October 7, 2002

Tonight I had an altogether new experience, which I am going to call an undate.

Several weeks ago I got a response to my planet out ad from a guy named N.N. who was about to move to New York. His e-mail and profile were charming, but the picture in his profile was so unattractive that I knew I could never love him. So I e-mailed him and told him that, since posting the ad, I had acquired a boyfriend (neither completely true nor completely false), but that I’d still love to meet him if he was interested in making friends in the city.

So he moved here a couple weeks ago and we arranged to meet tonight. I was surprised to see that he was nowhere near as unattractive as his picture made him seem. I mean, he’s no Peter Bacanovic, but I wouldn’t kick him out of bed for eating crackers. (Of course, the way I have been leading my life lately, it’s difficult to imagine somebody I would kick out of bed for eating crackers, but that’s neither here nor there.)

In any case, things were fine for a while, until he asked about my boyfriend. The problem, of course, was that when I first wrote him, I had two reasonable facsimiles of a boyfriend, and now I have none.

So I lied.

I am a terrible liar.

The more I said, the less sense I made and the less believable I was, and so the more I felt I had to say to try to make more sense and be more believable, and so the less—well, you get the picture. In the end I wove such a Byzantine tissue of lies, truths, half-truths, quarter-truths, and pi-truths that I clearly sounded like a creature from another planet.

So it doesn’t matter if I decide he’s attractive enough for me to love, because he thinks I am an ALIEN FROM OUTER SPACE.

How do I get myself into these situations?