DEAR DIARY: TODAY I AM A CATCHPHRASE

My life dreams have all been attained. In one week, I've become a new genre, inspired a catchphrase that's undoubtedly sweeping the nation faster than you can say "Baby Fish Mouth," and I've been compared to Molly Ringwald. You all know that I really like my JDate profile. It used to begin "Funny, smart and sassy..." until I met Evan and he criticized my use of adjectives. So I changed it, and came up with something catchy..."Too cool for shul, but I go anyway. Sometimes." This is actually a perfect description of me--couldn't have written it better myself. (Um, right.) Anyway, imagine my surprise when I saw this catchphrase listed as a headline on JRant. It linked to a post on JDaters Anonymous regular Passionate Life, in which P-Life recounts his perusal of my profile and the subsequent adoption of my catchphrase by his entire family over Shabbat dinner. Clearly, he didn't sleep enough that night (or since), because he also thinks I look like Molly Ringwald. (Whatever...like I told him, I'll take it!) Later in the post, P-Life submerges himself in a reverie in which he imagines the girls he loved in high school and actually invents a prom. Since no one's ever written an ode to me, let alone created an imaginary prom, because of something I wrote, I'm flattered! To reward him for comparing me to an 80s icon, let's send good JDaters Anonymous karma over to P-Life...

ALL MY CHILDREN

And by "children," I mean my columns. (Self-promotion alert...) I thought it was time to post my master list of singles columns, here for your reading and commenting pleasure. "Separation Anxiety"--On the subject of separate seating at weddings (NY Jewish Week, 8/27/04) "Darkness Visible" --Singles column about spiritual darkness and an actual blackout (NY Jewish Week, 8/13/04) "The Blaire Hitched Project"--An interview with "MarryBlaire.com"'s Blaire Allison (NY Jewish Week, 7/30/04) "Life After Sex & the City"--An Interview with writer Cindy Chupack (NY Jewish Week, 7/16/04) "A New Profile, a New You"--Revising my JDate profile, with help from E-Cyrano.com (NY Jewish Week, 6/11/04) "Activism, With a Side of Love"--The social scene at the UJC Young Leadership Conference (NY Jewish Week, 5/07/04) "Adam Mesh, Average Mensch"--An interview with reality TV's "Average Joe" and his parents (NY Jewish Week, 4/09/04) "Seuss and the City"--A poem on living Jewish and single in NYC (NY Jewish Week, 03/06/04)

"HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU"

The ladies know what I'm talking about. Probably some of the men, too. That "Sex and the City" episode where that guy doesn't call Miranda and Berger tells her the secret: "He's just not that into you." Check out this article in the Washington Post about the phenomenon, and the L.A.-based comic and former "straight male" advisor to the late, beloved show who's written a book about it. Warning...not for the faint of heart. Contains phrases like: When you Google "Why didn't he call?" you get more than 1,500 hits...a column on AskMen.com called How to Reject the Girl You Don't Want.... When a guy is truly interested in a woman, he pursues her. That's the way it's always been, he says, and equality hasn't changed it...and MORE delightful tidbits... All I'm sayin' is, if you can't handle the truth, don't order the code red.

GOOD NEWS...

(Cross-posted from My Urban Kvetch) This just in, good news for Superfreelancer... My Jewish Week column, First Person Singular, is now going to be running every other week, instead of every fourth week. That means twice as many pieces on living single and Jewish in NYC. And that, in turn, means that I will probably find a boyfriend tomorrow, and be rendered so immobile with happiness that I'll be unable to muster the energy, let alone the creativity, to come up with topics of interest to singles. OK, it's a bit of an exaggeration (there's no boyfriend on the horizon, and I've still got about a dozen ideas in the creative hopper). But still, I need your help. I'm putting together a dating questionnaire that I hope some people will consider filling out and sending back to me. If you'd like a survey sent to you, please email me and I'll add you to the list of people who are absolutely guaranteed* to go to Heaven for helping me. Thank you! *Not a guarantee.

I'LL TAKE ONE PERSONAL AD, HOLD THE CLICHES

Is it really this hard to write an accurate profile of yourself that actually says something about you? Here's a WSJ article about the idea of "personals trainers" (which I think is cute, but unwieldy to say) like my L.A. friend Evan Marc Katz of E-Cyrano.com (although EMK isn't the focus of this article, and his company is barely mentioned...) At this point, I've written a bunch on the subject of online dating and putrescent profiles, so I'm declaring myself an expert, too. $50 and I'll give your profile an hour. I'll not spare your feelings, just give you my gut reaction: boring or ka-ching! And I'll tell you how to fix it. I'd be doing us all a favor, trust me. (Although if you're reading this and nodding, your profile may already be fine...) Maybe I should form a mega company, with all the people I've written about in my column in the New York Jewish Week. First, I'll form a national focus group of all the people I met at March's UJC Young Leadership conference in DC, to deliberate all things single and Jewish. Evan could hold round-the-clock workshops and revise people's profiles...Blaire could be the resident love coach, who will attend singles events and tell awkward singles how to get over their nerves...and Adam Mesh could be our celebrity spokesperson. I'd also enlist experts on other aspects of dating and relationships: my non-Jewish now-friend on navigating interfaith relationships, writer Cindy Chupack on what's so funny about romance, and then, yo, I'd flow one of my stone cold rhymes, freestyle y'all, 'cause I'm the original Jewish love poet, dawg--don't be hatin' my flow. Word. EDK out.

HAVE YOU SEEN HIS SOULMATE?

Have you seen Jacob's soulmate? Maybe he should meet Blaire Allison. Maybe they're MFEO. Just for the record, I don't know where my soulmate/husband/Mr. Right Now is either. But I guess I haven't gotten to the point that I want to put up a website declaring myself open for the romance business. In any case, marketing is marketing. Good luck to them both.

TO REJOIN OR NOT TO REJOIN?

That is the question. It's been a little over a month since my JDate membership ended. If you remember, when we last left Our Heroine, she was getting no messages, and was increasingly frustrated with certain men, who did actually initiate contact with her in the first place, and who yet failed to follow up with any kind of contact outside of the email world. Plus, there was the whole issue of JDate's search engine finding forbidden words in my profile and removing them, rendering my profile an exercise in code-breaking idiocy. The day after my membership expired, I got two messages. By now, it's up to 8 messages, from men who apparently were sufficiently interested to read the first part of my profile, where I entice them with a witty and well-written profile, but who failed to read the part that says I'm not a member anymore and that they'll have to IM me when I'm online or send me an email c/o this blog. So now I'm looking at the "Members Who've Viewed You" page, and there are actually a few guys who aren't in their 50s who have viewed me and perhaps emailed me. So do I rejoin, only to find out that the messages are from friends who just decided to say "nice profile" or from guys to whose emails I had already responded with a "no thanks"? Or save thirty bucks a month and maintain my carefully cultivated "JDate disillusion"? Both, truly tempting options...opinions, as always, are welcome here.

CUDDLE PARTIES

This is like, almost the opposite of being Shomer Negiah. Of course, A Picture of C, always ahead of the trend, wrote about this a long time ago. Sounds like it's alternately a good and a bad idea. Thoughts?