Dating as a hobby

I have been in a bit of a cynical place recently. I counted it up and my record is 0.5 - 5 with dates, roughly. My ex-boyfriend is the 0.5; I didn't feel it was fair to give him a whole 1 since I already knew him, but the experience was not a total loss... Remember Bernardo, the guy I met speed dating? Well he never called me after we had coffee. I guess Cosmo magazine was right -- you do have to makeout with the guy on the first date to get him to call you back.

Dating is a serious hobby if you really want to invest yourself wholeheartedly. It is kind of like job searching: if you are not careful, you can make the task of dating a job in itself. I think I was responsible of doing that recently. Last night I realized I had been acting mopy and dragging my feet for no reason. "Elaine*, I need to stop feeling bad about myself and do something for others. The holiday season is a perfect time for that! Lets sign up for some volunteer activities," I said.

"Yes! I'm down," she said while doing homework at the kitchen table.

"Me, too!" yelled Andi* from her bedroom. I googled "holiday volunteering NYC" and clicked the first page that came up. "Help elderly Jewish people prepare for Hanukkah by aiding in their shopping and delivering food."

"Done -- I'm signing us up to help these old Jewish people. I'm sure they will be really cute," I said, filling in the contact information.

"I'm not going to get lots of emails from this charity, am I?" Elaine asked.

"No...but, you know who would love to get these emails?? The Lawyer from Long Island!!" I said excitedly. "We forgot to start signing him up for spam!"

"Perfect! Oh, wait, this is going to be bad for the charity because then he won't show up. We need to sign him up for magazines and stuff," Elaine said.

"There was some thing my boyfriend could never get off of, like a gym membership, or something. Or you could just sign him up for all the spam in your gmail," Andi said.

I searched around and subsequently came up with TVguide SOAP daily updates, Men's Health magazine, South Beach Diet daily updates (you CAN make it to your goal of 200lbs!), and my favorite, brides.com with his upcoming wedding day of 2/14/09. He will get daily reminders and saving tips - yes! The more I thought about it, this is probably bad karma, but it was his mistake to stalker style g-chat me. I'll also make up my karma with my holiday volunteering.