1. do you smoke? not like, every so often you’ll have a smoke at a bar or at a concert, i mean do you smoke. yes? sorry. unless you have some pretty overwhelming qualities to make up for this, it’s not going to happen. overwhelming qualities might include: …uh…jeez. basically you would have to awesome in every other way to make up for this. and you’d have to agree to never smoke around me.
  2. corollary (sort of) to #1: do you have chronic bad breath? i guess it’s kind of shallow, but i can not be getting up close and personal with someone who always has dragon breath.
  3. i like guys with skills. guys who know how to use tools and fix things around the house or know stuff about cars or hardware or, you know, physics. if you have to check the internet when you want to hang a picture or don’t understand what an alternator is, we’ve got a problem here.
  4. are you religious? guess what? i don’t believe in god and even if i did, i think organized religion is an outdated scam. are your hackles up? in that case, be satisfied that i’ll burn in hell and we can go our separate ways.
  5. do you bathe regularly? at least every other day? no? buy some soap, hippie.
  6. there are these things called video games. are you aware of them? have you played any? can you name a title besides ‘tetris’ and ‘zelda’ and ‘super mario bros.’? if the answer to any of these is ‘no’ – sorry.
  7. there are these things called movies. do you go see a lot of them? if not, are you prepared to see a lot of them? no? i neither understand nor am willing to spend time with your kind.
  8. i eat a lot. and often. if you’re at all put off by the idea of going out and having a girl half your size put away twice as much as you, you can fuck all the way off. but before you go, i’m gonna eat the rest of your fries. kthxbye.
  9. sci-fi. are you contemptuous of it? will you make a snide remark when i get excited about something that happened on ‘battlestar galactica’ or when you see that i have all of ‘star trek: deep space nine’ on dvd? we will never get along.

i bought maggie mason’s book, and i am going to try to do an idea from it at least once a week. this is #32.