It is good comedy that OKCupid included this fellow in my "people you might like" listing on the front page.

It's still somehow less weird than my boss, who made an appearance on my homepage last week.

Sometimes it takes all my emotional fortitude to resist emailing people to correct them about inaccuracies in their profiles. I would be a jerk to do so uninvited, but -man- sometimes I really want to.

I'm not talking spelling and grammar here, incoherency will turn me off but I don't feel a need to correct it. Misused words, misquotes of aphorisms and misattributed quotes, incorrect titles for books and movies, these are the things that make me crazy.

This is like back when Napster was hip, and there were hundreds of copies of "Tainted Love" floating around, attributed to Depeche Mode. Man, that bugged me.

First world problems.

The internet needs a Sadie Hawkins Dance, where the women paw through quickmatch and quiver and their match list and send out carefully crafted emails to guys, and then complain about never getting a response.

The guys should be guarded and cautious, they should presume sleaziness or ill intent on the part of most women, they should criticize spelling errors. They should be inundated with messages, many of them from women who -clearly- didn't read their profile.

We should all check out the landscape on the other side of the fence.

I want an opt out function for being notified when someone adds me to their favorites. This is worse than the woo/wink for hard to interpret psuedo-contact.

If you just wanted to hold the profile to contact later, or just wanted my journal to come up in your favorites list, you could have opted not to inform me that you were saving me. Instead, you clicked the button that sends me a message, notifying me that I've been saved, which seems unavoidably like a request.

BUT FOR WHAT?

I feel this itchy sensation like I'm somehow being maneuvered into making first contact with a person (I know I'm under no obligation to do so, but it's still the gut response I have) and that just results in an annoyed me who is less likely to make contact.

So, sorry random strangers who have added me to their favorites over the last couple of days, you get to hear about it in my journal when it probably never occurred to you that your actions might annoy a person. But now you know.

I have such awesome men around, both friends and lovers, but on the girl front it is just not looking good. Changes in my social scene have resulted in many of my women friends dropping out of my life, and now I'm up to my ears in boys.

I have, to be fair, always been one of those women with a preference for the company of men in general, but most of my really close talk-to-each-other-all-the-time-tell-each-other-everything friends have been women. I've got friends who I'm that close to now, and even a female friend who is that close who, due to circumstances I'm just not seeing that often at the moment, but my day-to-day life has a serious lack of the girly in it.

But as many, many men on this site have observed, it's hard to meet women! It's even harder to meet the women who I jive with really well. I live in the twilight between girly and butch that seems uncharted for most women. It's hard to find girls who will look down their noses with me at Confessions of a Shopaholic, but still think an evening watching Newsies* sounds like an awesome time.

My friendships with men are wonderful and meaningful and I wouldn't trade them for anything, but there are conversations with women that do not happen with men, there is giggling, there is understanding of the value of bad dance movies, there is going clothes shopping and hating it and hating fashion but going anyway. I need more girls in my life.

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*Yes, that's right, I like Newsies.

Nota Bene: Anyone responding to this by saying I'm being sexist or anything equivalent will be summarily catapulted to elsewhere.

Hiring is funny stuff. My org just posted a couple of positions on Craigslist and we've been watching the wackiness flow. My favorite cover letter so far:

"I am pleased to respond to the position of Event Project Manager at [NAME REDACTED[. I meet or exceed all of your requirements."

All of my emails on OKCupid are going to be ended with "I meet or exceed all of your requirements" from now on.

It's a little bit wrong how much I enjoy reading my own profile.

End of line.

I mean, not generally, but at the moment. I need more web designer friends, and fewer sysadmin friends. I need a website set up, and have nowhere to turn! If my problem were a server or a network, I'd be set.

I could do it myself, but I am both lazy and (in this arena) untalented.

Running WTF reports with people is always illuminating. I'm impressed by how honest people are about traits I would consider embarrassing (racism, sexism, heterocentrism, plain old meanness). A particular question that frequently pops up as a point of disagreement for me with people I have otherwise high match scores with is: "Would the world be a better place if people with low IQs were not allowed to reproduce?"

I am totally amazed by how many people say yes to this question. Sufficiently amazed that my kneejerk reaction is always to assume that they didn't fully understand its meaning. I understand believing that the world would be a better place if there were fewer people who were stupid (though I'm not sure that it's true), but I simply cannot comprehend the belief that it would be a good idea to prevent people from reproducing based on something as poorly understood as human intelligence.

Reproductive rights are important to me, and that means both the right to choose not to have a child, and the right to choose to have one. It is one of the things I think should be a fundamental right of humanity, and to rob someone of it because you don't think they're smart enough is absolutely appalling to me.

I think most people don't really consider the question that fully, at least I certainly hope so. I think they look at it and think, "man, I wish there were less stupid people in the world" and say yes, without really considering what it means to refuse someone the right to reproduce.

In response to All right, that's it by Diacritic:

I have been on this site for ages now and I'm sick of sending oute-mails and not getting a response. How impolite is that? Ifsomeone came up to you in the street and said, "hello!", you'drespond, right? But no, the same message on this site gets nothingagain and again...

It has come to my attention that OkCupid is in need of certain time-saving devices that I may be able to provide. There are some journal and forum entries that could be standardized for greater ease of use. As an extremely unprofessional writer, I feel I can be of service in this arena, so if you have a complaint to make, please consider some of Ipsafictura's Patented All-Complaining Devices (Patent Pending). I hope they will be of use.

Thank you Diacritic for the inspiration!

Post 1
"Why do all women/men [DELETE INAPPROPRIATE GENDER] want ___________? I think I have a lot of ________ to offer, and women/men say that they really want _________, but I look around and everyone is going for the guy/girl with the __________ or the fast _________, or the huge ____________. Can't a ______, __________ guy/girl find a nice honest woman/man who just wants a little __________?"

Post 2
"Why do I see so many women/men complaining about _________ on this site? ________ is so not a big deal, and if it is, couldn't you just ___________ it? If you think ____________ is a big deal, you should see what it's like when someone ___________ all over your ___________ and leaves you with nothing but _____________. See how you like being stuck with the _________, then you'll really be complaining. I just think you're all spoiled."

Post 3
"Why do women/men always ___________ when I _________? I'm not trying to _____________ or make anyone ____________, but people always react as though I'm the _______________. Isn't this a dating site? I don't get why so many people are uptight about a little __________. I mean, jeez people! Why don't you all just pull your ___________ out of your ________ and get over yourself? I'm a really nice guy/girl!"

Post 4
"Why won't women/men just ___________? I'm just a nice guy/girl who wants some ___________ and a little __________ and I can't find someone who is willing to ___________ a little ________ to/with me. I just don't think it's fair that all these jerks/bitches on this site should have all the ________ when I'm a really great person and I can't get a single person to _________ me or even _________ me. Thanks a lot, OKCupid!"

Now we just need to get some Madlibs going.