So Missy was asking me for help writing her online dating profile.  She recently moved from Lubbock back to Austin for her surgical residency, and has found it impossible to meet guys outside of the hospital.  I asked her if she’d tried going to church, or to some of the Texas Tech alumni events, and she said yes of course, but that most of the guys she’d met there were already married. 

Knowing how much Missy loves ‘the girls,’ I suggested she title her profile, “Everything’s Bigger in Texas.”   The thing about profiles on dating sites, and even networking sites like facebook and myspace, is nobody really tells the truth about themselves, even the pictures tend to be off, thanks to photoshop.  In some ways, we become a closer version of how we see ourselves.  Unfortunately, it’s others we’re trying to impress.  Anyway, I figured maybe if Missy wrote something that didn’t seem like an advertisement, something more authentic, and a little bitchy, she might get more responses.  Here’s a bit of what we came up with: 

A little bit about me:  I fall in love at stoplights.  And no, I don’t want to know what you’re really like, for the simple fact that I’m interested in being interested right now.  There should be a twelve-step program for that.  I also believe people should come with warning labels; if I had one, I think the preceding statements would be mine.

Trying to sum up Missy in five hundred words got me to thinking about myself.  If I had a paragraph’s space, what would I say?  It seems like you could almost go completely cliché, with a twist, something like:  I like walks on the beach, but only during low tide.  I prefer my coffee black, especially Illy.  And while I like sushi, anything is good except Unagai .  I think the last line would need a footnote:  I’ve never been able to eat Unagi, because it reminds me of an eel I knew when I was a kid.  The eel’s name was Hilda, and she was an albino that lived in an aquarium at the allergist center in Austin.  I’d watch her during the thirty minutes I had to wait each week after receiving my allergy shot; thirty minutes was the supposed amount of time it would take you to choke on your tongue, if you were going to.  I used to think Hilda looked a lot like the nurse that gave me my shots; both had similarly pale features, a long line of a mouth, with beady, punched in eyes.  The nurse hid behind her white curtain, while Hilda stayed beneath her piece of coral, always flicking her tail. 

I saw Hilda come all the way out once, only it was to chomp a yellow fish that swam too close to her rock.  She could move pretty fast when she wanted to.  I figured Hilda must have gotten hungry for something besides her usual diet of raw hamburger meat.  Not that I’d blame her, wanting something different, but after that incident, Hilda was gone.  The nurse explained the following week that the allergist had tired of buying Hilda her yellow fish, lunch at fifty bucks a pop.   Besides, Hilda had recently traumatized a little boy during one of her attacks, so she’d been returned to the pet store.