It's A Blanket!

I am such a sucker for mood lighting, soft techno-lounge music, and gimmicks, so I've been dying to spend an evening at trendy Manhattan club Duvet. Duvet, in addition to throwing Hunkmania every Friday and Saturday evening ("Indulge your bachelorette party fantasy, celebrate a birthday or the have the ultimate girls night out. Celebrate being a woman and enjoy life with these Sexy HUNKS!"), spoils the "dress to impress" crowd's hedonism with bottle service in bed, literally. Thirty dining beds, banquettes, and seven private "intimate" bedrooms where you either want to be the night's first couple or you want to just avoid. (I assume they're for people who don't exactly have a private zone at home.) Everyone's got to stand out somehow; if I ever got the chance to own a club, I'd call it "Hammock" and replace all the seats with... well, hammocks. Hey, it's better than my other idea, "Bidet." (But worse than my blanket fort cafe idea.)

I got my chance last night, cover-free, courtesy of Netparty, and it was... I guess the right word would be "comfortable." Really, all the excitement you'd expect from sitting on a bed. But as someone who'd like to see Western fashion move towards an all-pajama direction, I felt a sort of kinship. Like if you go the Olive Garden, is there any good reason you have to sit up straight, keep your feet off the table, not scratch yourself there?

Mites. Forgot about mites.

I thought folks would be claiming beds right away, but it looked like young professionals showed up for the happy hour first and sleepytime later. Personally, I like exploring first, so found the Ice Bar, the jellyfish aquarium (Duvet's website says it "houses over 100 exotic jellyfish," but I counted five), the bathroom, then found an empty giant bed and, you know, sat on it. Pros: 400-count sheets, imported Italian pillows. Cons: not as comfortable as the Brookstone bed, not allowed to jump on the bed (I assume, I didn't ask), and right, no duvets! Took my shoes off. Laid back, curled up. Wasn't bad. I mean, I could do the same thing at home; I even have the right lighting.

I really wanted to get out my laptop and shine under its soft gray light, but the mattress and booze still didn't put me enough at ease. Inevitably, someone thinking they're duly pitying me would come up and remind me, joshing, "Hey, work is over! Get out there and have some fun!" Which would be the point — not that my personal projects, this writing and stuff, isn't fun to me — but nobody's drifting my way in the first place and I only opened the computer like an anglerfish, passively luring folks over. I do want to try it some day, but I need to think of a witty, but friendly retort first. Instead I started chatting with this girl whose friends left her alone — second unsolicited, unprompted conversation with a chick ever! Yay! (?)

I'd go back, with friends, but I bet what you're dying to hear about are the bathrooms! God, the best thing about these posh places are the comically nouveau trendy bathrooms, as if the concept needs improvement. Duvet has two bathrooms, both obviously designed by someone who's never used a public bathroom before. First motif is the one-way glass doors, so there's a mirror on the outside and tinted window inside, so you don't miss a minute of the party while you're evacuating. Of course I knew no one could see inside, but the setup doesn't ameliorate any piss anxiety, especially since the top floor bathroom's right freaking there, behind the clear jellyfish tank and it's a swinging door and there's no lock. Second motif is no toilets or urinals, just a drain running along the wall, like the one you're not supposed to use at the gym shower, and kind of fenced off. I took pictures. I hope they're expecting me to tie my horse to those posts or something, because there's no way I'm peeing there.

I Am Swank, Briefly

My high-powered NJYP connections introduced me to Netparty, a site organizing networking functions for young professionals, and apparently people like me as well. Netparty held their premiere NYC event last night, where 1700 young professionals were expected to crowd into a club, trade business cards, and possibly hump each other, but in a totally professional, business-casual way. I went, expecting the social-phobic, fish out of water disaster these things usually collapse into — but I enjoy these stylish clubs, first because I get off on that slick, trance, mood-lit ambiance and second because I feel like someone important walking into this secret, sacred space, like Page Six or Heidi Montag might stop by and I'd get to be on the other side of the tabloid glossy for once. As if that's a worthy goal, but I think we can all agree that it sounds better spending tonight like every other night, commuting home, stuck in traffic.

The party was held at Hiro, an exclusive club that usually has no reason to be open at six on a Tuesday night. I confirmed this with a couple of the bartenders. Hiro is one of those obnoxious places that's kept hidden from the plebeians — 371 West 16th Street doesn't even exist during daylight hours, camouflaged as a service entrance for what I always thought was a homeless shelter but turns out to be an expensive hotel. It's easier to find at night because you can just look for the line of beautiful people heading into the Maritime Hotel's service entrance. I arrived a few minutes before the party sort of kicked off at six and the line was already down to the corner.

I was probably the only person waiting on line not talking into, e-mailing from, or texting on some kind of handheld electronic gizmo.

I'm generally super-awkward at these events and I somehow found myself sitting at the dudes' table. All of you with — not social skills so much as social confidence — haven't experienced this phenomenon, but basically you're hanging in the clu trying to look engaged, failing usually. One of the system admins already at the dudes' table — everyone at the dudes' table is inevitably a system admin — calls you over and you collapse, sucked into this black hole of low self-esteem, and wind up sitting with dudes sadly pointing out who's hot, or even more sadly not pointing out who's hot. Dudes and their repressive asexual work ethic are actually here for networking.

Here's where the night becomes awesome. So I'm at the dudes' table trying to explain this Netparty concept to some system admin who doesn't really speak English and is, seriously, expecting someone to make a presentation tonight, and just generally getting frustrated cause I've been sitting at the dudes' table since I was seven or eight years old. I want to escape and I see the woman who was in front of me on that long, long line outside sitting by herself. Understand: I never do this. I've never done this. But I was totally sick of being this guy's instruction manual — "No, you have to go and introduce yourself" — that I excused myself to go "mingle."

I went up to... the bar.

I checked out upstairs.

I brought my drink into the men's room. I've never seen this before: they have all this metrosexual styling product over the sink and a guy who charges you two bucks to use it. I'm a firm believer that you can judge the classiness of a joint by its bathroom — fake white marble, high-velocity hand dryers, those big bowl sinks. Hiro had the bathroom of your corner deli, plus the guy selling fancy soap or whatever was sort of creepy.

I left the bathroom and, out of places to wander, I introduced myself to the woman from outside. "I remember you from the line..." I'm not sure what the big—

Hold on. I'm forgetting something. It didn't hit me till later, but: !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't figure out what I was afraid of, since this went smooth as, well, curling up in a ball and floating underwater. Sure, the circumstances were really favorable — no competition, plus I had an opener, plus I don't know what the hell Hiro put in my drinks but I was spinning for hours — but still, in instant replay, it can't see my looming disaster approaching from anywhere at all. There's a moral somewhere in here; I really hope I can dig it out.

Chemistry.com Just Doesn't Get Me

Lovelorn, I took a web surf to chemistry.com, the matchmaking website for people too freakish to be considered by eHarmony. Chemistry.com is sort of like getting relationship advice from Miss Cleo. It'll be what you want to hear, and not remotely helpful. Still better than Dr. Phil, who'll throw folksy insults at you and not be remotely helpful. God, I hate Dr. Phil.

Chemistry.com just makes me laugh incredulously. Not as hard as that time my grandma tried to set me up with my cousin though. Maybe if she was a cousin by blood instead of marriage. eHarmony tries to psychoanalyze you with questions like "How important is it that your partner be physically attractive?" "What three words would your friends use to describe you?" Here's how chemistry.com finds your soulmate:





Be honest, chemistry.com, you're just matching people up by spinning a bottle, aren't you?

My favorite part of all these dating sites is the end of the survey, where they tell me what my personality is. As if I don't know — it's my personality stuck inside my damn head. The soulless machine algorithm doesn't have a chance:

You are a DIRECTOR/explorer

You are courageous; and you seek challenges. You are a tough-minded, independent and daring thinker who likes to explore ideas or problems thoroughly. You focus easily. And you are persistent, systematic and competent in pursuing your interests and goals.

You are also assertive; and you enjoy the opportunities your hard work wins.

You have a lot of energy. You think quickly, make decisions more easily than most, dislike unnecessary rules, and take a rational approach to people, issues and ideas.

You don't often enjoy "small talk." You are generally not interested in pleasing boring people and you gravitate to men and women who are intellectually exciting and get to their point quickly during conversations.

You are not conventional in most of your attitudes and values. You tend to be irreverent and pragmatic and you like spontaneous people. You can be an exciting, yet hard driving and exacting, friend and companion.

This has to be what you get when you answer "C" for all the questions, because it's so not me. "You are also assertive" stands out — a lot — and overwhelms what's right about it. (Recall the Forer effect.) Stuff like "[you] dislike unnecessary rules:" everyone dislikes unnecessary rules, sort of by definition, but I'm here thinking, "Well, I do have a lot of contempt for superfluous rules..."

It's not the personality test that worries me though, since it's not like you can fail that. It's the stuff that I contributed; I'm so sucky at introducing myself. I'm a little happy I can't link directly to my profile... but here's what I look like: Chemistry.com suggests posting a picture where you're smiling, maybe something from a vacation, and this is the best photo I have of me. Aside from the one on the upper-right corner of this site, of course. I should probably pay a professional to make me look as not-constipated as I feel.

My personal blurb isn't any better. Do other people have this issue, where they can only write about themselves at two extremes: terse and uninformative ("I am a carbon-based life form.") and too much information? I believe I went with too much information, although I tried to temper it:

Hi.

I'm pretty shy and quiet and don't warm to people very easily, but I can get very lively and funny around people I'm comfortable with. I'm eager to try new things, even though I sometimes need a little prodding. I'm open-minded and extremely picky -- because life is short and why waste it on things that aren't good, right? But you also (well, I also) never really know where you'll find stuff you really like. I'm fascinate by just about anything, as long as it keeps filling my brain with new ideas....

What else? I'm an aspiring playwright who does gigs coding websites until Broadway calls, which should be any day now. I raised tropical fish as a kid because my parents wouldn't let me have a dog, and I was pretty surprised when it turned out some of those fish were more carniverous than they looked in the store. I bake the world's best (and probably, only) kahlua and cinnamon brownies. I'm not a big sports fan, but I love watching those made-up sports they show on ESPN2.

Okay, well... nice meeting you.

I didn't want to put weeks and weeks of work into this online personal ad, but I just read that again and, hell, I wouldn't date me. (Also I wouldn't date me because that would be really weird.) Ugh. I figure maybe I'll just get a cat and one of those Japanese sex robots (like that's not weird) and call it a night.

Advice and/or words of encouragement appreciated.

And People Say I'm Anti-Social!!???

We need to talk about a major problem in this country: people blocking me from their Facebook pages. The other day, I ran into someone — ex-floormate from college, kind of a nice girl (at least six years ago...) — or at least I ran into what could've easily been the back of her head. What the hell, I thought. She didn't seem like the kind of person who'd bother having a Facebook page, but I wonder what she's up to. I put the super-nifty Facebook search feature to use, and since we went to the same college, I was able to see her profile. I'm like ninety to ninety-five percent sure that this isn't creepy; it's why not-Tom from MySpace (who kind of looks like George Michael Bluth) made Facebook in the first place.

Okay, it's two days later and I'm on Facebook again because it's like freaking crack. No motion on the friend request front. This happens — you people know who you are — and it's absolutely beyond comprehension to me. Let's say you're someone I went to middle school with and you get that e-mail with the subject "Jay Harris has sent you a Friend Request on Facebook." What's going through your head? "Oh, wonderful. Jay wants to be my Facebook buddy. Now I've got to click on the link, log in, and click the little "Confirm" button. That's gonna take a whole thirty seconds of my precious, precious time. We were never that close." Yeah, sorry to bother you, being all curious about what you're up to and how you're doing. How rude of me!

The other option I came up with is that you guys aren't quite picking up on the whole Facebook deal. Just because you tell Facebook that we're friends doesn't mean we actually have to be friends now. It's just a dumb little computer program so you can tell people your favorite movies and show them pictures of your trip to Paris or wherever. We're not gonna start hanging out, telling each other secrets, being total BFF's... maybe, MAYBE I'll send you a little note on your birthday, and that's it. Which, correct me if I'm wrong here, is why you have a Facebook account in the first place. There's a certain logic here, and the dangling friend request lives miles outside it.

But wow, this girl from college went one better. Two days later, no friend update, so I went back to her profile and... gone! A full profile, fifty-something friends, just disappeared from Facebook. It hardly seems worth my time to verify my Occam's Razor theory here, but I believe I'm blocked from her profile. Let's go through this step by step: She got the friend request e-mail from Facebook — note, nothing special, no personal message or anything. So she logs into Facebook and the "Do you want to confirm Jay Harris as your friend?" window pops up. There's two options, "Confirm" and "Deny," and instead of clicking on "Deny" and moving on with her life, she went into the Privacy control panel, typed my name into the little search box, went through the more than 500 Jay Harrises in Facebook, found my profile, and clicked on "Block." I'm almost touched that she'd that much time on me.

I'm insecure, so I've gotta go through all the different possibilities: Did I ever burn my name into her lawn? Nope. Was I ever caught on hidden video with Chris Hansen? Don't think so. Did I call her something mean in my blog? That's a distinct possibility, but she escaped my literary wrath unscathed. I checked.

Point is, unless you've got some compelling reasons not to, stop being a jerk about and confirm your Facebook friends already. Stay tuned next week, when I tell off people who walk slowly in front of me on the sidewalk.

Honestly...

I put this application called an "Honesty Box" on my Absolutely Indispensable Facebook Profile, which never really seemed like a super idea. The idea is that people can leave little notes anonymously; officially, "Honesty Box lets users send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions and letting people be completely honest with you." Honesty Box basically presents you with a decision: do you want to know what people honestly think of you? There seems like not only a good potential for abuse — it's restricted to your friends (or "friends") thankfully — but also a great way to shatter your blissful ignorant belief that people actually like you. I was conflicted over the concept, but I eventually decided that, first of all, my friends/"friends" are completely indifferent to me. (Check out my Facebook wall. It grows at a rate of about one post a year.) There are days when I feel like I could grow to fifty feet tall, start breathing fire, and walk around stomping on Tokyo and the people who know me would still be completely oblivious. Well, things are busy at work, and I'm totally stressed, and it's my other friend's birthday next week or whatever.

My other thought is that if my friends do hold an opinion about me, which they don't (see caveat below), their opinions can't possibly be any worse than the opinion I have about myself. This is what we call a "win-win" situation, right? But then, here are the first four reviews for the Honesty Box application:

[anonymous person] (Putnam City North High School) wrote at 12:52pm I NEED TO DELETE REPLIES. SOME ARE... NOT APPROPRIATE. Message - Report

Whitney Porter (LA Tech) wrote at 12:41pm I want to delete replies Message - Report

Lyndsey Shea (Hingham High School) wrote at 12:27pm i want to delete my reply threads too. how do i do it ? Message - Report

Alicia Colón (Howard) wrote at 12:05pm What if I want to delete a reply thread? I don't see where I can do that. Is there not an option to do that?

I think that speaks to the quality of some people's friends.

Much to my surprise — I was really expecting "Jay, you are an ass." — somebody wrote something nice to me. I quote, out of sheer joy, "Hey Jay. I think you're a very cool person I knew from a very long time ago. I always pictured you working at NASA or something just because you're so smart. Anyways, I really do hope you're doing well and having a happy life." Thank you, Anonymous Person. That really made my day; I'm even going to resist the temptation to cynically pick it apart because I'd like it to keep making my day. (This does not come easily to me.) Did you hear that? Somebody thinks I'm a very cool person! Smiley emoticon, please! I see a meet-cute romantic comedy in the making here: like Anonymous Person turns out to be my most despised rival at work, but it turns out that from behind the Internet, we're great friends.

I can't say anything because I'm about to cowardly compliment my friends through Honesty Box — my original plan was to cravenly tell people off via Honesty Box instead — but what the hell? Call me crazy, but I think being nice should be, uh, a nice thing... free of subtext, ulterior motives, and face-to-face. I'd like to extend a little invitation to them: Contact me! Leave messages! Constructive criticism appreciated! (Euphoric praise appreciated even more!) I don't bite — okay, I do, but not the amiable — and I won't read into your comments or develop expectations (really, when have I ever had expectations?) or anything. Just want to share the love.

Loneliness is haunting me, following me around from one desolate happy hour to another, leaving my Facebook feeds unchanged for a week, and taunting me with commercials for Age of Love. I have some time, just me and my computer, and I thought I might try expanding my social network... but I don't want to go outside my bedroom. I don't feel like putting a shirt on. I gave online matchmaking a shot two years ago, only to have that snooty bitch eHarmony.com reject me. I answered eHarmony's personality profile honestly and the computer dating monkeys at eHarmony headquarters were unable to match me "at this time." Should've lied, I guess.

Anyway, I logged into eHarmony again — still going to answer honestly, but I figured that maybe I've grown a bit since eHarmony unceremoniously snubbed me. Or maybe eHarmony's grown, not so much superficial, self-absorbed, and marginalizing... diverse... profiles. Nope. I love this little blurb from the home page: "Meet and communicate with quality women today" — and that emphasis is theirs. "Quality" women? This is exactly why personal relationships are bullshit: I've never used an adjective to describe both women and snow tires, but somehow that doesn't factor into the love equation.

I'm re-reading my eHarmony personality profile, now outdated, and I'm thinking this is a good place to put some links explaining the Forer effect.

Fine. Fuck eHarmony anyway. I'm moving on to Match.com, which is endorsed by Dr. Phil, so it'll probably berate me into dating, right? I was signing up for Match.com, but then I stopped and thought it might be fun to take you, my adoring public, on my journey through the world of online dating. I can make fun of it, be self-deprecating, so it won't matter and it'll sting less when I fail. Ingenious.... But you know what would be even better is filling out a fake form, pretending to be an Asian-American hog farmer from Montana or something, then when Match.com rejects me I can just be like, "Ha, joke's on you, Dr. Phil!"

The only questions Match.com asks before matching you up with, by my count, sixteen random eligible singles are your location and the age range beyond which you absolutely will not touch. Today, I'm 25, so I figure there are three ways to answer this question:

• The open-minded, full of shit way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 18 and 114."
• The honest way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 25 and 25."
• And the perverted, I know the age of consent in all fifty states way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 16 and 18."

(By the way, I had to look up the age of consent in New Jersey, just in case you were wondering.) I mention this because the next page on Match.com has this pull-down menu where you give them your birthdate, and it goes all the way back to 1919. I really want to know just how many octogenarians are actually on Match.com, how many are looking to meet someone in their twenties, and whether Grandma will let me put up a profile for her.

Okay, now I'm onto the search part of our evening. I didn't set up a profile on Match.com, so I sort of feel like this is the electronic version of peeping through a hole in the girls' locker room... but somehow when you're hiding behind a computer this all becomes appropriate. Don't ask. Here's the search criteria I'm offered:

• Height: Anywhere from 3'1" to 8'11". Three foot, I can understand, cause there's a population that's three feet tall. But eight feet, eleven inches?! There's one guy in history who's that tall, and if he's your soulmate, then you're S.O.L. cause he's dead. I don't know, maybe Match.com just put that in there to satiate the pituitary disorder fetishists out there.

Silent Single Mingle

The New Jersey Young Professionals held their "Silent Single Mingle" last night. The rules were cell phones off, keep whispering to a minimum, and passing notes is strongly encouraged. I'd been looking forward to this one for a while, since most of my NJYP events tend to be pretty silent anyway, the silent single mingle seemed tailor-made for me. And let me just tell you, it was freaking awesome! The first half-hour or forty-five minutes, especially...

I got there right at the beginning, cause I tend to do better at these social things when no one's around. People — guys — trickled in, and what happened couldn't have gone better if it was planned. Each of us walks in, takes a pad and pen from the table in the middle of the room, gets a drink (we scribble down our orders for the bartender), and takes it to a seat around the perimeter. And we sit there. Perfectly evenly spaced out, each by ourselves and no one moves for at least fifteen minutes. It's super-awkward, but I can't help from giggling: for once, the other party people are doing the same thing I am!

The good times didn't last. Girls showed up eventually, and twenty-something guys in the room coalesced around the six girls, and it wasn't silent anymore. Low point of the night: some bland douchebag Mike takes a break from chatting up a girl, who clearly has lousy taste, and turns to me, "Having fun?"

"Sure," I said with uncommon enthusiasm, the joy of the earlier sitting around like a lump not completely worn off yet.

"Hey, you're not supposed to speak," Mike chastens me.

Oh God, Mike, that was fucking hilarious! I bet you spent all night thinking that shit up! I left after that.

Speed friending tonight, and it wasn't too, too bad. I credit my newly-discovered Love Tactics, which I've decided is too depressing to read but sort of amusing when you just skim it. It's really sleazier than I thought — the first half of the book is this collection of self-esteem boosting platitudes ("It's okay to be nervous!" "When given choices, be decisive!") and the second half of the book is basically an instruction guide for being a manipulative jackass. There's a chapter called "Cultivating Their Emotional Dependency" followed immediately by "Shaking Their Confidence," because nothing signals a happy relationship like emotional dependency.

I actually did some thinking... well, some therapy, since my last speed friending, in which I could've probably been replaced by a pre-recorded message for all the lack of emotion and personality I was showing. To be fair, my goal for the evening was to get in the habit of shaking people's hands while repeating their name back to them, and I succeeded! But it turns out that was a rather lame goal; I remembered everyone's name, and they remembered me as that banal guy sitting in between two much more worthwhile people. This is why I have a therapist; it took him like five minutes to tell me that I'm bullshitting my way through speed friending because my mother (who, by the way, hates my therapist) and the Love Tacticians of the world keep telling me that I'm not good enough and no one wants to hear about my dull, dull life. And it took fifteen years but it was such a relief to hear someone finally tell me, "What's wrong with saying you're a web designer but it's not what you want to do, and you want to be a playwright? There are probably plenty of Young Professionals who are in some kind of intermediary job that's not exactly what they want to be doing, and they'll relate to you."

Which I did, came up with a whole new, and surprisingly honest, line for that question: "I'm a web designer, but my life's goal is to be a writer." I also dumbed down my "Where do you live?/Where are you from?" answer to something I could remember under pressure. (It used to be, "I'm from Fanwood. It's about ten/twelve/fifteen miles south/west/southwest of Newark," depending on which words came out of my mouth.) And I reworked my "What do you do for fun?" answer, and I can't believe I went to two speed friending events stumbling for what I do for fun, because it's not like I haven't answered that question about a million times in the virtual networking world.

Now here's the thing: I keep making three-minute friends with dudes, maybe because I'm not following Love Tactic #7, "Be The First to Show Interest in The Other." This is in the non-disturbing part of the book.... No, sorry, I re-read the section, and there's nothing useful in it. On the other hand, at least I wasn't exercising Love Tactic #33: Use Silence.

I went down to Atlantic City last night, trying to make friends with the New Jersey Young Professionals on the long, long bus ride south. It went better than expected: I thought I'd make no friends and lose money, but instead I made no friends and won money. Ka-ching! And really, if you happen to be on a hot streak at craps, you've got a whole tableful of new best friends.

I actually wasn't going to go because I knew the bus ride would be long and lonely. I wish I could spend my life on a deserted island, staring out at the sea, because I hate those events where you know you'll regret it if you go but you'll also regret it if you don't go, and you have to solve that remorse calculus dilemma. There was a trip to Atlantic City last summer that I chickened out on — did the math wrong — so I had to go on this one.

I have to say that I prefer the senior citizens' bus, even though there's no food allowed, and it's dry, and it comes with some crappy movie you never wanted to see that keeps distracting you from your book. The old people, they come to gamble, and my favorite part of the whole trip is at the casino's bus depot, when you're not allowed to move from your seat until the greeter's done welcoming you and raffling off the free buffet. The seniors get all uppity, like they know they're losing ground in the race between them and Death to the Lucky Sevens machine. Young professionals, they shift around in their seats, but since they came to hang out with their friends and not to feed coins to a blinking machine, there's not the same urgency. On the plus side, with the young professionals, I didn't have to spend the whole ride listening to reasons why my generation sucks.

Since I wasn't traveling with the old people for once, I got to see Atlantic City after dark, when it turns from a seedy, low-rent gambling outfit into a slutty, low-rent gambling outfit. The NJYP rented out the Foundation Room for our New Years party mingling (yes, a month after New Years... or maybe eleven months before New Years 2008!) and then Club Worship for late-night dancing, but I couldn't help being amused by the proliferation of cocktail waitresses slumming across the House of Blues floor after ten.... Oh, wait, they aren't cocktail waitresses. I know that Atlantic City is never going to be as classy as some places, but when you're outfit says, "Why did I even bother with clothes?" maybe you can take a good, hard look at your wardrobe choices.

Love, Tactically

I'm not falling for this Love Tactics crap. Forget about the initial creepiness the book exudes, the first few chapters — before we get to the parts about manipulating your beloved into emotional co-dependence and then shaking their confidence and esteem by turning aloof like a dickweed — are just a collection of ridiculous, feel-good platitudes that leave me stewing in my misanthropy. "You can do it!" I feel like I've got Bela Karolyi as my dating coach, and I feel like your confidence in my dating abilities would be awesome if I wanted to date you, Love Tactics. But the flattery is more than a little perfunctory, like when my mom tells me how adorable I am — I'm twenty-five and she's still toddler-talking to me, so this might be part of the problem right here &mdash — and it might mean a little more coming from someone who didn't share half my DNA.

My favorite Love Tactic so far is number four, "Talk With Confidence." First of all, if I could talk with confidence, I wouldn't be lying on my bed reading Love Tactics. I would be out at a bar, hittin' up some honeys, which is a term I heard some dumbass on an MTV show use. He said it very confidently. I'm trying to sop up some of Love Tactics' enthusiasm and encouragement, but it all gets shot to hell by clumsy passages like this: "Starting a conversation need not be that difficult. In fact, once you get over your initial reluctance, you'll find making conversation an effective instrument to help you win the one you want." Really? Talking to her will help me win her heart? Thank you for the brilliant revelation, Love Tactics, because all this time I've been watching her through binoculars and rooting through her trash, and that hasn't gotten me anywhere!

I asked Anne last week why she thought I wasn't getting any action, and, wonderful friend that she is, she pointed me to this book, Love Tactics by Thomas W. McKnight and Robert H. Phillips. I know, I know: skeeziest title ever. In fact, its full title is Love Tactics: How to Win the One You Want, which is, amazingly, even worse.

"Written in a warm, easy-going style, this book offers a wealth of practical advice on how to get the one you love to love you back. So don't just stand there — get out and stir some hearts!

And, oh yeah, that McKnight author: he's a Mormon.

Nope, wait... Amazon has those "you might also like..." books and lists something called How to Make Anyone Fall in Love With You, which is definitely a worse title.

But Love Tactics is Anne-certified, and Anne said that she knows a lot of people who've also certified it, so I went to Borders today and picked up a copy. Dear God, I was embarrassed — and I'm someone who sat in Borders for two hours one afternoon reading Dating for Dummies cover to cover, in freaking public! There's something about walking up to a cashier, another human being, with a copy of Lurrrve Tactics in your hands that makes you feel greasy and sweaty on the inside. Maybe it's that lewd rose on the cover or the fact that McKnight has few qualms about selling the secrets to breaking up other people's marriages, but I would've rather been standing in line holding a stack of fetish porn and guides to hypnosis than Lurrrve Tactics.

Guess who I saw while I was waiting in line to pay? The girl I had an unrequited crush on back in tenth grade. The high school rumor mill said she told a bunch of, well, let's just leave it at "our mutual friends" how she'd never date me, even though I was miles from even getting up the courage to ask her to date me. She was like two people ahead of me in line. And I'm there. Holding Lurrrve Tactics. An instruction manual. For manipulating people into having sex with you. Awkward.

Prozac + Alcohol = Awkward

Time for another one of those New Jersey Young Professionals events, because no one's confirming my MySpace friend requests and apparently Facebook hurts my self-esteem. This week was something called speed friending, more or less inspired by the speed dating craze that cleaned up the word "loose" a little bit. The Young Professionals also do speed dating, but I felt like my fear of women probably made me a bad candidate for the latter.

I got there way, way, way too early and met up with Lisa in the parking lot, where we stood around for a real long time, mutually thrilled about the idea of making new friends. You get there before the whole speed friending starts and you've got to kill the time with some unstructured friending, and neither of us were going to have that. I guess we went in about ten minutes before the seating began because I just couldn't wait to start drinking. Cuba libre: sounds so much more cocktail-literate than "rum and coke." By the way, thank God I went with Lisa, because if she wasn't there, I'd still be sitting in that parking lot right now.

I had mixed results once the whole getting-to-know-you portion of the evening got underway. There were thirty or so people there and I guess that's a good size. Half of us were designated sitters; the rest were movers, rotating one seat clockwise every three minutes when Laura, Ubiquitous Mistress of Ceremonies who finally got my damn name right the first time, rang the Conversation Ending Bell.

So, three minutes, right? That's a hundred and eighty seconds, barely long enough to unfreeze a Stouffer's microwave dinner, but it's so freaking malleable at speed friending. My conversations are like the mayflies of social discourse — according to the Interwebs, mayflies have such a short lifespan that they don't even need to feed themselves — but it's frustrating when what could've been a five minute conversation about "This club is in such a weird location, sharing a mini-mall, next door to an A&P and a laundromat," gets knocked out in its prime by the Conversation Ending Bell. Then there's the other extreme, and all I can think of to talk about is, "What do you do," "Where are you from," and "Uh...," and suddenly galaxies are disintegrating in those three minutes. It is un-comftor-ble. I feel like the bartender cut my cuba libre on too much Diet Coke, and I should've gotten a drink that was all alcohol, like a NyQuil martini or something.

It gets repetitive:

Where are you from?

Fanwood... ... ... [Jay the Human Atlas explains where Fanwood is.]

What do you do?

I'm a web designer.

How's business?

[I prevaricate. And on and on. I work freelance. For small businesses. And individuals. Who want to have, uh, "a presence on the web." Artists, writers, local restaurants. I meet lots of interesting people.]

I was thinking about setting up a web site.

[Even though I know you totally aren't...] Here, take a business card.

I compulsively explain that it's not my real job, just in case I'm... fuck it, one of us is underestimating the other one of us.

I came away with fifteen new friends! I'll be so damn popular at the next NJYP event. Boy, I just wish I could remember their names. And what they do. And where they're from. And if I've already handed them my card.