$ingle Lady #1 has been delinquent

I know, I know, I've been super delinquent about the postings. Truth be told, I haven't done much in the way of dating lately. I've been busy with other things and I just don't have time to [gasp] have a personal life. Lawyerboy had to cancel our gaming date last weekend due to illness, but made up for it by cheering for my Spiders in the NCAA tourney yesterday. Maj bonu$ pointz for getting his whole firm into a conf room to watch AND cheer AND text me updates during a marathon meeting. Ohhh to be a fly on the wall when he responded to the, "wait, did you go to Richmond?" question from his co-workers. "Uhh, no, this girl that I met on the world wide web did, and we've been on a few dates and I've cancelled or bailed on her twice so I feel like I should," or worse, "My girlfriend went there." Shudder.

My $i$ter is in town visiting and brought with her a nugget of iDating wisdom from a fellow silent $ingle Lady (shoutout Mrs. F) to not renew after the required 3 months since there aren't enough new joinees and you quickly drop the number of matches (or worse, get matched with the same doods over and over. Eww, I Closed you for a reason). Better to pulse your memberships to allow for brighter and better $ingle Doods to accumulate first. Totally true - I'm now down to like 4 new matches a week as I enter the home stretch 10 days of membership.

Resched with lawyerboy for this Sunday for a quiet and short evening break probably involving March Madness. Hope I still like him after over 2 weeks "off." Given my affinity for food products made up exclusively of sodium and MSG, my non-clingyness, and my sincere love of all things sports, I imagine he's probably currently questioning whether I'm the world's perfect woman, or else secretly a dood.

xo,
$L#1

$ingle lady #6 - $pring has $prung

Hello readers,

Well $pring has $prung for this $L, and I am ready and roaring to get out there and go on a date. My Easter deadline is fast-approaching, and while I initially had thought it would be easy-peasy to go on six dates by then, that is not the reality. I firmly believe eHarmony should not be allowed to charge you for your first month of membership. It takes a long, long time to get the ball rolling on these things. It takes at least a week or more to even get to the e-mailing stage, and even longer to where you're comfortable meeting someone in real life. And to top it off, once I've boiled down the 70 or so matches, I ended up with about three I might be interested in. The first month is for whittling down and exploring, not dating, so I think it's unfair to charge me $40 for it.

I'm finally getting some communication going, one with funny Brian, one with nerdy med-student Jay, and another with the aloof and elusive Ben. (Side note: most popular name on eHarmony in DC = Ben. I've gotten about 7 Bens.)

I hope sometime next week to have a more exciting tale to regale you with,
$L6

$ingle lady #2: I am single because...

I have about 15 questions waiting in my inbox. And they are hard. I don't feel like answering them. One in particular comes to me from a guy named Scott (okay that's a lie, I have no idea which one asked me this):

Why are you $ingle?

Four little words have proven so daunting. Every time I think of crafting a response I am stumped. What is this guy looking for? A history of my relationships and why they failed? For me to reveal that I have outstanding restraining orders issued by boyfriends past? There is no way this is the venue for those kinds of discussions. And in true HJNTIY fashion, who the F cares (pardon my language $L#1's mom...)? I am single because I'm not dating anyone. Why do people obsess over reasons for everything? Sometimes things just are.

And furthermore, isn't this question kind of like when you lose your keys, and someone so matter-of-factly says, "Well where did you have them last?" If I KNEW where I was when I had my keys, they would not be lost. Is it true that if I knew why I was single, I wouldn't be?

Anyway it's late and I just finished watching an episode of LOST and I haven't a clue which way is up. Goodnight. And I'm not answering that question, Steve, or whoever you are.

$L#2

$L #4 - I Gchat, therefore I am

I have come to the conclusion that the way that you gchat is reflective of the type of person you are.

If I am already friends with you, this is a pretty accurate assessment of who you are and I can almost picture you talking to me in real life (for my long-distance best friends). But if I have yet to meet you, I can size you up with just a short conversation. Here is a summary of the indicators I have come up with:

- Excessive use of emoticons = toolbag. And now that gmail has made these faces animated, it just makes it worse. These should be used sparingly and only in an inside joke scenario. If you are trying to convey how you are really feeling through an emoticon, there are bigger issues at hand.

- Still using middle school AIM lingo = immature. Such words as "g2g," "ttyl" and others were fine to use when we were still taking spelling and vocabulary tests in school and we didn't know how to spell actual words. Plus you looked more appealing to your crush on AIM if you dropped a few of these terms. But now are are working adults, out of college, these terms should be left in the past. This just tells me you don't care about spelling or grammar, which are giant pet peeves of mine. I am guilty of ignoring the proper use of punctuation and capitalization when gchatting. However, I always spell my words out in their entirety and I don't need a special decoder or a search engine to figure out you are trying to say to me. An occasional LOL is fine with me, but only if you are actually laughing out loud.

- Type how you talk = potentially good or bad. Unless you are Eminem or that crazy beyotch Angelea from ANTM, I would assume you speak like a normal person. But when I see some "I ain't be talkin to nobody", our gchat is over.

An eHarmz update on me:

- A Leo recap: the day after the date he felt the need to recap the entire night to me (hint: I WAS THERE) via gchat. Also, he asked me to rate our date on a scale from 1 to 10. Also referred to me as "hot." Personally, I am not a fan of the term, unless you are referring to the temperature. I just don't find it very genuine. I haven't spoken with him since Friday, so who knows when he will surface asking for a second date.

- Got matched with a 19 year old today. Enough said.

- I have reached stage 3 of questions with a Matthew. His (one) picture shows some promise and he asked me some insightful questions.

- I had an aggressive battle with another Matthew on Friday afternoon. I was first nudged by Matthew. I rechecked his profile, only to see that this was one of the guys I had kept around in my matches folder but never communicated with. He resembled David Cross (google image now.) aka Tobias from Arrested Development. His nudging and boring profile warranted a closed match, just because I do not appreciate being jostled by eHarmz or electronically by Matthew to communicate with him. THEN I received an ice breaker subsequent to closing him (is this allowed??) saying "I'd love to chat!!" Obviously, he then sent me his Final Message, the ever-so-creepy, "I really felt we had potential. I'd like you to reconsider."

xoxo,

$L 4

$ingle lady #6: Why no photos, boys?

The communication block has finally been lifted: three people are now responding back and forth with me (finally) and I feel less like an online dating pariah. I'm even e-mailing with someone, and although he did not capitalize my name in his first correspondence, I'll let it slide because he is a lawyer and can probably take me somewhere nice-ish for dinner. (BTW, these lawyer-types seem to be very prevalent on eH, I think we're all communicating with some.)

My newest eH pet peeve is that some (lots of) boys don't provide photos. I noticed it a bit in the beginning, but now eHarmony is consistently sending matches without photographs (even though I'm pretty sure I told it not to). I don't so much understand whether this means they are so attractive they feel they want people to know them for the "right reasons," or whether they are so unattractive they fear no one would communicate with them if they have they provide photographic evidence. Either way, I'm 1000 times less likely to chat you with no pics, so this dumb behavior should stop. If you're going to pay the money, why wouldn't you at least play the game?

I'm also getting worried that my matches seem to be coming from farther and farther away. This weekend I got matches from places such as Lorton; Rockville, Silver Spring, Clark, and other far off lands. This is depressing as I'm only interested in meeting a metro-accessible boy toy, preferably on the orange line. Bummer.

I need at least 35 pictures of each boy before making dating decisions, and he should maybe also be my neighbor,
$L6