Know Their Obsessions Before You Try to Get Them Into Bed

It was my first time meeting anyone online. I was going to UMass, and for some reason I was going on more dates and having less actual sex than ever before, but damned if I wasn’t going to climb every stairwell, or something. After finding and dating the only conservative ever to go to Hampshire college, I decided I needed to try something new.

Lavalife it was. After about a week I had a few responses, and pursued a few email leads, but usually ended up committing gross freudian typos, along the lines of “I miss the nights in Maine, driving with the windows sex down through the mountains…” etc. I was hard up in a bad way.

I eventually get an email that says “I want to meet you.” Since I was neither a nineteen-year-old girl nor a ten-year-old boy, I wasn’t worried about rape, so I figured I’d get right to it. I wrote a few sentences back, some questions, and she responded with “Coffee for the Mind;1[1] nine o’clock.”

“Awesome,” said my second brain, “She’s quick and to the point.”

So I dressed simply, like any philosophy or arts major should dress, wearing complicated button shirts and not buttoning half the buttons, and went out to meet her. I won’t say I should have asked for a picture, because I don’t want to admit to being shallow, but she was on the fence, so I decided conversation couldn’t hurt.

Have you ever seen that Family Guy episode where death goes on a date? With the animal lover? Who won’t shut up about animals? Who just keeps talking about how animals are little people? And he kills her?

I didn’t kill her.

And it wasn’t animals. It was “refined white sugar.” Everything in this girl’s life had come down to the central pillar of evil in The Man’s plot to destroy life, and that pillar was made of refined white sugar. Somehow she could take “Do you like jazz?” and come to, “…and they use so much refined white sugar in their products they’re killing 2% of the nation’s homeless.”

I’m not sure where she got these statistics. I realized quickly that I didn’t care. Fortunately, we were just doing coffee, which was good, because we didn’t have to wait for a check. So, knowing she would mind, I asked if she’d mind if I smoked. I also knew she would say she wouldn’t mind, and that she would like me less and less until I chain-smoked her into going away, allowing me to get another cup of coffee and a magazine.

I put three scoops of sugar in that second cup. Refined. White. Hopefully bleached, and extracted from screaming third world factory working baby seals.