The Opposite Side of the Spectrum

Last week I recounted the tale of my brief date with what I affectionately like to call "The Behemoth". Sure, I know this is terribly asshole-y of me to do, and I know I will catch some gruff from someone with the balls to go by "annonymous", but fuck him. She was and probably still is huge. But that's not what I want to talk about today. Nah, that's old news. This little incident happened a few years ago. I had been off of college for a few months at that time. I was removed from my regular social circle by way of moving up north to Los Angeles to work. I was, once again, somewhat alone. So I turned to the internet again for dates.

Now, some of you who are not familiar with Los Angeles might be saying to themselves "What the hell is wrong with this guy? Why didn't he just go and meet people the way the rest of nation does?". If you've ever lived in LA, then you know that no one speaks to anyone else on the streets unless they absolutely have to. LA is one of the most anti-social environments that one can live in, and when you throw in an anti-social person like I was at that point of my life into that kind of environment, I might as well have been living in a cave in the mountains like a hermit.

But, there I was, plucking away in the Yahoo internet chatrooms looking for people who lived in the area. Girls specifically. And I find a girl who seems interested in meeting up. She seems normal, describes herself as being 5 feet tall and a size zero. I'm thinking alright, finally, a petite girl. We agree to meet up at the Starbucks in Old Town Pasadena. My hopes are up. And whenever my hopes are up, boy do they come crashing down on me.

I don't know if you've ever had one of those moments when you see someone walking into a room and you pray to your deity of choice that they do not come your way. Well, that night, at the Starbucks I had that moment. Only she did come over. And let's just say she wasn't what I expected. How can I describe this girl properly? If you've ever taken a science class, then you've seen one of those hanging skeletons. Ok, slap some skin on that, reanimate it, and you'd pretty much have the closest thing to my date that evening. She had mentioned she was a little under 100 lbs online. 25 lbs under 100 lbs is not a little. That's starving Ethiopian small. I asked her if she wanted to eat something, she declined and claimed that she had already eaten that day. I wanted to ask her "When did you eat exactly? 23 hours ago?" but I didn't.

I didn't skip out on this one like I did with Behemoth though. I did the next best thing. I suggested we go watch a movie. My reasoning was, let me get into a dark place. I know, what an asshole, but if you were walking next to a skinnier Nicole Ritchie, you would have done the same thing. I think we watched that Antonio Banderas/Woody Harrelson movie where they are boxers. I don't know, I kept looking over to her just to make sure I wasn't on a date with the Living Dead. Any minute I was expecting her to break out into a "Brains! Must eat brains!" tirade, and if she did, she was not going to catch me unawares.

The movie ends, and my brains are still intact. I'm thinking she probably sensed what I was thinking, because she offered to hook me up with some of her friends. I said "Sure, why not" but I never did call her back. That would be too much of a heartless bastard of a move to use this poor anorexic girl to score dates with her friends. Even I have certain moral standards that I sometimes adhere to.

Those were pretty much the two worst dates I had through internet dating. I'm sure these kinds of things happen less and less these days. Putting up a picture on a profile on a dating website is easier and easier these days. Everyone's got a digital camera/camera phone/webcam they can use to take flattering pictures of themselves. Back during my bout with internet dating, this wasn't the case. But I'm sure that even to this day, some people end up with more/less than what they bargained for. To those people out there . . . I feel your pain.