I heard back from The Washington Post regarding the Date Lab experiment. Despite a slightly offensive usage of the word "dilly," the project seems harmless enough. Interesting, even. I've been asked to fill out a 5-page questionnaire all about me (you already know I like writing about myself) and then it's up to the "expert dating technicians" (I'm guessing that's what The Washington Post calls their interns) to match me. Again, I have no idea why I feel that this is less weird than...oh...say...letting that creepy eHarmony guy set me up with someone, but in the interest of science and interesting blog posts, I'm going to go ahead with this for now...
The Questionnaire
I'm not posting the entire thing up here because I feel like that would eventually get me into some kind of trouble (although none of the rules said that I couldn't blog about this) and might even disqualify me. The following are just a few of the questions and selections from my accompanying answers:
Do you work out?
I do yoga with a kind of self-loathing sense of irony about it. I don’t like the kind of New Age-y lifestyle that it's associated with, but I really love the stretches and the way it makes my body feel. I just wish people weren’t so weird about it sometimes—I’m not into the whole “edamame-eating-third eye-namaste” kind of crap.
Do you eat meat?
Voraciously.
Do you have pets? If so, what kind?
I have a cat, but I don't like her and I’d really prefer a dog. I sort of got the cat on a whim last summer and now I feel like I’m stuck with her. We're currently coexisting in a kind of uneasy détente. I won’t go as far as saying that her days with me are numbered, but you never know…
Imagine your date writes you that s/he is “equally comfortable in jeans or in formal attire.” Your reaction?
“Could you be more cliché?"
What’s his/her theme song? You know, the one that plays when the person walks into any room.
Hmm…I think I prefer a man who doesn't have a theme song because that would be especially inconvenient those times that we're a few minutes late for a movie and trying to slip in as unobtrusively as possible.
What I would like, however, is the kind of guy who, when asked, would pick something by Sinatra or Dean Martin. You know, that sort of old school cool, classy, a little jazzy, cigarette hanging out of the side of your mouth kinda guy. So maybe he's not actually that way, but it's the way he imagines himself sometimes and that's actually better for me, because I'm not really the way that I imagine myself to be either.
If you could be a superhero, what super-power would you want? Why?
Actually, I think I'd rather date a superhero than be one. I'd like to be the superhero's girlfriend. You know, he comes home late after a long day of doing super-things and I have dinner waiting and we talk about those people he rescued in the mudslide or the baby that he caught falling out a window. We joke around about his nemesis (who is a complete idiot). I show him the chapter I wrote and he offers suggestions (I'm a best-selling writer in this fantasy). I patch up a rip in his costume. Then we curl up and watch a movie, have super-sex, I fall asleep in his super-arms. Occasionally we go to super-functions (award ceremonies, movie openings, etc.). We get photographed by the tabloids. I go on The View and talk about what it's like to live with a superhero. We have cute half-superhero, half-Puerto Rican kids...
But ok, that wasn't the question. So, my first instinct would be to say something like the power to heal myself, but then I think about what that would mean. I would probably live much longer than everyone that I love, which seems kind of sad and lonely. Then I thought about how incredible it would be to read people’s minds, but the repercussions of that just seem a bit too dangerous. It would be far too easy to manipulate people with that kind of an advantage, and I mean do I really, genuinely, honestly want to know what people are thinking about me all the time? No. Definitely not. So I think I’ll just have to go with something a bit more prosaic (in terms of super powers) like “the ability to fly.” And the "why" is so that I can stop spending so much money on DC cab fares.
What song is currently stuck in your head?
Led Zeppelin, "Trampled Under Foot" and the song the little aardvark girl sings in the Sony HandyCam commercial.
OK, so reading over my answers I'm pretty sure that they're not going to know what the hell to do with me...
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8 comments:
hilarious!
I laughed out loud in class at this.
I used to be funny, until I met you, that is.
If only I weren't in a cubicle!!!! this is fantastic!!!
You sound like a real handful, A. :-) Coincidentally, I'm actually a superhero. My power is that I can see 6 seconds into the future. I don't know exactly what to do with it yet. It just feels like I'm constantly on tape delay.
I feel exactly the same way about my cat...and I've had him for seven years. After about five, I got another cat, just to keep the first cat company. I'm a bad pet-owner.
As soon as one of them dies, I'm totally getting a dog.
There was a great skit on SNL a few years ago called Ed Glosser, Trivial Psychic. Any chance you saw that? I wanted to give that as an answer, but I figured the interns would be too young to have seen it.
"I see...you're in the kitchen. You're going to want some ice cream. You're going to bite into it too eagerly and get an ice cream headache. It's very painful! It's really gonna hurt until you take an Advil!"
"Wait! Your daughter! She's home alone! She runs through the hallway in socks! Your wife has just been mopping the hallway! ... She's gonna have to mop that whole part of the floor again!"
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