Sometimes I like to reminisce about the good old days, when people went out together on horrible and humiliating blind dates set up by their well-meaning but idiotic friends instead of going out on horrible and humiliating blind dates set up by Craig from Craigslist.

            One time some friends of mine set me up on a blind date with this fellow, and I knew right away I didn’t really like him, and  I felt really bad about not really liking him, but what  could I do about it? I don’t like okra either.  He had a 20-disc CD-changer in the trunk of his car and he was really proud of it since it was a pretty impressive thing at the time, but I wasn’t impressed because pretty much every CD in it was Jethro Tull and I hate Jethro Tull because the music literally gives me a stomach cramp. I think it’s because of all those rockin’ folk-out flute solos.  And to change the CDs he had to pull his car over on the freeway and get in the trunk and dig around in this massive box of discs to try to find something else that I might like.  But there was nothing in that box but Billy Ocean and Glenn Frey and Steve Winwood and Phil Collins and other nauseating classics, and since I was all out of Rolaids, we just had to turn the music off.  I naturally found all this effort to try to please me, a not especially attractive or charming blind date, a bit suspicious so I used the opportunity to inspect the trunk of his car for odd items like chain saws and bits of plastic sheeting. He was clean.

            He actually seemed like an OK person, a pretty nice guy, even. He was a trained pastry chef which was cool and he was also pretty heavy, which was also cool, because that meant the pastries were edible. He was a little bit heavier than I might have preferred, like maybe 90 or 100 pounds too much, but since I'm not the skinniest branch on the Olive Oyl tree myself, it wasn’t really a big deal. But then I started wondering what my friends were thinking when they set us up.  We didn’t really have that much in common, except for that one thing.  It's like they were thinking, "Well, he's fat  . . . she's fat . . . why wouldn’t they get along?  They can sit around all night watching the Food Network, cooking and eating and playing the bongo on their big, fat bellies. And we know they won’t breed, because they’re too fat to have sex!"

            After we had squeezed our fat selves into his car, and turned off the 20-disc CD-Music-Box-of-Misery, we decided to go to the movies, and since this was probably 1991, we went to see a nice, romantic comedy like Star Trek 4 or 6 or 8. I paid for the tickets, and he paid for the snacks, and we got a couple of ushers to help us get to our seats with all our food and then we settled in to watch the show. The movie had barely started when he leaned over to me and said, "Can I put my hand on your knee?" I told him, no, but this type of question is the linguistic equivalent of big, flappy fart.  It starts out bad, and the longer you sit next to it, the worse it gets.  But then later, apparently completely undeterred by the "knee incident"  and I guess assuming that by now I'd been whipped into some kind of erotic frenzy by the seductive antics of Leonard Nimoy, he leaned over again and asked, "Can I give you a kiss?" And I said, again, holding my nose, “No." And he said, "Well, why not?"

            Why not?! What do you want, a graph?

            "As you can see here from this chart of the date, where the x-axis equals the duration of the date, and the y-axis is the level of my attraction to you and you can see that a zero would be about equal to say,  Eugene Levy, and a hundred might be, say Russell Crowe,  and wherein you would hope to see the slope of the graph at maybe a 55 or 60,  or at least remaining in the positive integers, what we have instead here is a negative slope, and you would be hanging out here in this region which mathematicians like to call,  “the area under the curve."

            Since then I’ve had a couple more encounters with the type of guy I call the “Rejection Rejecter” who deals with the disappointment of not getting laid by turning the otherwise unambiguous, “I do not want to have sex with you because I find you the sexual equivalent of creamed spinach” into an exercise in semantics. All I can say to these fellows is that if you have to ask, maybe you'd better not.