I look around the world and see that only stupid people are breeding

I am an arrogant bastard*. I tend to think of myself as smarter than most people. While there are those who would argue that this is hardly true, it's true in my mind, and that's all that matters to me. As is the case with most arrogant bastards, I have a bunch of indicators that allow me to know how much smarter I am than everyone else. Some of these are obvious, some less so. The list of indicators is long, and I won't go into all of them here, but I thought I'd share some of the most obvious ones.

I am smarter than you . . .

. . . if you spell the word definitely wrong (e.g., definately).

. . . if you misuse words in your writing (e.g., waste instead of waist).

. . . if you think to, too and two are interchangeable (same thing goes for there, their and they're).

. . . if you write that you "must of" done something wrong (instead of must have).

. . . if you use the following substitutions in your emails**: da instead of the, 2 instead of to, u instead of you, etc.

. . . if you say "liberry"*** instead of library.

Maybe I should have been an English teacher.

Also, whether it's fair or not, I apply a double standard****. I am much more likely to let some of these slide if you're someone that I like as opposed to someone I don't, or if you're a friend or casual acquaintance instead of someone I'm in a relationship with. I haven't kept it a secret that I'm a shallow person. A woman has to be attractive to pique my interest, but believe it or not, good looks alone aren't enough to keep me interested. That's where sense of humor and intellect come in.






*Anyone who doesn't believe me should go talk to my ex-wife. She'll tell you the same.

**It's one thing to do it in text messages, and another if you do it in emails. If you use them in text messages I'll only be mildly annoyed, but can understand if you think it saves you that much effort (even though it doesn't).

***See?


****Especially if I'm the one that makes the mistake, in which case I'm still smarter than you.

I'm lonely, but I ain't that lonely yet

Ex-wife: I think you should date my biology teacher.

Me: You do huh?

Ex-wife: Yeah, I do. She's not that pretty, but she's well educated and seems to be really cool. She has a lisp, but you don't even notice it after a while.

Me: Um. I'm pretty shallow. Plus, she lives in Salt Lake City so I don't really see how that would work out.

Ex-wife: I just thought that you'd have a lot in common because you're interested in the same subject. I said she was smart, but she's not arrogant.

Me: But I am, remember? I heard that from you for years.


I don't know why everyone is suddenly feeling the need to find love for me (I mean, obviously I'm incapable of doing it myself, but still). I'm finding it to be a little annoying. Strike that. Make that QUITE annoying. I would like to take this time to add another rule to who I will consider dating.

New Rule: NO LISPS!!!

What it takes to wanna be a man

I got a letter from my sister-in-law the other day. She said that she and one of her neighbors were looking through some pictures and there were a few of me. Her neighbor asked if it would be alright if she wrote me a letter. She and my brother decided that "it wouldn't hurt" and that I "might like a pen pal." In other words, they're trying to set me up with this girl.

There was a letter from the girl enclosed. She is a year younger than me and has three kids. She likes to "read, garden, fish, hike, camp, and would really like to go hunting someday." She then told me about how much she likes to fish, can bait her own hook, clean and filet the fish, but never learned how to cook them. That's great and all, but personally I think those are talents that she should share with someone who fishes with bait.

(You see, I tend to be a bit of an elitist, and by that I mean I'm an arrogant prick, and by that I mean I'm better than everyone else. I enjoy flyfishing , but that's about it. Fishing with anything else is boring, and fishing with live bait seems a bit like cheating. So in summary, flyfishing = high class, bait fishing = white trash, I = awesome. Anyway, on with the story.)

At the end of the girl's letter she told me that she had enclosed some pictures of herself and that she hoped I liked what I saw. Sure enough, there were three pictures in the envelope, but I didn't exactly like what I saw.

I think I'm going to have to explain my rules for dating to my brother. Also, I have to add one more rule to the list - In order to consider dating someone, I must be able to look at a picture of them without recoiling in horror while fighting the urge to vomit.

You wait for something that'll make the waiting worth the wait

It's been a long time since I've been on a first date with someone. Those of you who know me might think it's been a little too long, but I'm going to have to say that I'm ok just having an occasional lunch with the girl I have a huge crush on (even when it ends with me catching a cold from her). Well, at least I'm ok with it for now.

Part of the reason for my lack of dating is because I don't meet a lot of new people. The other part is that I can usually tell pretty quickly whether someone meets enough of my requirements to pique my interest. Usually they don't. But, even when they do, it's a rare occasion when they also happen to be available.

So why am I bringing this up? It's because of this story. It's not a story of my own. It's the story of a friend of mine who recently went to dinner with his girlfriend and ended up at a table where they could observe an obvious first date. He said it was kind of funny watching each of them try to impress the other, and the general awkwardness of it all. Naturally, this prompted my friend and his girlfriend to reminisce about their first date. (For some reason couples seem to like to do that. Isn't it cute?)

The following is what I can remember of the conversation as he told it to me:

Her: I remember laughing a lot. In fact, I was probably laughing a little too much. I was thinking that what you'd said was funny, but not funny enough to have me laughing that hard.
Him: Aw, you were trying to impress me, weren't you?
Her: Well, my boobs shake when I laugh, so I was probably trying to get you to notice that.
Him: I remember that you had a low cut shirt on that night.
Her: Really? Because I wore it, but I didn't catch you looking down even once.
Him: I make a conscious effort not to do that when I'm with a woman.
Her: I was impressed, but I was also a little disappointed.

I say don't you know. You say you don't know. I say take me out

From time to time someone will ask me about the 'type' of girl I tend to be interested in. I used to think that I didn't have a certain 'type,' but one day I was telling someone my list of the five best looking actresses and realized that they all kind of looked the same. I guess that means I have a 'type' after all.

I don't really ask for much. A girl just has to be smart, funny, attractive and thin (those last two generally go hand in hand). Oh, and she has to like the same music, movies and t.v. shows as me. She also can't have children, nor want them, yet must be willing to accept that I have three (does that make me a hypocrite? of course. do I care? not really). She must also be ok with the fact that I don't want to re-marry. I already did that one time too many. And one last thing, she has to be available, and interested in me. Therein lies the dilemma, and is the reason why I've come to terms with the fact that I will remain single for quite some time.

Anyway, back to the part about skinny girls. A lot of my friends think that I like girls who are way too skinny. I remember pointing out one girl that I thought was cute to one of my friends, and all he said was, "That chick needs a hamburger."

A little while ago I was looking at a girl while I was having dinner with a few of my friends (hey, I'm well on my way to being a dirty old man, it's what we do). One of my friends said that the girl I was looking at was way too skinny for him.

Him: You know, curves are ok on a girl. It gives you something to grab onto.
Another Friend: He likes girls that make his penis look big in comparison.

I guess that's one more thing to add to the list.

Hey everybody, where did Mary go?

I don't have any good stories to tell, so I'm stealing this idea from someone else, but it's ok, because I'm tayloring it to reflect my own shallow personality instead of his. Besides, I'm sure that I'm not the only person who thinks this way. In fact, I'd be willing to bet that everyone has a list like this, whether they know it or not.

On with it you say?

Fine.

There are certain names for members of the opposite sex that I tend to associate with attractiveness. The corollary to that is that there are also names that I tend to associate with unattractiveness. There's no doubt that some of this comes from past associations, such as girls I thought were cute when I was in high school, but there are others that I can't explain, and, if I hear someone mention something about a girl I don't know that has one of those names, I automatically assume that she must be pretty. Of course that doesn't always end up being the case, but there's the association just the same.

So anyway, here's my list of cute girl names. It's not all inclusive (obviously), and I've tried to leave off names of friends and family members (after all, I wouldn't want anyone to feel bad if their name got left off the 'hot list' or worse, had it included on the 'not-so-hot list,' plus, if it were one of my sister's names then someone could say I think my sister's hot, and that would just be gross).

Attractive	Unattractive
Tiffany	Becky
Leslie	Susan
Amy	Tara
Christine	Tabatha

Anyway, you get my point. I could keep going, but I actually misplaced the list that I had made up for this post, as you may have guessed once you read the last name in the unattractive list. I've never actually known a Tabatha, but she'd probably have warts on her nose along with other witch-like characters.

I spent an hour with you, should I want anything else?

Yesterday a friend of mine and I were talking about the waitresses at one of our favorite places to hang out. He started asking which one I would choose if I had to choose between two. The same girl won every combination that he threw at me, although the last one would have been a tough decision if it was a real one I had to make. In fact, I had to get him to clarify what we were choosing for:

Me: "Is this for a lasting relationship or just a roll in the hay?"
Him: "Either. No wait, just a roll in the hay."
Me: "In that case she still wins the last match up because they both have great bodies, but she has the cuter face."
Him: "I have to agree with you on that. But, the other night she said something and it sounded like she's already starting to develop that smoker's voice. It kind of gave me the heebie-jeebies." Me: "Ooooh, I hear those are the worst kind of jeebies you can get."

For the record, if it was a for a long term relationship (and a real choice) I'd go with the other girl because she has the better personality.

When you wake you shall find all the pretty little horses

Last weekend, on the night I ended up not going home, one of my friends kept trying to get me and a few of my other friends to go over and hit on some girls that were sitting at a table across the room from us.

Her: "Why don't you guys go over there and talk to those girls?"
Me: "Because there aren't any girls over there that I'd want anything to do with."
Her: "What's wrong with them?"
Me: "Nothing, it's just that none of them are hot."
Her: "What's your definition of hot?"
Me: "I'll let you know if I see it."

I wasn't the only one with this opinion. None of my other friends wanted anything to do with them either. There was one guy I work with (I'm hesitant to call him a friend) who figured it must just be that we were too shy, so when one of the girls walked by us on her way to the bathroom he started hatching a master plan for us.

Him: "I'm going to introduce myself to this girl when she comes back out of the restroom. How would you like me to introduce you guys to her? "

One friend: "Tell her that we're all hung like horses."

When she came back out he did as he said. He stopped her, introduced himself, then introduced us:

"These guys are all graduate students. They're really nice guys, they're intelligent, funny, and they're all hung like horses."

Let's just say that sometimes things that are meant to scare people away don't quite do the trick. This girl ended up sticking around and talking with us until the time when I left to go to my friend's house. At one point she left to go grab a drink, and the guy who had introduced himself to her told us that we were making him look bad because we weren't wooing her with all our best stories.

My friend: "Maybe that's because a) none of us were interested in this girl or her friends, and b) we didn't want you to bring her over here and introduce us in the first place."

My question is, how come this kind of thing would never work on a hot girl?

Maybe I'm just damaged goods, and baby you're a babe in the woods

Given the nature of what I do, and the fact that I have little social life outside of the people I work and/or go to school with, most of the new people I meet are a bit younger than me. It's not a problem as far as just hanging out with people goes. I got over the rule that you can only hang out with people in your same age group in high school. If I only would have been able to hang out with kids in my class, I would have been going to rodeos all the time and hanging out with cowboys who had belt buckles the size of their grandma's turkey platter. Luckily I had other options. However, the age difference is getting to be big enough that it's something to think about when considering a relationship that is more than friends.

My last girlfriend was 7 years younger than me, which wasn't a big deal, but I thought it was at first. It's one of the reasons that I didn't dare ask her out once I started getting a crush on her. In fact, I probably never would have if she hadn't said something about it first. After we broke up there was another girl who was acting quite interested in me, but she was even younger, and while nothing ever developed with that, it forced me to think of where I need to make the cutoff. How young can a girl be and have me still consider getting into a relationship with her? After some deliberation I came up with the following rule: If a girl is closer to my daughter's age than she is to mine, then I couldn't do it without feeling like a creep.

I was talking to my brother about this a week or so ago and told him about my rule. He said, "That's fine for now, but at some point you should be allowed to get rid of that rule. Once your daughter gets old enough."

I said, "You're right. I think the rule should go away as soon as she turns 18. Then I can date her friends."