Fit Darcie

Text messages leading up to the date:

Me: i’m running late. be there in 15

Dude From Bar: Me too

Me: i seriously have no idea what you look like. be there in 10

Dude From Bar:lol (aside: I HATE “lol”)

Me: Can u make yourself obvious?

Dude From Bar: I’m the naked guy with a lampshade on my head and a bottle of jagger.

Me: Sweet.

So I walk into the bar, and I only see one guy sitting alone. He was old and gross. I smiled, but he didn’t smile back. Phew. Not him. Then I turned around and saw another guy sitting alone. He smiled and said “hi”. He was hot. Phew.

Taking the advice of my co-worker Chad, I decided not to make an effort to find out his name….to see how long I could go. I seriously didn’t think he knew my name either. We bar hopped and were at some restaurant when he went out for a smoke (ew). From the open window he shouted my name. Dammit. He did know it. I guess when he called me “Eyes” all the time it was just a cute nickname.

Leaving the restaurant, some guy shouted “Hey Shawn!” Dammit. That was not a really funny way to find out his name.

Anyway, we went to another bar (where girls drink FREE on Thursday. Uhm. New favorite hang out.) Needless to say, I got wasted. Woke up this morning, going through my pockets and came up with the number of some guy named Enzo. Would be interesting to remember how I got that number.

A few weeks back while partying with some friends, I met some guy in some bar. The reason I know this is because he’s been texting me ever since. I don’t remember his name, or what he looks like. I have him in my phone as “Dude From Bar”. We’re going out tonight.

Some suggestions on how to slyly ask his name?

Recently, I was having a conversation with a co-worker about profile pics and how often, when you meet someone you’ve known only online (extremely common in my industry), they look nothing like you expect them to. This annoys me because I find it to be a form of false advertising. When we were having the conversation, we were speaking specifically of colleagues and co-workers.

The subject of online dating came up, and I was reminded of how ridiculous I think men look when they have pics of themselves up without shirts on. I don’t care how great your body is, but put your shirt on. Women are not as eager as men to find out what you look like underneath. (Much more exciting to find out the hard way ;-))

I was browsing my Facebook, and clicked on the profile of a guy I met a few months ago, and never really had any communication with (because he’s pretty much a big loser). I clicked on it because he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and I was curious to see how deluded this guy was about his body. And I was surprised to learn that he had 400 Facebook friends. I was surprised because he joined Facebook after meeting me. That’s an average of 100 friends a month since I met him. Odd, I thought. So I clicked a little further. From what I can tell, about 95% of his friends are female. Fine.

But what I noticed about his female friends, is that most of them were half naked…some more naked than that. There were butt shots, boob shots, and shots I just can’t talk about. I’ve met this guy in person. He is not nearly cool enough to have friends that hot or slutty even…the only thing I can think of is that they are all hookers. Has anyone heard of this before on Facebook? A Facebook network of whores?? I suppose Facebook is a logical place for this. It IS a social networking tool, but it really makes it rather public. I mean, at least 400 other people are able to find out that he belongs to a “One-night Stands” group.

I’m not going to argue that being sexually compatible isn’t an important part of any successful relationship. But I don’t understand why men need to know that immediately.  “Hi. How are you? I’m Ben. Are you good in bed?” First off, if we slept with men on the first date, we’d never hear from them again, regardless of how good it is. So why do we need to let them know immediately if we’re compatible or not?

A few years ago, I’d gone on a few pathetic dates with a guy we called “Urckle” cause he looked like Steve Urckle. There was nothing standout about the guy, but nothing that totally wanted to make me barf. So I went on 3 or 4 dates with him. During the last one, he’d gotten completely wasted at a friends party (who lived upstairs from me), so I’d offered him my couch to sleep on. I was hoping that after he left, I’d never hear from him again.

Of course not. He pinged me on msn messenger later that day, and asked what I was like in bed. He said he didn’t want to waste his time with me if I was a prude. That was the last sentence he ever spoke to me.

Browsing through my very disappointing eHarmony matches this evening, I was reading Joel from Toronto’s “Must Haves and Can’t Stands” (someday I’ll explain how eHarmony works…whenever I get my first crummy date). In there, he put “Sexually Knowledgeable”. I can understand how this would be important to someone…but you only tell that to women you expect to sleep with right off the bat.

Nice try guys, guess you’ll never know.

On my recent trip to Boston, the rental car I was driving had a flat tire. (My first ever, not that exciting). We were just outside of Rochester, NY when it happened. After some confusion about who we were supposed to call to fix it, some guy with a tow-truck put the donut on and we drove to the nearest Sam’s Club to get it fixed.

I know we always complain about how rude Americans are and how they’re selfish and think they are the center of the universe and all that, so I was kinda expecting that when we got there. Quite the opposite. The folks at Sam’s Club were super nice, very friendly, trying to have small conversations with us, telling us about where their sons are going to college, etc. The guy who fixed the tires even gave me the address of the nearest Enterprise car rental place so we could take the car back and yell at them. My co-drivers were getting headaches, so while one waited, I ran across to the Walmart (love you Sam’s Club, but I am not buying a 1000 pack of Advil) to get some headache medicine. When I was done paying, the cashier wished me a good day and told me she hoped my headache would get better. Whoa. That to me was exceptional.

So, I made the trip out to the suburbs today to Sam’s Club, hoping maybe it was some sort of Sam’s Club policy to be polite to people. Nope. Even the samples people weren’t pushing their product on me. No hello’s or anything from the cashiers. I thought that maybe when we were in Henrietta (the town we ended up in NY) it was just small town niceness, and in Toronto, everyone is so mean to others because they are just too many people. (I personally hate just about everyone). But Sam’s Club was DEAD.

So, moral of the boring story, Americans aren’t as bad as they seem. I love you Henrietta Sam’s Club workers.

“Black guys can’t increase the size of their legs.”

I was reading Women’s Health magazine (the June 2008 edition) and it had this page full of odd relationship stats. The thing that always gets me about these surveys, is that they exist in the first place. Who decided that knowing how many women have dumped a guy because he was a bad dancer (2%) was important to know?

Some of the stats in here include:

- Number of men the average woman has slept with (including husband): 6

- The average woman is most likely to dump a guy on a Monday in January than any other day (my last boyfriend dumped on a Sunday in January. Right after Desperate Housewives).

- 11% of Americans think it’s ok to dump someone via text message. Wow.

- 27% of single women are still pining over an ex; 50% of single men are still pining over an ex.

It’s that last stat that grabbed my attention. Twice as many men are still in love with their exes as women are. I’ve always had a theory that men fall way harder for women than women fall for men. We women fall way more often, and way sooner, but when men fall for women, they fall HARD. But we’re so used to the ups and down, so it never phases us long when we get dumped (and 73% of us keep gifts from our ex’s. Duh.).

As a single girl out there in the dating world, I find this stat rather discouraging. With everything else I have to fight against to get a date, I now have to deal with the fact that half of the dateable men are too emotionally unready to move on.

Pansies. Get over it.

A game I play with myself to pass the time on the subway or in a lame bar is “If I Had To…” where I pretend that the entire world has blown up and I am the only woman left on the planet and the only men left are those in the room with me and I have to choose one to help me save mankind. (Note, this is the opposite of the male version where the object is to pick one they couldn’t do it with).

Usually, it takes me the entire subway ride to decide which one. Not because there are so many to choose from, but because it’s hard to decide which one wouldn’t make me puke my brains out.

Last night, I discovered a new version of this. At the gym, I picked two guys standing in close proximity and decide of the two, If I Had To, which would it be. I was surprised with the results. Of the 30 pairs at the gym, I managed to cleanly pick 28 men who could be my partner in saving the world. 1 pair resulted in a tie, where I could either way, and 1 pair resulted in mankind being completely wiped out.

Helped to pass the time at the gym anyway, but I do hope the world doesn’t blow up unless I am at the photo shoot for the firefighter’s calendar.

I am often the only female working out at my gym. Trust me, I am totally ok with this. I have no self-confidence issues and am not shy around men at all. The only thing that pisses me off about being the only female is having to wait for the girlie machines or weights.

I can’t think of any reason for a man to be using 12lbs weights. It’s worse when I have to wait for them cause some pansy is hogging them. He’d better be injured cause that’s the only excuse you can have for using such small weights. That’s how much my purse weighs for crying out loud. Or the abductor/adductor machines. First of all, these were created  by an idiot and only work the intended areas if you REALLY know what you are doing (and this is rare). I personally only use them for a brief 6 week period in a year, and merely to give the rest of my legs a break. There isn’t even huge benefit to working these muscles unless you plan on walking or running sideways a lot. So when some asshole hogs one of these machines for 45 (FOURTY FIVE) minutes, I get irate. The asshole looks even more ridiculous when he puts his head between his legs after every set. He must be a post-man with a strict “walk sideways” rule. Moron.

I was driving the other day with my friend (I’ll call her Shelly) in the car. We were discussing the recent break up of a friend of ours. Regarding the break up, Shelly said “Well, she’s a pretty girl, she’ll find a boyfriend in no time.” I had nothing to say really, so there was a 5 second pause in the conversation, so Shelly piped up again and said “Not that you’re not pretty. I mean, you’ve been single for a long time and all, but you’re still pretty.”

I can see how Shelly would have thought she might have insulted me (though she didn’t, and totally slipped by me at the time). She had said that our other friend could easily get a guy because she’s really pretty, but then realised that I am single and thought that maybe what she would have said would’ve implied that I am not pretty, and therefore single.

Now, the only reason I would write about such a conversation is that Shelly just recently got into a relationship after a very long stint in the singles club. By long I mean longer than mine. So, not only did she call me ugly and single, but also put herself into the “hot-enough-to-get-a-man” category.

Thanks Shelly. Your trying-to-make-me-feel-better-words were worse than the originals.