Please. Someone. Save Me From Myself.

I went out and had a lovely evening sharing a pitcher of margaritas with a friend tonight. Margaritas always make me feel happy, bubbly, and flirty, so I came home thinking "I know! Maybe I'll get back on one of the free dating sites and see if there are any good possibilities!"

Why did I think that? Sure, it was partly because of the margaritas. But mostly it was because I am a brain-dead idiot with the memory of a gnat. Because I JUST rescued myself from match.com! Why would I go and get back into the same stupidity again?!?! On the plus side, I've now had a hearty laugh and been gently reminded of why the margarita flirt-high should be allowed to pass unindulged in the future.

First, I get on the dating site and look around. I spend a good hour just laughing at the terrifying and/or sad profiles and congratulating myself on avoiding this mess. Then, just as I'm about to give up, I see someone halfway decent.

Next, I decide I might as well put up a picture and a 2-sentence summary of myself. Just in case he was interested. You never know.

So I post the picture and get started on the profile...

ME (thinking): Hmmm... what's the first thing people notice about me... lemme think...

SITE NOTIFICATION: Euthanizer666 is checking you out!

ME: Uh-oh! I wonder how I turn that off. I don't need a pop-up window every time...

SITE NOTIFICATION: Beelzebub72 is checking you out!

ME: Yeah, this is exactly what I DON'T want to...

INSTANT MESSENGER: MILFHunter said: So what are you doing up this late? Wanna chat?

ME: Mother of God, how do I make it stop?!?! MINIMIZE! MINIMIZE!

iPHONE (sitting on the desk by the computer): *new email sound*

ME: New email? From whom? OH GOD NO!

EMAIL: RightGuy4U has sent you a message! Message text - Good evening good lookin'...

ME: *vomits into the wastepaper basket* Where was I? Oh right. The profile blurb...

iPHONE: *new email sound*

ME: New email? From...crap.

EMAIL: 35RestrainingOrders has sent you an erotic poem in the original French by Pierre de Ronsard! His profile says he doesn't speak French, but he is attempting to pass this off as an original work!

ME: Dammit! Where are the email settings?

SITE NOTIFICATION: NiceGuy is checking you out!

iPHONE: *new email sound*

INSTANT MESSENGER: Rico_Suave said: Voulay voo cooshay avec moi? Ha ha! 

Pretty soon I begin to feel like I don't need a date; I need an exorcist who specializes in Apple products.

I want to stress that this has nothing whatsoever to do with how I look, and it is NOT (repeat: NOT) the ego boost you might think it is, if you've never been on a dating site before.The first time you set up a profile, this happens (and it happens to ALL of us), and you think you might have seriously underestimated your hotness. But soon you realize that there are about five hundred guys out there whose entire strategy consists of finding whoever is new to the site and bombarding her with seriously weak pickup lines. They don't care what she looks like and they definitely have not bothered to read her profile, because they don't care who she is or what she wants. The messages they send are evenly divided between something along the lines of "Your so beautiful" (note: this is the entire body of the message and they ALWAYS make that grammar error) or something more like "I see we have a lot in common..." (this is pretty much NEVER true).

It's the Fresh Meat approach, and I can't imagine that it has ever worked, but I guess its devotees know something I don't. Mostly it's just the most irritating thing ever, like a denial-of-service attack on my love life. From the wikipedia entry on DoS, emphasis mine:

One common method of attack involves saturating the target machine with external communication requests, such that it cannot respond to legitimate traffic, or responds so slowly as to be rendered effectively unavailable.

I suppose it's just as well. I have an awful lot of sketches to write/edit in the next two days. And any time I don't spend on sketches really ought to be spent making ginormous glossy posters of myself to be distributed to every Mexican restaurant in the metro area, featuring big black letters that say "DO NOT SERVE MARGARITAS TO THIS WOMAN".

DISCLAIMER: There are nice, decent, real guys on these sites who really do read women's profiles before blindly assuming that mutual desperation will be a sufficient basis for a relationship. It's just that you don't hear from them until the first week has passed, and this post is about the first horrifying seconds after posting a photo. So don't yell at me. I didn't make the rules.