¿Qué?

I thought I was going on a date with Jack the "athletic, career-driven, professional who loved to travel" from eHarmony. Instead I met Jack the doughy, middle-manager, who had been to Canada that one time.

The disadvantage of online dating websites is that men are able to camouflage their flaws, shortcomings, and personality disorders into carefully crafted descriptors ranging from slight adaptations of truth to outright, bold-faced lies. Luckily, the resulting wagonload of disappointment can be avoided once you learn to speak the language:

"Discovering myself" = Unemployed

"Family man" = My kid(s) and baby mama(s) will hate you

"Let's meet for a drink" = I'll buy you dinner if you're hot

"Southern gentleman" = I’m a little bit racist

"Modern guy" = You're paying for your own dinner

"Ended last relationship on good terms" = I hate that whore

"Makes time for friends" = I’m at the strip club at least twice a week 

"Athletic" = I watch football 

"Outdoorsy" = You better like hiking because I’m broke

"Loves red wine" = I’m an alcoholic

"Nice guy" = I’ve never sexually satisfied a woman

Jennifer Aniston Edition

Jennifer Aniston. In five years she's plummeted from enviable A-Lister to Hollywood's resident sad sack. While it seems ludicrous that a multi-millionaire celebrity is dogged by the image of the pitied lonely girl, Aniston has seen the same sort of media backlash usually reserved for the Charlie Sheens and Lindsay Lohans of the entertainment industry.

But I maintain that although Aniston hasn’t engaged in blow benders or dog fights, she’s every bit as deserving of the negative press. When a celebrity slips from the Hollywood limelight, I believe the underlying cause is the public's response to how relevant that celebrity is. Sometimes the lack of relevance is obvious, the average person isn't in rehab four times and doesn't currently have a hooker locked in their bathroom, and sometimes it's more subtle, as in Aniston's case.

Had Aniston taken the social temperature before launching her five year pity party, she might have picked up on a few current events that make her plight appear less than significant. While she pouted, tanned, and sold overpriced water, America faced the most profound economic crisis since the Great Depression, elected the first African American president, experienced enormous overalls in our health care system, am I forgetting anything? Oh yes, troops aboard, the ever present threat of terrorism, 185 million gallons of oil in the ocean, Hurricane Katrina…. America has been simply too busy to indulge the tender emotions of another narcissistic celebrity. As a result, Aniston "exclusive interviewed" her way into her own irrelevance.

And her celebrity friends sure haven’t helped. Rather, they’ve done her a huge disservice. This out-of-touch group trumpets Aniston’s awesomeness and staunchly maintains that Angelina Jolie is homewrecking whore. But in fact, what Jolie has done with her past five years seems...pretty incredible. And the idea that Jolie masterminded Brad and Jen's demise while carefully orchestrating her own image through charitable work? Hollywood fruitcakes, like Chelsea Handler, scratch their heads at why this super juicy gossip is being ignored when the general public has long since evaluated the millions in donations, the adoptions, and the substantial time and energy devoted to civil service, and simply didn't care about the motive.

Look, we’re all sorry Aniston didn't get her happy ending. But she's had five years, which is way longer than any of our girlfriends would have listened to us, time to shut her beak, and move on.

The truth about dating a beautiful man

Now this isn't to say I haven't dated my share of attractive fellows—cause don't get me wrong—I have. But I've discovered there is a significant and profound difference between dating the average attractive guy and a painfully, ridiculously, over-the-top handsome man.

Exhibit A:

Paging Dr. Goodbody anyone? 

As the date approached, drinks after work, my anticipation grew. I passed the time by updating my e-mail signature block to read "Doctor’s Wife" which subsequently crashed my Outlook and provided my IT help desk administrator fifteen minutes of uproarious laughter.

So there’s a stereotype that men are superficial swine content to value appearance over more substantive traits like personality, ambition, or a basic mastery of the alphabet; while women, in contrast, need depth, insightfulness, and a full fledged melding of spirits to solidify attraction.

I did not find this to be the case. I realized the shocking extent of my own shallowness on the date with Dr. Goodbody. I couldn’t tell you what we talked about. He might well have been speaking in Portuguese. Rather than paying attention to what he was saying, I was simply thinking over and over again: "Hooooooooot. If I spill something on his shirt will he take it off??"

It could be that my utter lack of attention to the conversation resulted in the deficiency of future dates. At the end of the night, he hailed me a cab, gave me a squeeze, and went back to wherever it is that beautiful men go at the end of their day. But not without imparting a lasting impression on not only me but also my cab driver who commented, "My goodness that was a nice-looking man."

How right you are Ameed.

The lesson here: really, really, crazy good-looking men should not be allowed to just wander free. They should be kept in museums or parceled into companies like Netflix where women can rent them for an evening.

30 Minutes or Less

So I'm driving home the other day when suddenly there’s pizza delivery guy tailgating me.  Tailgating me in a completely over-the-top, practical-joke-level way. Since we're driving in my neighborhood, which is an upstanding residential area, and being a peacemaker I pull over to let him go by. When given the option to pass me like a gentleman, he chooses instead to gun it around me.

And again, this is a neighborhood, an area with sidewalks, children, strollers, and free-range kittens. Being a pillar of the community and not wanting to see my neighborhood's roadways ravaged by a pepperoni-scented maniac, I follow him to where he is making his delivery. I calmly exit my vehicle and rationally explain to him the ways in which his driving affects the safety of those around him.

He disagrees with my assessment and scrambles away to make his delivery. But I know I must unhold the integrity of my community's infrastructure. So, I steal the keys from his car and relocate them into the nearby bushes.

Although there was a mild traffic disturbance caused by the tow truck that came to collect his vehicle the following day, a community had been saved.

...especially this guy

One theory why it's tough for ladies this area to date is that the competitive job market, fast pace, and urban culture of the DC Metro Area not only attracts but also facilitates a certain type of male personality that is highly egotistical and self-absorbed.

Now, I'd hate for these city boys to get all the credit...

When I lived in North Carolina, I dated a fellow named John. And while, it didn't turn my stomach to look at him, I wasn't exactly high-fiving anyone after each date with him.

But, strangely, John was completely and utterly convinced that he was strikingly and painfully attractive he was. Certainly vanity is never a sought after trait, but most women will forgive this characteristic for a man whose vanity is well-earned. Brad Pitt, for example, could've written his graduate thesis about his own gorgeousness without complaint. 

This wasn't the case with John. But he would talk endlessly about his superior visage. At first, it was simply strange, was he being sarcastic?

Models, he claimed, had told him he was beautiful.

The notion that at any given time hoards of models are roaming the countryside distributing over-the-top compliments to average-looking men aside, when the following incident occurred that I realized I was dealing with more than just the symptoms of early onset dementia.

One night while out to dinner, John and I happened to run into a co-worker of mine dining with his wife.

The following day, John asked me,
Really, honestly, asked me,
Asked me without an ounce of irony or humor,
Asked me in a way that was so genuine and sincere that it continues to befuddle not only myself, but every person with whom I have shared this story since,
Asked me if the next day at work my coworker had told me how attractive he thought John was.

You're probably confused. I'll clarify: John wanted to know if my male, married, co-worker had taken me aside at work, not to discuss a new movie coming out or what we were doing for lunch, and in lieu of conducting our professional responsibilities, but for only the exclusive and specific purpose of telling me that he thought John was good-looking.

My confusion was so absolute, that it may well have been the most confounded anyone has ever been about anything that has ever happened, ever.

Cavemen seeing fire for the very first time could not have been more baffled than I was at that moment. I was positively bewildered—and at that point growing frightened—by the magnitude of the ego I was dealing with. It was like realizing that the annoying ant problem I had in my apartment weren't ants at all but actually post apocalyptic fire-breathing dragons.

Sh*t my attorneys say (and do)

I've been working with attorneys for six years now and like rhetoricians, two-year olds, and drunks, they say the darnedest things.  

...because these are the people I know

Like many women in the city, every day I face the disheartening realization that for every fresh-faced, career-driven, put-together, on-the-ball, college-educated, kept-it-tight, twenty-something-year-old one of us in this city, there are about ninety million (I’m confidant this is an exact statistic here) knuckle-dragging, chin-missing, mouth-breathing, hairline-receding, beer-gut swinging, middle-managing, men-boys trying to pass as the datable population of DC.