I've had several people tell me that I should use a certain online dating site. Then last month I got to meet and have dinner with Heather's little sister. She gave me some really great pointers for online dating. She told me that I needed to be really aggressive in screening my messages and to not waste a lot of time messaging someone back and forth. She said it's better to bite the bullet and just meet face to face as soon as possible. This advice made sense to me. One of my problems was that I'd feel bad for not responding to every single message even when I was not interested. My problem is that I'm too nice. So with all of this new information and advice I set up a profile. And actually...this time around has not been as annoying. One thing I have noticed is that I am very attractive to the 50 and over crowd and the "20" something crowd. Also, I get a lot of messages from married men. I put 20 in quotes because one kid that emailed me (rather aggressively) looked to be no more than 17. I told him I wasn't into statutory rape. So when you edit out the 50 and over and the trying to be 20 somethings, I am left with a very narrow field. Turns out that people my age are in a relationship or just so freshly out of a relationship that they are not ready for online dating. So, we're talking about a really narrow field.

There are still some concerns or problems or I'm not sure of the word to use here. I already kind of had an account with this online dating site that was started a long time ago when I did one of those silly Harry Potter quizzes that everyone was doing at the time and posting to their blogs. As a result, my username is associated with this blog. This shouldn't be a big deal because anyone with any brain cells can find my blog and figure out who I am. I am not a woman of mystery. But I am concerned about what they'll find when they do come over here and start reading. I am concerned about editing myself. I feel like I already stick to a good rule of editing the content of my entries. If you don't have anything nice to say, it's best to just say nothing at all. Though I don't have anything mean to say about some of my encounters, I worry that if I talk about anything that happens, they might be offended. Heaven forbid I offend anyone.

Another thing that is a little awkward is that I have a number of good good friends that just happen to be male. I always feel the need to explain my relationships. The other day I was on a date and my phone was sitting out on the table when Chad decided to send me half a dozen texts. The screen of my phone lit up with Chad, Chad, Chad, Chad. I tried to laugh it off. "Oh, that's my friend Chad. We met on the internet." When you say that out loud it sounds ridiculous and then any further explanation of Chad just gets even more ridiculous. It's Chad, aka birdpony. Enough said. He told me to use him as an excuse to get out of things, tell them he's my special needs older brother. Really that's not far from the truth.