relationships and then some

I finished the ritual I perform every four hours: 2 pumps of saline spray into each nostril, toss back 2.5 Tablespoon of Robitussin, slather my neck and chest with Vick’s Vapor Rub, a 4oz. cup of Airborne, and shove simultaneously 1000mg of Vitamin C and 450 mg of Echinacea into my throat. I look like a 6 yr old. My scent; a combination of mint and cherry flavored cough syrup, snot dribbling down my nose, and whimpers of how much I want my mommy right now.

Yes, I am still sick. My sinus infection cleared up only to be replaced with a horrible chest cold from walking home that one night in the freezing cold sans hat and scarf. In its place a hacking “unproductive” (aka no phlegm, and God how much I fucking love phlegm and wish for it right now) cough, heavy chest, and thoughts racing through my mind that I am about to have a serious asthma attack.

Whenever I get sick and paranoid like this, I need to be around people—someone to take care of me, their presence to remind me if I do go into an asthmatic fit someone will be there to call the police or drive my sorry ass to a hospital. But I’ve come to realize that my relationships with my friends have changed and no longer can I call them up at 2am to come over and sit by my side. To invite them out for a beer yes, but to take care of me, not so much.

Other priorities have come into their life: jobs, relationships that provide sex, a desire not to be nocturnal…and it’s acceptable that the friendships have evolved. And it’s acceptable if you don’t notice this evolution because you are one of those lucky people who are perpetually in relationships and have the luxury to barter expedited intimacy via sex for chicken soup and companionship when you are sick.

So perhaps it’s the combination of being sick and not having anyone to take care of me at 2am and the prospect of a new year on the horizon with promise, but I’ve crawled back to online dating, committed to find a decent lady.

And yes please remind me there is always something wrong with them, and there are no decent women on online dating and the decent ones have issues.

So with friends in NYC still happily engaged in productive relationships, I am back trolling the depths of mediocrity called match.com. The beauty of internet dating, I recently learned, is this feature called the ‘keyword’ search. Have a hand fetish? Enter that term in and see all the ads that mention hands. You see, I have a British fetish, I love the accent and women who are my polar opposite: repressed, refined and have a sarcastic sense of humor. So I’ve keyworded (it is now a word in my book) match.com for Brit, British, England, Englishwoman, etc.  I stumbled upon this one lady, who has posted an ad on match and eharmony. Same dorky smiling face, similar rambling of why she wants a girlfriend…and I was thinking to myself, isn’t that slightly desperate? What must be her fatal flaw if she is posting on match AND eharmony?

Through some faultless CIA style investigation, I found out that her profile is fake.

And I am now convinced that 85% of match.com profiles are fake.