By Gina Angostura
Columnist

Now what do I do?

A whole year of complaining about not enough dates, then I finally post a picture on my personals site and I get more responses than I can deal with. I get it: Men are visual. Who knew?

But am I happy?

No, because now, instead of complaining about being dateless, I can complain about how hard it’s going to be to keep this process organized. It would be so much simpler if the system arranged the relationship for you. Click on a link, type in a few criteria and voila! Your perfect guy. Click “add to basket” to accept or click “keep shopping.”

Previous articles • September 28, 2006 • September 14, 2006 • August 31, 2006 • August 17, 2006 • August 3, 2006 • July 20, 2006 • July 6, 2006 • June 22, 2006 • June 8, 2006 • May 25, 2006 • May 11, 2006 • April 27, 2006 • April 13, 2006 • March 30, 2006 • March 16, 2006 • March 2, 2006 • February 16, 2006 • February 2, 2006 • January 26, 2006 • January 19, 2006 • January 12, 2006 • January 5, 2006 • 2005 Archives

But now I have to read stuff and decide stuff and answer stuff.

My regular e-mail gets backed up enough, and I don’t have to do anything with that but read it. But my future is in the balance here, and my memory sucks. The only thing I retain anymore is water.

What if I forget to answer The One? What if I can’t remember I already told one guy about my love for Breyer’s butter almond ice cream and repeat myself and make him think I’m some ice cream obsessive? Or what if I forget to answer The One?

See? I need a dating secretary. Someone who’ll say, “Ms. Angostura, time for your lunch meeting with the accountant who likes blues and long walks on the beach and read ‘The Da Vinci Code.’ ”

Then I can say, “Which one?” Because who can tell one of those from another?

A dating secretary would also take care of weeding out unsuitable candidates for me, so I don’t have to waste time reading about the guy who wants an honest woman who doesn’t play games because he has issues with women who lie and play games because some prior woman obviously was a liar and a game player.

I have sympathy for the guy, really I do. But if I’m not spilling the contents of my baggage all over my profile, then neither should he. And believe me, there are more items in my baggage than I could ever sneak into the overhead bin. First date is plenty soon enough for that stuff.

So the secretary – I’m thinking of a cute guy here – would keep track of profiles, bring me my messages, schedule my dates and generally help move the process along. Sort of a PDA for PDA, if you know what I mean.

Look, I know I’m going to have to make out with a lot of frogs to get to my goal. I’m more than willing to do it. Amphibians R Us.

I just hope that I don’t run over any of the good ones with the tires of my carelessness on the rainy road of life.

True love is too precious to be squished.