know this beer-guzzling, weed-puffing chick and she’s hinting about wanting to put on an x-rated show for me. I’m wondering what else she has in that elephantine purse of hers – she has drugs and alcohol. I think firearms completes the unholy trinity. And here we are, alone in the woods so to speak. I could imagine her pulling out a stun gun and zapping me and then I’d awake, staked the ground the way the Lilliputians staked Gulliver, and she’d have her way with me. And then harvest my kidneys.

So now I know I have to go. I mention having to leave in a bit. She asks me if I thought it was curious in her email when she said she hadn’t shaved. No, I told her. I know women often go out without shaving their legs, especially if they have on long pants. No, she says, I meant I gave up shaving. Here, let me show you.

So she rolls up her pants leg and…and…it was gross! She had big black curly hairs everywhere. It was like she was female from the waist up and burly trucker man from the waist down! Once seen, it can’t be unseen! When I’m on my deathbed and my life flashes before me, that leg will be in the highlight reel…and I don’t want it there!

I will give her credit though. She had an exquisite sense of timing. Just when I thought I had descended into a gaping Cthulian maw of madness, she came up with a topper. She said to me, “I don’t shave my pits either. Want to see?”

Nooooo!

3476

So she rolls up her pants leg and…and…it was gross! She had big black curly hairs everywhere. It was like she was female from the waist up and burly trucker man from the waist down! Once seen, it can’t be unseen! When I’m on my deathbed and my life flashes before me, that leg will be in the highlight reel…and I don’t want it there!

I will give her credit though. She had an exquisite sense of timing. Just when I thought I had descended into a gaping Cthulian maw of madness, she came up with a topper. She said to me, “I don’t shave my pits either. Want to see?”

So Rimbo’s wife is NOT in China?

Fortunately, we didn’t explore that, she and I. Whew. So we part and I get back home and email her a bit later and tell thanks for meeting but I’m not interested in pursuing anything. She fires back an email, clearly mad, and tells me that’s fine because she’s in love with someone else anyway.

Hoo-boy.

3477

Too many grammar nazi’s in here so I removed it.

3478

All I saw there was the passing of an opportunity for quick vicious sex. I’m disappointed in you (Mark Asher)

3479

Wow, that’s pretty trollificent. You deserve whatever happens next.

3480

Ha ha. Well, she wasn’t very attractive, at least to me. Yeah, I suppose a swimsuit model drinking beer and smoking weed and batting her eyes at me while she talked about sex might have made me react differently, but not this woman. She’s not someone I would have ever been attracted to in the first place, but that’s online dating for you.