Finding 40 Dates: Part Two - Procrastinating

What is Borneo?

One evening last week I made myself a hot chocolate and settled down to write letters to strange internet men. Just as background noise, I turned on an episode of Jeopardy. Since you ask, most of the storage space on my PVR is taken up with episodes of Jeopardy, which I love beyond reason and prefer to watch sporadically and only with people who are comfortable with me shouting out my responses (in full question format) which vary from exactly correct to wickedly profane to utter nonsense. I tend to skip the interview bits where you cringe at just how inane super smart people can be. But it’s good to have on in the background while puttering around. I like to think I pick up some really good bits of trivia just from ambient listening. This is important to my life because you never know when you might need to know where Borneo is.


I fired up my laptop, and while it was starting I flipped through a cookbook for cupcake recipe ideas. I was getting ready to participate in a cupcake bakeoff and would need to come up with something brilliant to topple the reigning bakeoff champ. (Remember that bit about going all-out? Yeah, it’s how I roll.) Some of the recipes involved making ganache, which was new to me. To make ganache, you pour heated cream over chopped chocolate. The kind of cream that my recipe book called for was “heavy cream” though I’d never heard of that before. Luckily my computer had booted up, so I was able to look up the difference between heavy cream and, say, whipping cream. The fat content of heavy cream is 36-40% whereas whipping cream contains 35% fat. Who knew!? If it comes up in the double jeopardy round, I’m gonna be all over it.

An email notification reminded me that I was supposed to be writing replies to any and all literate potential dates. I read some new ones (a few that just said “Hi” and one scarily thorough 2 pager) and refreshed my memory by re-skimming the profiles of the ones who made the cut. I came to the conclusion that men who are interested in me are (generally speaking) categorically unattractive night owls with alopecia. Nevertheless, I need dates for Lent. I took a composing breath, almost unconsciously shouted “Who is Lehane?” at a recording of Alex Trebek, and hit the reply button. At this point, my computer gave up. A sign?

Earlier that week we had some fine cable gentlemen come to our office to fix something internetty. While it was down, the newest office intern revealed a Google Chrome game involving a dinosaur that pops up when the internet isn’t working. Kids these days.

Me as a Jeopardy contestant.
An extremely necessary use of my time.

So when I hit ‘reply’ and the whole online dating conundrum disappeared to be replaced with a low-tech, offline dinosaur game that I’d heard the cool kids talking about, I had to try it out (instead of restarting my laptop and the modem and whatnot). It’s not procrastinating. It’s a game. Right?

It took a while for me to get bored of it. By that time, I was on a whole new episode of Jeopardy and the contestants were terrible. Then I realized they’re just lovely geeks trying their best and I was probably just hungry. I restarted my computer and went to make myself a snack. While figuring out what I wanted to eat, I made a list of cupcake ingredients I would need for a few different potential recipes so that I could see what I already have in my kitchen and thus know what I would need to buy tomorrow. I made popcorn, wrote lists, yelled at Trebek, turned on some Motown, forgot all about making dates and went to bed.

I think next time I'm online I should amended my profile to include that my ideal man is patient. Or at least, he should try to be. I’m sure I’ll get around to making 40 dates very shortly thereafter.

Have you ever noticed how writing a blog is practically the same thing as writing awkward introductory letters to strangers? Me neither.