Adventures in Higher Adventure: The Dating Game

By Steve Aubrey

The dating scene.

It seems to be the complaint of the month. You can feel the frustration in the air. Everyone seems to wants a date for Friday night and no one seems to be getting one. Even that sketchy guy who always steals huge handfuls of condoms from the Health Center is looking pretty glum. You can tell he's only shoving the condoms into his pocket out of habit because he's taking the non-lubricated ones now. The most anyone hopes for these days is a random hook-up. From what I've observed, the random hook-up consists of humping everything in sight under the guise of dancing until something responds to your pelvic thrusts. It's kind of sad.

And to make the dating scene at Wesleyan even worse, there's no WesMatch anymore. Granted, WesMatch was more of a procrastination tool than anything else, but hey, it instilled hope. I can remember everybody sitting in their rooms unabashedly lying on their profiles in order to seem cooler than they actually were. In WesMatch world I was a muscled stud with the libido of a horny jackrabbit. Everyone was. Which was kind of cool, but when the person you matched 95% with turned out to be an asthmatic albino hunchback with a tendency to drool, you were always thrown a bit. But looking back, I suppose Quasimodo is better than nothing.

But now I face the barren wasteland of my love life without the crutch of WesMatch. You can only talk into your box fan and pretend you're Darth Vader for so long before it gets old. It's at that point you decide you need to either get a date or write a screenplay. (Speaking of screenplays: The Independent Student Film Production Co-op is looking for a 5-10 minute screenplay to produce in the spring. Deadline is Nov. 1. Submit or kill a hobo. See if I'm kidding. Thus ends the shameless plug.) Since I'm largely illiterate and have to dictate my column to a monkey in a fez who knows how to type, I decided to get a date. But romantically, things have been especially hard for me this semester. When I left for school this summer I had to leave behind my girlfriend Petunia. She was everything I could ask for: warm, caring, intelligent, four-legged. But the police say I'm no longer welcome within 100 meters of that farm anymore. And I'll be honest: I still haven't gotten over her.

It's not that I haven't tried already. But watching lesbian porn on your laptop with the gay guy next door isn't as therapeutic as I hoped. So I've decided it is time to get back into the field. I can derive only so much sexual satisfaction from paying my RA to give me a frontal-wedgie every night before I go to bed. I mean, I like it and all, but I'm not sure I was ready for a serious wedgie relationship. I'm young and virile. In five years I'll be bald and overweight and no one will want to give me frontal-wedgies, even if I do pay them. I can't spend these pre-obese years stuck in some one-sided relationship dependent on wedgies.

In preparation of the possibility of ever getting a date, I decided I should write down a few thoughts on index cards. Mostly witty banter, the sort of small talk I'd make on a date to keep the girl laughing. I think it's important to be prepared and to know what you're going to say. The last time I tried to wing it, the date ended with me lecturing my date on cladistics and the role of the monotreme in evolutionary theory. So in preparation I consulted with the Queen of Wit, Liz Jones. She babbled on for quite a while and I had to subdue her by attacking her with my Glo-Worm, but the collaboration was fairly productive. Thanks to her I think I have some solid material. For instance:

Toe Socks.

They do make your feet feel more like your hands but I think it is unnatural to have fabric between your toes.You sweat profusely, and who wants that? And really, who is going to see your toes? Unless you are wearing sandals with your toe socks, in which case you are already a nerd. I suppose you could go up to people and tell them that you're wearing toe socks, but trust me, they won't give a damn. I have tried this approach and been left feeling broken and alone. Then I remember I have toe socks and I felt better. It's a vicious cycle really. They're like drugs. You think they're going to make you look cool, but really, they're just hurting you.

If my index cards don't work I always have my charming eccentricities. Like how I only eat the top of muffins because I'm allergic to the bottoms. This isn't actually true but it should be. What's cuter to a college girl than a guy allergic to muffin bottoms? Well, maybe a penguin in a tuxedo, but there aren't too many of those in Middletown. Or maybe a monkey riding a unicycle. Well, okay, maybe there are a few things cuter than a guy allergic to muffin tops, but not many.

The only hitch in this plan so far has been getting a date. My pathological fear of women and halogen light bulbs aside, I don't see why. So maybe I can't talk to girls or be in their presence without sweating profusely and compulsively passing gas. I'll admit that's a bit of a problem, but should it prevent me from getting a date? I don't think so. But every time I get near a girl to ask her out they just scream and call me a stalker. Now I ask you, does following a girl everywhere she goes, calling her at odd hours of the night breathing heavily into the phone, and hiding in the trees near her dorm with binoculars to watch her sleep through her window make someone a stalker? Where I'm from, they call that persistence.

But I wondered if I was doing something wrong, so I consulted my hallmates. Maybe they were right in saying that shoving bananas down my pants in the Campus Center isn't the best way to get noticed by girls, but I still think they were a bit harsh to me. The word “psychopath” is just a bit drastic, don't you think? Granted, I didn't help my case any by threatening to strangle them all with a plastic straw afterwards, but hey, they made me angry. But then I got to thinking.

So maybe I don't have the best social skills. Maybe my table manners are atrocious. Maybe I don't believe in personal hygiene and have lice, again. Maybe I'm going to end up dying old and utterly alone on a dirty street corner in the middle of a dark winter night without anyone ever noticing or caring about my death. You know what? That's who I am. And I've accepted that. I mean, just the other day I treated myself and picked up a really nice scarf. It has little blue snowflakes on it. It should look great on me when they pry my cold dead body off the frozen street corner.

Because sometimes it's the little things in life that make me happy.