“What kind of difference can a few years make?” wailed Darlene Love. “I gotta have you now or my heart will break.”

Of course, Darlene was complaining about objections by the parental units. But if he’s reluctant, perhaps you should hand him a calculator:

Mathematicians have come up with a ‘fiancee formula’ that allows men to work out the perfect time to pop the question.

All he needs is the age he would first consider marrying and his cut-off point — and the equation does the rest.

Variables:
  p = youngest age desired to “settle down”
  n = oldest, &c.

Then calculate [(n - p) x 0.368] + p.

Supposedly, this works just as well if she’s the one who’s not so sure.

Still, this comment seems apropos: “Shouldn’t academics get a girlfriend before they do these surveys?”

So said Joe Jackson, but he wasn’t thinking about this:

[I]t kills me to think of the world my perfect, beautiful, gorgeous daughter is inheriting. Soon someone will tell her that she is not enough and she will believe them and it will break my heart. Because she is perfect, and I do not wish this torment on anyone, especially not my spectacular Kiki. (Except for maybe Karl Lagerfeld, though I have a feeling he is quite familiar with this particular hell. He’ll never be the thin woman he really, really wants to be.)

The obsession with outward perfection extends into the political realm, as you can be any fat slob with a computer and become a respected political pundit (no offense, guys, you know I loves ya), but you ladies ain’t gonna get a Fox News contributor gig unless you lose 50 pounds and get some blonde extensions. It doesn’t help when awesome, supportive chicks like Laura Ingraham start slagging off “plus size” airheads they don’t agree with, as if that is somehow a valid response to the vapid musings of the McCain Spawn.

Vapidity, of course, is not a function of one’s size, and fortunately, I don’t aspire to much beyond “fat slob with a computer.” Furthermore, while Fox News sports a fair number of babes, there are interesting-looking talking, um, heads on rival networks.

More important, though, is this:

In situations like these, the lie only has as much power as we give it and once we break the cycle of passively condoning the lie by continuing to consume it, the house of cards starts to tumble. There are much more important things for us to worry about than whether or not we can fit into sample sizes. Me, I worry about my Fran times and my mile splits. And, you know, a nuclear Iran. I’m totally shallow, though.

Sure she is.

We’ll have none of those Personal Displays of Affection in this store:

Oh, and a little plea to the coupled people of the world: Though it might seem a perfectly lovely idea to you to go to the Wal-mart on a Saturday at 4 pm, and walk slowly side by side down the aisles, arms about each others’ waists, and stop periodically to snog, trust me, the bitter single people who are out trying to quickly get food so they may get back to whatever semblance of a life they have will not feel happy for you and look longingly at you wishing they were you.

Rather, they will mutter, “Get a room, already” under their breaths and push past you to get to the cereal aisle.

I’ve never seen this sort of thing myself — where I shop, if there’s a couple, they’re usually trying to get an unruly child to cool his jets — but I’m sure it could be quite annoying.

Over here in Straight City, it’s easy to toss off phrases about luring the opposite sex and such, and nearly as easy to overlook the fact that a small but not insubstantial portion of the audience isn’t looking toward the “opposite sex” at all.

The language, of course, adapts eventually, and not by the brandishing of ugly-sounding terms like “heteronormative,” but by simple substitution. I have to admit, though, I wouldn’t have expected to see an example of such in Motor Trend. Still, there it is, on page 84 of the March issue, in a paragraph about Oldsmobile’s rise to the top of the sales charts in the middle 1970s:

Olds’ Cutlass muscled in on the best-seller action for 1976 thanks largely to strong sales of the Supreme coupe, which, along with the Ford Thunderbird, Chevrolet Monte Carlo and Chrysler Cordoba appealed to optimistic Baby Boomers who were single and looking to lure the attractive sex with a flashy long-hood/short-deck two-door with all the bells and whistles.

Why, that’s downright … inclusive.

While the returns didn’t go out until Monday (and the post office wasn’t open anyway), I did my taxes on Valentine’s Day, and that’s about as romantic as I get, given the perennial lack of entries on my dance card.

Which is not to say that couples always have it easy:

I spent a gray afternoon sitting on the couch editing a novel for a vanity publisher, while my significant other spent the day at a science fiction convention in Boston.

Although this wasn’t their worst V-Day by any means:

[T]hat honor goes to the first Valentine’s Day we lived together, a Friday night, when I sat home alone while he took another woman out on a date. (Granted, the woman in question had my blessing; she was a friend of mine serving as Maid of Honor at another woman’s wedding, and needed my boyfriend for the obligatory male escort on her arm. To thank me, she gave me a nice Swarovski crystal figurine for my collection, and when people ask about my romantic history I tell them “Oh, yeah, our first Valentine’s Day together I pimped out my boyfriend for crystal crap.”)

Not everyone can say that.

Well, isn’t this sweet: Sixteen percent of respondents to a Fair Isaac survey would not consider dating anyone with a FICO score of 700 or less. (One percent, in fact, will insist on 800 or more.)

And this question came up: “When dating, when should you disclose your financial situation?” Says this same survey:

While the majority wait a while to discuss finances with their partner, men were nearly twice as likely as women to discuss finances right away.

Especially, I suspect, if they show up with a FICO below, oh, 699 or so.

(Via Sex and the 405, which I’m pretty sure refers to the San Diego Freeway, not the Oklahoma City area code.)

“Why, I wouldn’t go out with you, even if you were me.”

A latter-day (well, 1977, anyway) single by the Carpenters advances the notion that “it’s a dirty old shame when all you get from love is a love song.” I certainly don’t expect anything more than that. On the other hand, a good love song is worth hearing on the 364¼ days each year that aren’t Valentine’s Day, and since JenX was kind enough to put up a playlist of some of her favorites, I figure this might be a good time to point you once again to my infamous V-Day mix, now six years old and not even slightly dated. (Then again, I’m fifty-six years old and not even slightly dated these days.) One of these years I’m going to have to knock out a Volume Two.

Accent on “always.”

(Seen at Morgan Freeberg’s place. I heard somewhere that this was actually aired during some sort of football game.)

From this very quarter, last month:

Julia Baird in Newsweek argues “the case against settling,” mostly as a shot across the bow of Lori Gottlieb, who’s written a book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. One problem, says Baird, is Gottlieb’s assertion that women expect too much.

Now The Last Psychiatrist has found another problematic assertion by Gottlieb, this time in The Atlantic:

To be fair, my conceptualization of what a good relationship is may be very different from hers. Here’s hers:

“In my formative years, romance was John Cusack and Ione Skye in Say Anything. But when I think about marriage nowadays, my role models are the television characters Will and Grace, who, though Will was gay and his relationship with Grace was platonic, were one of the most romantic couples I can think of.”

Nothing characterizes The Dumbest Generation Of Narcissists In The History Of The World better than using throw away cinema as a template for life. What kind of results did she expect?

The Atlantic article is here. Here’s the bit that gets me:

Each time I read about single women having babies on their own and thriving instead of settling for Mr. Wrong and hiring a divorce lawyer, I felt all jazzed and ready to go. At the time, I truly believed, “I can have it all — a baby now, my soul mate later!”

Well … ha! Hahahaha. And ha.

And so she did, and now she grumbles:

Just as the relationship books fail to mention what happens after you triumphantly land a husband (you actually have to live with each other), these single-mom books fail to mention that once you have a baby alone, not only do you age about 10 years in the first 10 months, but if you don’t have time to shower, eat, urinate in a timely manner, or even leave the house except for work, where you spend every waking moment that your child is at day care, there’s very little chance that a man — much less The One — is going to knock on your door and join that party.

On the other hand, as Lloyd Dobler once said, “If you start out depressed everything’s kind of a pleasant surprise.” But then, he’d say just about anything.

(Spotted by the Twisted Spinster of Spleenville.)

The time for due diligence is before you do someone something else. Inevitably, there’s an app for that:

Even though dating should be about having fun and meeting new people, it’s also about finding out if this person is potential mate material. I mean you want to know if the person sitting across from you has had serious run-ins with the law or has picked their nose since age seven. Thanks to this new iPhone and Android app, you might not be able to check about the nose picking habit, but you can get the deets on just about everything else.

Date Check is an app that lets users pull up all those juicy secrets that you want to know, but might be too shy to ask on the first or second date. With a flick of the wrist you can find out if a person has a criminal history via the sleeze detector. You can also see if they own real estate, or if they’re living with someone — say a spouse they might have forgotten to mention.

I’m thinking that the slogan — “Lookup before you hookup” — is just a hair off-putting, at least to me.

“Why,” asks the Hyacinth Girl, “do people insist on writing ridiculous sex scenes?”

I picked up my yearly copy of Cosmo this weekend — I love Anna Faris — and paged through what seemed to be acres of cheesy sex advice and attempted bawdy talk. First of all, girls don’t do sex talk well. We tend to giggle and shy away from the proper names of things. Anyway, the back pages are reserved for excerpts of romance novels, and being unfamiliar with that particular genre, I had to read it. I don’t understand how women read those things without laughing. All that talk of “his length” and “member” and “ravishing her” is just terrible. I’ve read good sex scenes and that ain’t it. I know that if I could only swallow (ha! ha! “swallow” — I’m a 16 year old boy at heart when it comes to these things) my pride, I could make a lot of money writing that crap.

Bad sex scenes, however, are hardly confined to the romance-novel genre. Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes (The Kindly Ones), a memoir of a fictional SS officer, contains this howler:

Her vulva was opposite my face. The small lips protruded slightly from the pale, domed flesh. This sex was watching at me, spying on me, like a Gorgon’s head, like a motionless Cyclops whose single eye never blinks. Little by little this silent gaze penetrated me to the marrow. My breath sped up and I stretched out my hand to hide it: I no longer saw it, but it still saw me and stripped me bare (whereas I was already naked). If only I could still get hard, I thought, I could use my prick like a stake hardened in the fire, and blind this Polyphemus who made me Nobody.

It gets worse after that. The Literary Review was pleased, or at least amused, to present its seventeenth annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award for this very passage. The list of previous winners suggests that mere romances don’t stand a chance against the furiously-awful concoctions of ostensibly “literary” fiction.

(For your further dining and dancing pleasure: An arbitrary list of the 25 Sexiest Novels, from 2006. I expect Steve Lackmeyer to have a coronary any moment now.)

In my blunter, dumber moments, I have been known to admit that I do a genuinely-lousy job of getting over people; even the most fleeting crush still occupies memory space, and no amount of anything will dislodge it. Usually I blame brain damage.

Easier, though, to blame brain chemistry:

[F]irsts, it turns out, are so packed with deep emotional and physiological sensations, they’re deeply etched in our memories, creating what psychologists call “flash-bulb” memories. In addition, these “firsts” drive up dopamine and norepinephrine, chemicals in the brain that basically make us feel good, tuned in, and rewarded.

What happens, then, is when we experience something, like, say meeting someone who reminds us of a first love — whether it’s physical appearance or a similar personality — those chemicals are released again and the memory we have of that relationship is triggered. We may even assign this new person the characteristics of our exes. This is called “transference.” And it’s not just the characteristics of your ex that gets transferred; “your old feelings, motivations, and expectations are also reactivated.” According to Susan Andersen, a psychologist at NYU who studies mental representations of significant others, “if someone new reminds you of an ex you still love, [...] you’ll like that new person more, want to be close to them, and even start repeating the behaviors you engaged in with your ex.” In other words, many people really don’t truly get over their first loves.

Attempting to write your way out of it doesn’t work all that well, either.

But I’m now at the point where I don’t trust any of this stuff. Maybe it’s all illusion. (The estimable Nelson Muntz was once heard to say, “Some of us prefer illusion to despair.”)

It does not help that the music box around here chose, during the writing of this, to serve up “Brandy” by Looking Glass, which may or may not have been based on this sad tale.

Besides, I persist in believing that the first love is never as important as the last one.

Our smutsational society, says Robert Stacy McCain, is putting women into some awkward situations:

One of the weirdest effects of pornified culture is young women feeling pressured to conform to the Porn Norm. Beyond the trend of extreme depilation — the deforestation of the pubic delta, so to speak — now girls are getting surgically altered:

[A] young woman consulted a doctor about the fact that her labia minora extended slightly beyond her labia majora and that this caused her embarrassment. Instead of reassuring her that this was entirely normal, the doctor recommended, and carried out, surgery on her labia.

Ouch. And, honestly, what a tragedy. I’m struggling to find a way to say this in a PG-13 way, so I’ll just say it: Lots of guys like that extra helping of cauliflower. IYKWIMAITYD.

Previous commentary on landing strips here.

Disclosure: I was once married to a girl from Mount Pleasant. Said so right on her birth certificate.

In general, I defend romance novels — yes, they’re unrealistic, but reality is overrated — though once in a while I find something like this and the porcupine in me crops out:

A computer programmer can only find love if he’s built like a bodybuilder and quits computer programming to become a “hip Beverly Hills record producer.”

Now they tell me.

Oh, well. I knew the job was dangerous when I took it, Fred.

Julia Baird in Newsweek argues “the case against settling,” mostly as a shot across the bow of Lori Gottlieb, who’s written a book called Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr. Good Enough. One problem, says Baird, is Gottlieb’s assertion that women expect too much:

This twisted thinking makes my head hurt. First, the only evidence offered to prove that women expect too much is anecdotal. Are some women too picky? Sure. People are shallow, unkind, and judgmental. But I don’t know any women who have checklists. If they do, I imagine it’s something most grow out of. If you will only date someone who looks like Brad Pitt, “earns a gazillion dollars, and makes your knees go weak every time you’re together,” as Gottlieb writes, then you’re probably either 20 or stupid.

It appears Baird’s circle of friends doesn’t intersect with mine, because every woman with whom I’ve discussed this paragraph has agreed with at least some of it:

Women, I have always believed, have a Mate Template of sorts, and whether a man has any chance with her depends on how closely he conforms to the standards she has proposed. Some points are more negotiable than others, and perhaps some won’t budge in the slightest, but ultimately, what determines the course of the relationship is how much she’s willing to compromise on that template. (Men’s selectivity is somewhat less linear, I think.)

Which I say neither in sorrow nor in anger: it’s simply a hypothesis that explains things better than previous explanations, and as such is subject to change should a less-inaccurate account come along. And the standards set down in this template are generally not so specific as “Must look like Brad Pitt” or “Must earn no less than $1.0 gazillion,” though I’m pretty sure someone who escaped from Meth Mountain and subsequently showed up on the coast isn’t going to get much of anywhere with Julia Baird. (Or, for that matter, with Lori Gottlieb.)

On the other hand, this sort of observation doesn’t play particularly well with me:

Gottlieb’s sadness is another lament for the unlucky in a generation who delayed marriage longer than any other, risking their fertility, and found themselves fighting for a family in ways our mothers would not have dreamed of. Half a dozen of my friends are having children on their own: buying sperm, signing up for IVF, freezing eggs.

Um, well, yeah, okay. Probably half of those children will be girls. And some day they’re going to be looking for mates, and perhaps by then they might dimly realize that they have no experience whatsoever with the other half of the species. You can’t say that, though: the first rule of “fighting for a family” is that you do not talk about actually fighting for a family.

Now I have no idea how well this template business works in the opposite direction. I do know this, though: if I’ve run the analysis, and the target appears to be at least 50.1 percent of what I’m looking for, the heart is rolled into position, ready for its new assignment. And when nothing happens, as nothing always does, it’s dragged back into the shadows, left to accumulate another layer of dust.

But if it’s Baird’s world, and I only live in it, none of this should matter: I’ve had my children, and they in turn are having theirs. The species is thus perpetuated. I suppose I’ll have to, um, settle for that.

(From a throwaway remark by Robert Stacy McCain, who surely had no intention of sending me off in this direction.)

The February Maxim has a very Maximesque list, titled “Dump Her with Flowers.” Among the undesirable posies: Phallus impudicus, the common stinkhorn, which technically isn’t a flower, and Hymenopus coronatus, the orchid mantis, which technically isn’t even a plant. Still, I have to figure that a bouquet of any of these, um, organisms will do the job, if the job you want to do contains the phrase “I don’t want to see you again.”

There are, generally, two places where you’ll find the phrase “spiritual, but not religious”: the About (or similar) page on someone’s blog, and in a profile on a dating service.

The latter, at least, is a means toward an end:

A sweeping new psychological survey has come to the conclusion that North Americans tell others they have spiritual beliefs to appear more attractive, especially to prospective mates.

People subconsciously paint flattering pictures of themselves by revealing they have inner spiritual beliefs, according to Constantine Sedikides, a social psychologist at Southampton University in Britain.

The strong link between spiritual convictions and social attractiveness is based on Sedikides’ overview of 57 different international studies, which recently appeared in the prestigious Personality and Social Psychology Review.

And for some reason, this link is strongest in the US and Canada. The reason for this is apparently unclear:

Sedikides wonders if people believe the self-worth of a person rises if they believe themselves, or others, are valued in the eyes of a divine reality.

Other evolutionary psychologists have speculated self-enhancement expands when people assume, rightly or wrongly, “spiritual” people may be more trustworthy, believe in something beyond their own self-interest or are inclined to monogamy.

It might even be simpler than that: some people are resistant to the very idea of dogma, at least to the extent that it’s alleged to be handed down from on high. (Horizontal dogma, otherwise known as “All my friends have the same delusions,” is just fine; just don’t introduce a vertical component.) Besides, how different, qualitatively quantitatively, is “spiritual, but not religious” from “promiscuous, but not slutty”?

And I suspect that if people could be persuaded that they’d get laid more often if they bore the image of the AT&T Death Star on their bodies, there’d be a worldwide shortage of blue tattoo ink inside of a week.

Update: Fixed an inappropriate word.

“Every Breath You Take” gets played at weddings, fergoshsakes, and it’s about as inappropriate a tune for such an occasion as can possibly be imagined: the lyrics practically scream “Stalker!” I see it as being more generally Orwellian, but then again, we’re supposed to love Big Brother, right?

And if it’s not the least-appropriate wedding song ever, how about …

My friend picked “God Only Knows” by The Beach Boys 4 her wedding song. Why would u pick a song that starts “I may not always love you”?

As tweeted by Riki Lindhome, the leggier half of Garfunkel & Oates.

I might worry that her friend might actually be thinking realistically instead of romantically; as the Boys noted two songs later on Pet Sounds, “Love is here today and it’s gone tomorrow / It’s here and gone so fast.”

But lyricist Tony Asher knew what he was doing with that opening line. It’s that old perception-versus-reality thing again: you might want to question my devotion at some point, but ultimately “I’ll make you so sure about it.” And really, have you ever seen a couple this side of Darby and Joan who didn’t occasionally have their differences? “The couples cling and claw and drown in love’s debris,” noted Carly Simon (and/or Jacob Brackman) several years later. But still they cling.

So “God Only Knows,” as the young folks used to say, tells it like it is. By all means, play the record. Everybody in the place will be singing along before the instrumental break anyway.

“If you love somebody,” said Sting, ungrammatically, “set them free.”

Well, screw that.

According to the new biography Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, by Peter Biskind, the Actor Formerly Known As Bulworth has bedded, in succession, 12,775 women, “a figure that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on.”

This figure apparently is open to debate; it seems rather high to me, though anything with two digits seems rather high to me.

I do hope he’s had his shots, or whatever one takes these days.

The split between Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins gave me only the briefest glance at “OMG she’s available again!” before reality snapped that particular window shut. Besides, the unfortunate interaction of my sporadic fondness for insane redheads and the all-too-persistent impairment of my libido means I’m far better suited to the likes of Maureen Dowd, and despite her manifest charms I really don’t need to be associated with someone so easily fisked.

But this observation from Dave on the Sarandon/Robbins rift keeps coming back to me:

One has to wonder if any couple from Hollywood can survive.

Well, Tim and Susan did stay together for 21 years, which is far longer than any of my liaisons lasted, but still a bit short of “till death us do part.” Of course, they never took the vows, in deference to that old platitude of how it’s just a piece of paper, y’know, and how does that count for anything?

So I contemplated my own perhaps-stereotypical view of the Hollywood mindset, which goes something like this: “Does showbiz turn people into asshats, or do asshats naturally gravitate toward showbiz?” The contemporary fusion of celebrity and politics would seem to suggest the latter: Hollywood has only so many job openings, but there’s a growing surplus of buttock berets, and they have to go somewhere. And really, if you have two practicing hemorrhoidal Homburgs in one household, the potential for conflict is doubled, maybe even quadrupled.

Still, Tinseltown’s breakup rate doesn’t seem all that different from Tulsa’s, so there’s got to be some other factor at work besides mere rectal millinery, and I suspect it’s simply this: we’ve gotten used to the idea of No Consequences, that commitments can be exited as easily as they are entered, that anything making us unhappy must be discarded at once for the sake of our self-esteem. Discomfort is to be avoided at all cost. Cue Woody Allen:

Annie Hall: Sometimes I ask myself how I’d stand up under torture.

Alvy Singer: You? You kiddin’? If the Gestapo would take away your Bloomingdale’s charge card, you’d tell ‘em everything.

Not that this gives me any leave to pretend to be superior.

Back in August, when I wrote about the chap who went on a killing spree in a women’s gym in Pennsylvania after whining about his lack of success with the ladies — his whining, not mine — several women pointed out that he most likely gave off a creepy vibe long before he hit upon his Final Solution.

But what are the chances that someone who looks pretty creepy actually is? Perhaps better than we think [redirects to PDF file]:

Despite the crucial role of physical appearance in forming first impressions, little research has examined the accuracy of personality impressions based on appearance alone. This study examined the accuracy of observers’ impressions on 10 personality traits based on full-body photographs using criterion measures based on self and peer reports. When targets’ posture and expression were constrained (standardized condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for extraversion, self-esteem, and religiosity. When targets were photographed with a spontaneous pose and facial expression (spontaneous condition), observers’ judgments were accurate for almost all of the traits examined. Lens model analyses demonstrated that both static cues (e.g., clothing style) and dynamic cues (e.g., facial expression, posture) offered valuable personality-relevant information. These results suggest that personality is manifested through both static and expressive channels of appearance, and observers use this information to form accurate judgments for a variety of traits.

Or, as Fausta notes: “In plain English, if someone looks creepy, odds are they are.”

I have got to find myself a cloaking device.

Nilsson, I thought, addressed the question of being on the wrong end at the end of the relationship very directly: “You’re breakin’ my heart / You’re tearin’ it apart / So …”

Sometimes, though, it takes more than just a song to get you through your pain. At least a couple of these were intended as viral, and not all are entirely safe for work.

(Courtesy of Miss Cellania.)

Which is a follow-up to “The girl in the locker room”, one I’d never expected to write.

No, not James Blunt. That would never do.

But just the same, you’re beautiful:

I know I can never be with you, cute hipster girl. My bicycle has not only brakes, but multiple gears. It is, in fact, a hybrid, the fanny pack of the bicycle world. I am entirely free of tattoos. My facial hair is patchy at best, so I am unable to grow a beard. I live west of I-35. I am not a member of a lo-fi shoegaze indie pop band that sometimes gigs at Progress Coffee, and indeed I can’t play any musical instruments. I can’t even play the ukulele, the fanny pack of the indie rock world. I find Wes Anderson somewhat tedious, and I have not read a single issue of McSweeney’s in anything even vaguely resembling its entirety. My jeans do not hug my legs, and I do not have a single stylishly retro vest or hat in my closet. I rarely listen to KUT or KVRX. Although I own a Moleskine, I have to be honest with you … I don’t really write in it that much. I went to the Chuck Close show at the Austin Museum of Art and I’m pretty sure I didn’t get it. I shop at HEB and not Wheatsville.

My appreciation of Hall and Oates is entirely non-ironic. I occasionally eat meat.

But the biggest problem, hipster girl of Austin, is that you’re just too intimidating in your good taste and vaguely-counterculture-but-not-threateningly-eccentric hotness for me to ever work up the pluck to talk to you. I know I will never be cool enough. Le sigh.

And forty years after I left Austin, here on this blog, the fanny pack of the Internet world, I seem suddenly to be missing some of the girls who never paid me the slightest attention in the first place.

Which is, of course, all of them.

Not the activity of street musicians many decades ago, but the process by which the demand for sex tapes is met. I think I liked the musicians better.

The Unreligious Right turns up some shots of Hot Atheist Girls.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. On the other hand, I tend to suspect that this is one of those “mysterious ways” in which the Lord works.

(Via Jenn1964.)

For some reason, “missed connections” has always been my favorite section of the craigslist personals.

This one from Chicago dealt me a solid:

As we both entered an ATM at Division and Milwaukee, you were momentarily distracted by a sleek 20-something brunette. Your eyes followed her until she was out of sight. Me, you looked right through. It’s hard to believe I have another 20-30 years of being ignored.

It’s hard to believe that somebody would be that easily distracted by — wait a minute, was that Zooey Deschanel?

I’ve been on television twice, both times in time slots where nobody could possibly be watching (I keep telling myself), and I’ve had a couple of mentions in the Gazette. The Oklahoman, however, tends to ignore me, and I’m starting to think that’s a Good Thing, since the absence of coverage gives their brow-at-nose-level Web commentariat no shot at me.

This story, for instance, has drawn all sorts of nasty remarks:

Cathy Velte is not your average 54-year-old. The Oklahoma City woman is a successful medical researcher. Financially secure, she’s single, beautiful and confident. She’s a speed junkie who races cars professionally. And she’s proud to be a cougar.

But wait. Most people think of a cougar as a lonely, desperate woman over 40 who is on the prowl for a younger man. That hardly describes Velte.

That’s because Velte is one of thousands of women on a crusade to redefine the term cougar as applied to women.

A sample of the verbiage:

It is flabbergasting that someone would think they could appropriate a term — “cougar” — which is code for “I sleep around” and *NOT* think they are going to “inherit a degrading label.” The “label” fits.

“Code,” incidentally, is code for “This is a blatant example of projection” a good 90-95 percent of the time.

I’m guessing that if Cathy Velte races Porsches and runs a medical lab, she probably doesn’t have time to sleep around, not that it’s anybody’s business in the first place. Furthermore, I have just enough glass around the house to remind myself of the qualifications for stone-throwing. I will, however, lob a lump of feldspar at Steve Lackmeyer if he somehow sells the Dark Tower suits on the notion that I’m somehow newsworthy; I’d almost rather get Valentines from the Lost Ogles.