don't worry. i'm keeping my day job.

So, I've had the honor of being asked to consult on a couple of my friends' online dating profiles. It's a dubious compliment, if you think about it. I mean, apparently my rapier wit (thanks, Bunny - and freaking blog already) makes such work easy for me. At the same time those friends are asking me because I've been doing the online dating thing for the past 15 months and this makes me an expert.

Let's be clear about this matter - being an expert online dater is nothing to be proud of. (Neither is ending a sentence in a dangling participle, but I couldn't think of any way to restructure that sentence. Feh.) But it should be worthy of a sort of Badge of Courage.

On the other hand, I am chock full of useful information on the many and varied online dating services.

One of my favorites is Nerve.com's personals. They are run through Spring Street Networks, and the personals for The Onion, Salon, Village Voice and other groups feed into the system. The bachelors and bachelorettes are pretty hip and well-read. The Maestro came from Nerve. What a nice guy... It can be a bit hook-up oriented, but is way better than...

Match. Oy. I'm not even linking to those bastards. The Fartful Dodger was a match date. Need I say more? Oh, need more do you? Punk. Well, the first ultra needy guy whose cat box was kept in his kitchen [pausing to gag] was also a match date. I got "winks" from men who were in their 50's. I got barely literate messages. I got horny idiots. I hear that men who use the service that they get messages from escort services and internet porn sites. ICK.

eHarmony is my latest experiment. The guy who devised the system is a bit of a god-squader, and is rumored to head a cult. But, it the matching is based on personality characteristics and carefully guided communication. Yeah, a lot of the guys are a tad conservative but it's not so difficult to weed them out. I've gone out once with one eHarmer [hee hee] and he seemed pretty nice. So, I'm trying it for three months (which is when my discounted membership ends - sure as hell not paying full price for this crap). Stay tuned for potentially hilarious/disastrous date stories.

I also tried eMode for about three weeks - and it was a total waste of time. Don't go there.

This public service announcement was brought to you by a large glass of beaujolais.