let me see if i understand this correctly

according to this article, a species has arisen somewhere in the universe to master the technology of interstellar space travel, and has traversed the endless wastes of interstellar space to reach our planet, only to be eaten by a duck.

somehow i thought first contact would be a bit more....momentous.

and i also somehow hoped that any species clever and determined enough to journey through the vastness of the universe might somehow be able to recognize and avoid the perils presented by small, domestic waterfowl.

clearly, i was mistaken.

the joys of online dating; part the first

I hear the incessant grousing of the men-of-my-acquaintance, who, like me, have chosen to wade into the shallow, online end of the dating pool.

“I keep writing to all these women and not one of them bothers writing back? Why are women so rude?”

Well, women aren’t that rude, as I have told the men-of-my-acquaintance repeatedly: our inboxes are just flooded.

And largely by men like men-of-my-acquaintance.

Dating along these lines is rather like fishing for minnows: with a tightly woven net, you can scoop up a handful at a time. Sadly, they usually all need to be thrown back. Oh, occasionally you will find an angelfish that is worth keeping; but more often than not the dating pool is stocked with little more than clownfish and wide-mouth bass.

But, eternal optimist that I am, I get up each morning to check to see whether or not the man of my dreams (who naturally is also fishing in the unchlorinated wilds of the dating pool) has discovered our cosmic connection and emailed me ~ his Arwen, his Guinevere, his T’Pol.

I am not a discerning woman: I seek nothing more than a man with the looks of a Calvin Klein supermodel, the brains of Sir Stephen Hawking, the money of Mel Gibson, the sense of humour of Stephen Wright, the political convictions of Gandhi and the social conscience of Bono.

Granted, throughout my life I have only ever dated men with the looks of Stephen Wright, the brains of a Calvin Klein supermodel, and the personal wealth of Gandhi, but that matters little: he’s out there, I know it. And I have every confidence he is emailing me at this very moment!

So it is crucial that I wade through the one hundred and fifty emails that flood my inbox each and every day.

Well, the first forty are easy to delete: they are not in English.

Then I delete the eight or so that have come in with naked pictures of men I have never met (good heavens! I am NOT that kind of girl, Internet or no Internet!) …although that last one from Brazil may be a keeper....

Then I delete the nineteen offers of “no strings attached sex”; eight emails from men that are twenty years younger than me, fourteen emails from men old enough to be my grandfather, two from women and four from some online casino in Nevada that seems to want to date me.

Now comes time to sort through the emails from men with “questionable” online dating names like “spankmemommy006”, “stiff14U” and “badboy1988”. 1988???

Delete.

Whew! Down to 52.

Surprisingly, as I explore the world of online dating, I have discovered a few things about myself that I never knew: first and foremost, I am catnip when it comes to men in Central Egypt and Albania. Something about me drives these men wild, and they trip all over themselves emailing me, no doubt creating little human pyramids of desire as they scramble for whatever limited email access they have in order to curry my undeniably curryable favour.

Sadly, I do not speak Albanian, and my Arabic is weak.

Delete.

Secondly, I have discovered that I am charming, beautiful and sophisticated enough to attract royalty! At least, so it would appear from the fifteen or so Nigerian princes who contact me each day. One of them in particular was wonderfully sweet, telling me of his proud lineage and proposing marriage to me, promising to be a good, caring and Christian husband to me. Well, naturally I wrote back immediately and in a flurry of excitement. Imagine that, I thought; I would soon be married to royalty! I thanked him for his gracious offer and told him all about my family, the family that was waiting to welcome him with open arms: my six sisters and four brother, my mother and invalid grandparents, my cousins that had moved in with us after their family home had burned to the ground, and the four Tamil orphans I had adopted on a recent trip to Sri Lanka. With stars in my eyes I planned our future together, and asked him for only a small advance on the family fortune that we would soon share…

I am hoping he will write back soon.

I am also apparently intelligent and worldly enough to appeal to academics in Ghana and Togo (all of whom, oddly enough, seem to either have been once highly place in military or governmental positions, all of whom have millions of dollars they want to share with me); and yet I am still young and fresh enough to appeal to twenty-two year old men in Brazil who lick me for my frondshop, or something to that effect.

I had no idea how amazing I was until I began dating over the internet.

But I cannot escape one simple fact: all of these lovely men are far away and over the sea.

With a sigh and a quick glance at my wristwatch, I decide that I have time to wade through the fifty-two emails from men “within 100 miles of my postal code”…..

i am being stalked by aliens

and i do not mean the kind that have entered the country illegally: i mean the kind that have entered the planetary atmosphere illegally.

they are stalking me, monitoring my email and phone messages and abducting - for some nefarious purpose - any man that expresses an interest in dating me.

it happened with todd (not his real name - ed). i got a voicemail message from him one thursday afternoon, telling me what a great time he'd had on our last date, and that he would call me the following monday to make plans to "hook up again".

i haven't heard from him since.

then the same thing happened with kevin (might be his real name; then again, it might not). after a wonderful first date that included pastrami, william shatner impressions and a pamphlet advertising radiation detectors, i got a lovely email from him saying that he'd had a great time, and would i like to catch a movie, maybe go browsing in indigo or watch a dvd? i replied that i'd really like that, and *POOF!*, he's disappeared....no doubt never to be heard from again.

i am convinced that in a millennium, in a massive cylindrical spaceship orbiting europa, a thousand or so men will spontaneously awaken to find themselves the victims of this nefarious alien abduction plot; and as they shake the woozy cobwebs from their cryogenically frozen minds, and puzzle over the anal probes (ok, the anal probes are pure conjecture, i know) they will start to figure out what it was that has happened to them.

i figure the conversation will run along these lines:

lewis (might or might not be his real name, who knows?): "hey, what happened? where am i? last thing i remember is trying to set up a second date with some chick named annie..."

gerhardt (oh please God don't let that be his real name): "ja, annie! in toronto? me too!"

at which point 996 other men will chime in with a muted yet ominous chorus of "me too"s!

at this point i think the aliens will have a serious problem on their hands....if they even have hands. see, the men they have abducted are the finest the planet earth has to offer, truly fine examples of human maleness.

how do i know?

because these aliens have not indiscriminately abducted every man i have gone out on a date with. no, i went to dinner recently with a man whose nose hair was so rampant and aggressive, i thought he might have been sporting an ingrown moustache.

the aliens did not take him.

then there was the radio dj with breath so hideous that it could knock buzzards out of trees. he is still around. i know - i listen to his show anyway. its a wonder the microphone doesn't melt.

no, these aliens are very discerning. they only abduct men with deliberate facial hair and breath that will not singe off one's eyebrows. and somehow, i have become the focal point of this nefarious (you really like that word, don't you? - ed) human culling exercise...

clearly, the men i am attracted to are in great danger..... and yet, i really DO want to date. and let’s face it: what other logical reason can there be for a man not wanting to date me? i have the one trait any not-too-picky man over forty is looking for.

i have a pulse.

and if he were half blind, with a crippling squint in a dim room on an overcast day, it could be said that i am not too hard on the eyes, either.

no, alien abduction is the only reasonable explanation.

the sense of responsibility is almost crushing: i have become the siren charybdis, luring hapless men to their doom at the hands of feckless - and let's face it, nefarious aliens...

so perhaps, for the safety of the human male, from now on i will wear a tinfoil hat on all dates (at least until i am sure that the men are safe, or that they have some noticeable irregularity that would make them unsuitable to these aliens' nefarious purposes). tinfoil hats are an excellent way to block alien thought waves (i am told by several acquaintances, all of whom, oddly enough, live in their parents' basement...), and can be styled in a number of attractive ways.

i figure that if, on a date, we go for pizza, i can make a tinfoil ball cap. if we go for moroccan, perhaps a stylish silver fez...

after all, i don't want to stand out or anything....