The Screening

Screening profiles is quite a skill. You must take your entire lifetime of learned social cues to judge how one reference implies major character flaws. It's loads of fun.

Step one: getting past the photo/s. If the guy is decent looking, there's inevitably one photo that is questionable: a blue steel head shot, wearing a cheesy Billabong graphic tee, the sexually ambivalent one, standing next to a big sculpture intended to attract children (like an oversized M&M animation), I can go on...

Step two for me is height, no shorter than 5'11. 2 inches, is that too much to ask for??

And here's where the real culture and style snob in me comes in.

Here's the recent no-fly-zones:
- referenced Jay Leno as funny
- favorite recent book was the one about the ivy league gamblers who beat vegas
- any business book as a favorite book (no, I would never date someone like my Cisco-psycho brother but I think he's clever enough to know how to attract what he wants, which he did! plus he had me and Alta to show him the cultural ropes)
- almost any made-to-movie book, especially the thrillers
- any mention of cuddling with pet dog
- trying to be a poet: "things I appreciate most: eyes so I can see, ears so I can listen, heart so I can feel"

Some of my favorites from my online dating cohorts:

- no favorite movie =shawshank redemption or DiVinci Code

- no more than one mention of a dog

- no pics of them + dog
- anything cliche like, "I like to live life to the fullest"

Would love to hear others, anyone for share and tell?

On a positive note, what I do look for is someone with a more unconventional background.
- not born in this country
- traveled extensively, lived in other parts of the world
- more specifically, Chinese guy born in India, interesting!
- intellectual- say, sites New Yorker as his favorite publication
- sense of humor - tough one, but anything that makes me chuckle a bit, like "one thing I wish more people would notice about me is that I'm funnier than you" Well, it's only funny if he's so perceptive that nobody gets him but it's probably because he really isn't funny.
- some sense of humility - that's a tough read too...
- self-deprecating humor
- biographies as a recent favorite book

You really have to read between the lines because anyone can create a rosy profile. I mean, I'm not going to write that my college nickname was Jizzoyce (now abbreviated to simply Jizz) and that my brother places me in the "castrator" wave of the feminist movement. Hey, but I am caring in my own way, thanks Ryan! I wonder if you can tell I'm a bully from my profile... I've been trying to shed the fear factor since Hong Kong, definitely an avatar you don't want to know.