I want…

I want….

I want…

Thank you, Christine, for sending this image.

I want to live and breathe. I want the sunshine, the flowers, the patter of rain and slashes of lightening. I want the power outage so I can feel the great sense of relief when the lights come back on.

I want the ordinary. I want the mundane, the routine. I want the stacks of laundry, the piles of papers, so I can feel a sense of accomplishment when they are gone. I want them all to return, like a cycle, so I can tackle a chore with the confidence that I know just what to do.

I want the new experiences, the challenges, the opportunities for growth and wisdom. I want to look back and laugh at what wasn’t funny at the time. I want the surprises that make me think and make me smile. I want the harder road sometimes, because there is so much to see.

I want to love, and to share that light. I want to sit in perfect harmony with one I love so I can feel the vibration of my soul as it matches another’s. I want to fight, so I can forgive or be forgiven and rekindle our connection through the gratitude of knowing the storm has passed.

I want inner light, that glow that comes from happiness. I want that so I can put it forward, so I can light up a life that is getting dark. I want to bring joy and peace more than I want to have it.

I want to believe in the spirit. I want to feel mine, and theirs. I want to touch those who share this Earth with me now, and I want to be touched by those who have come before me, and left.

I want to see heaven. I want the beauty and the ever-present and all-encompassing love. I want to know what is waiting for me because it will make the hardships less. I can get though the days that leave me broken because I know I will be fixed and whole again when it is time.

I want to be connected with God. I want the guidance and the patience that He offers to those willing to take it. I want Him to know I will walk His path wherever I see it, and if I wander off the path I want to know He will light it up for me because He knows I will come back.

Knowing What I Know…Would I Do It All Again?

Knowing What I Know…Would I Do It All Again?.

I’m Only Here for the Life Experience

Over the many, many years I have graced this Earth, I’ve met – and usually worked with – nearly every personality type. I presume I’ve dodged meeting any serial killers, and since not everyone in my acquaintance can say the same thanks to a local pig farm, I am both proud and relieved to have missed this group. I have worked with gossips, backstabbers, flirts, bullies, princesses, doormats, passive-aggressive, born-again Christians, and circle-the-wagons cliques. I’ve also worked with excellent parents, open hearts, quick wits, generous minds, and helpful hands. It will surprise no one to know that these two groups – the good and the bad – are describing the same people.

Early on, I figured out that most folks are both wonderful and not. We all have good qualities, and by knowing who was good at what, and playing to their strengths, I could make even the most unbearable situations liveable. And turning the other cheek is much easier when you understand it is less a personal issue and more just them being human.

At some point in my life, I decided to own my flaws. After all, I am human, too. I knew my strengths, and I used them as much as possible, but I also knew where I struggled. I purposely learned as much about myself as possible. Reflections, experiments, memories, emotional growth, parenthood, and countless inspirational posts on Facebook have aided my path to the person I am within, and I’ve become aware of many traits that make “me”.

1)      I rarely get offended. It must be obviously both rude and petty.

2)      I forgive quickly.

3)      Unless it’s over my kids. “Forgive” and “forget” don’t ever apply when the offense is over my kids.

4)       I like to make people laugh.

5)      I actually like my own company.

6)      I actually like the company of others.

7)      I judge the value of a book by how many times I reread it.

8)      I can have my head in the clouds and my feet on the ground if I make myself stand very tall.

9)       Life gives us no guarantees, good or bad.

10)  And sometimes, just sometimes, miracles come disguised as disasters. With the exception of children and windfall lotteries, we rarely grow during the good times. It’s the hard times, the times when we must reevaluate through our grief, when we must toss out everything we thought was going to be and open ourselves to possibilities, that make us truly who we are.

Who She Is

I know people are put off by Shayla’s autism. I’ve seen it firsthand, and though people try to be polite, you can’t sugercoat rejection. Because it hurts to see my daughter rejected for what she cannot help, I’m working on a simple “how to” list for people we come in contact with on a regular basis. This is not the final draft, but it’s a good start.

Shayla isn’t rude. She has trouble choosing the right words, and she does not understand body language. But she is trying to understand you, and she is trying to communicate back to you what she thinks you want to hear.

She isn’t ignoring you. It takes her longer to process what you said, with context, subtext, and possible meanings. She does this better when she is looking away, because everything else is a distraction.

All distractions are major for her. They divert her focus completely away from her task at hand. She cannot stop it. It’s as automatic to her as reading facial expressions is to you.

She is quite happy in the company of others without interacting. But she is always paying attention. She can be prompted to interact, but she does not do small talk and she does not have the social tools for initiating conversations.

She prefers to write rather than visit. When she’s texting,,emailing, or messaging, there is nothing for her to decode except the words on the page.

She isn’t lazy. She has challenges with Executive Function, the instinctive ability to analyze, plan, organize, and schedule. Without it she cannot plan how to complete a task, and she is overwhelmed.

She isn’t stupid. In fact, she is be quite smart, and her brain has created clever pathways to cover what isn’t firing right. But the way of the classroom does not work for her. Give her a YouTube video with a visual – step by step (there’s that executive function stuff again!) – and she can learn anything. Give her a classroom, without the visual aids but with all the peripheral distractions, a disinterested instructor, and social and context cues her brain cannot decode, and she is lost. Take her out of the classroom and plunk her down with the kids who have far greater challenges than she, and her senses become overwhelmed. Just because she is the highest functioning child in the room does not mean she is high functioning.

Her mind is never blank. When she looks spaced out or dazed, it’s because her attention is turned inward.

She wants friends, but she needs people who accept that she has autism. She can’t be like all the other kids and no amount of avoiding her will change that, but when everyone grows up she won’t seem as different. Most 14 year olds have a lot of growing up to do. She’s just growing up on her own path.

She has value. She is bright, funny, creative, and loving. She wants to marry and have a family. She is surrounded by people who love her, and who she loves, too. She matters.

Witchiepoo

Earlier this afternoon, the Kinder Canada facebook page (which is maintained by the fine makers of Kinder Surprise) posted one of those status updates that spark, like, 400 responses in just under three minutes. The update reads, “Think fast! What was your favourite childhood game, growing up?”

So, like a multitude of other like-minded Canadians I gave this question the two-second “think fast” thought. The answer was obvious. I bet only a handful of people played this game, and I bet I know them all. My favorite game growing up was called, “Witchiepoo”.

The game itself was simple enough, but there was a strict routine to follow. It was a great game for a large group of kids, and perfect if they were of diverse ages. I remember playing it with the group on my block in the way, way back. There were maybe a dozen or so kids at any given time around our neighborhood, aged from nursery school and up. Logically, there must have been a cut-off age for playing with the neighbor’s four-year-olds, but these kids were the mysterious “teenagers” who rarely came outside.

I’ve since taught it to a few other groups, but though the kids loved the game, it never caught on like I remember. It  does take several rounds of the game, led by a Witchiepoo expert, to cement the storyline into the other players. And like any routine, it takes practice to really get it down. Plus, the game dates so far back it actually references smoking. This is so not cool for today’s generation, but for us it was just plain silly and therefore utterly hilarious. There is actually a mom, smoking a pipe.

Ha ha ha! Women NEVER smoked pipes! They smoked cigarettes!

Come to think of it, there were some major child-abandonment issues inherent in the game. I seriously doubt any of us noticed.

The game required a minimum of five players: a mom, a witch (these were generally played by the older kids), and at least three kids to play “kids” (a role well within the acting chops of your average four-year-old). It required a spot on someone’s front lawn for the “mom’s house” and a spot on someone else’s lawn for the “witch’s house”. Someone else’s lawn could be a block away and around the corner. Didn’t matter. If you could get a visual on both lawns it was all good, and in fact some distance made the game even better (we’ll get to that part later). The only real estate rules for the moms and witches was, “Who has the most shade right now and won’t kick us off?” If you had something fun on your lawn, you were Witchiepoo Central. (Side note – there were places on the block you NEVER played. I was pretty sure the strange, mean woman on the corner transformed into a monster at night to seek revenge on the kids who dared play near her property. This was reinforced by some episodes we had with her while she was in her human form. And though now I can look back through the eyes of an adult and understand she had a mental illness and would likely have been sweet and kind had the condition been treated, she was scary-mean to me at six.)

The object of the game really wasn’t really an objective at all. It was a clever ruse to bring together a group of kids into a game where no one kept score, no one was “it”, and no one was “out”.

Scene: a hot day in the early afternoon. Everyone has eaten lunch and has been kicked outside to play. The only people wearing sunscreen are the kids who burn. Older kids are under death threat orders to watch over their younger siblings and to protect them from cars, dogs, strangers, falling asteroids, and ~shudder~ scary lady down the street. Any older kids without younger siblings were under the same orders. You did not get off the hook by being unrelated to the ones being watched.

The “quick draw” method of volunteering was used to choose Mom and Witchiepoo (the first one to call it, gets it). Gender did not matter. We might have had “dads” instead of “moms” sometimes, but I’m remembering the boys mostly talking in falsetto to stay in character. Homes were established, with the mom and kids on one lawn and Witchiepoo on the other.

Mom faced all her darling children, and in “eenie-meanie-mienie-moe” fashion picked a favorite from the group, using this little rhyme.

I’m going downtown

To smoke my pipe

And I won’t be back

‘Til Saturday night.

So lock the windows

And lock the doors,

And don’t let Witchiepoo in.

You. Are. In. Charge.

(Can’t you just hear the respect and admiration we had for our mothers?)

Mom would leave (she could go anywhere except Witchiepoo’s house) with appropriate death threats to Kid In Charge, which were amazingly similar to the ones received from Real Mom right before we were kicked outside. With Pipe Smoking Mom gone, Witchiepoo approached the house and knocked on the imaginary door. Witchiepoo always knocked, maybe because this was the days before home invasions and everyone, including serial killers, knocked. Kid In Charge would answer, and it was up to Witchiepoo to trick the kid into leaving the door open and unattended. “Can I borrow some sugar,” was a standby but the game was no fun unless Witchiepoo got creative.

Kid In Charge was never supposed to be bright, because they would always go and fulfill the request, complete with all pretending actions, while leaving the other children unattended. Witchiepoo would approach a random kid to lure him or her outside in some manner we all knew never to fall for, such as, “Want some candy?” or “Help me find my lost puppy.” Witchiepoo then took random kid to her “house”. Next, Mom returns, does a head count, and gets Kid In Charge in Big Trouble. She then immediately lines up the kids to pick a favorite again.

But here’s the best part. Witchiepoo had to pick a category, like colors, shapes, or flowers, and assign each kid a word from that category. It was up to the kid to remember his secret code word, but if you were likely to forget the backup plan was to tell everyone else in the hopes that someone remembered.

Eventually, Mom came home to an empty house. Only then does Mom head to Witchiepoo’s and demand her offspring back. Witchiepoo had to give the name of the category. If it was colors, Mom had to name random colors until she had a “hit” and broke the spell over one kid.

Now we come to the reason why we had the “houses” so far apart. The kid who just had his code word called would beeline it to “home”. If you beat Mom there, you were safe. If Mom caught you there was a spanking. Spankings among the kids were pretty realistic so us little ones learned to run fast. This part continued until all kids were called and chased home. A new Mom and Witch were then chosen, again by quick draw, and the game started over again.

A round of Witchiepoo could take upwards of half an hour, depending on the number of players and how carried away we got with the various scenarios. We had some comedians in our group that made the game take a wondrous forever.

Childhood has changed, and the way I grew up is just not the way my kids or their friends live. We have more stuff and less time. We have schedules so tight cloud-watching is now played in the car more than on the grass. Organized sports have replaced front lawns for outdoor activity, but since no one merely drives anymore (how many drivers are phoning, texting, or eating while on the road?) getting the kids off the streets could be a good thing. And maybe Witchiepoo is gone, but I still have very fond memories of playing it with the neighborhood kids. So I say thanks to Witchiepoo, and to all the friends young and old who made it memorable.

Really? I’ve Won That?

How many people actually check their spam folder? Experts say to check it often in case anything important got booted into it (and by “experts”, I mean me). Mostly it’s filled with crap few would even open (From: Eeeeeeee@hotmail.net: Buy Viagra at bargain prices. And have your p&n!s enlarged while you are at it!)

I love my spam folder. It gives me the best Facebook status updates. The latest one, and possibly the best so far so I don’t know how they will top this, comes from the RIAA, which according to the email stands for Recording Industry Association of America.

Now, after many, many seconds of ace detective work, I was able to ascertain that RIAA is a legitimate organization with a very busy website. Or it is a very careful scam which covered all possibilities and set up its own website with an attention to detail that would make any mother proud. Either scenario might fool the average email reader into believing that they really are in deep trouble for some sort of copyright infringement. All I can say is, thank goodness we have spam filters to protect us gullible internet users.

For all those who have not received this notice, the email goes something like this: Dear *******@yahoo.com, hereby we notify you that your IP address has been identified as distributing copyrighted content. Please see the attachment to this message for illicit Internet traffic details.
Failure to respond to this message within 14 days will result in copyright infringement accusation and standard legal procedures.

Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA)
1330 Connecticut Avenue NW Suite 300
Washington, DC 20036
tel: 202-775-0101
fax: 202-775-7253

Clue number 1 that this was not as legit as they want me to believe: the email address, which I have cleverly replaced with stars for privacy reasons, was not my email address. I have no idea who owns this email address, and I certainly will not be forwarding them the message. I suspect (s)he received their own copy.

Clue number 2: it was very short on legalese. Any legitimate lawyer-sounding letter would have many more whereas’s and henceforth’s. If a real lawyer was involved the email would be six pages long. And they would not have made formatting errors.

Clue number 3: the attachment was a .zip file. If you don’t know yet what a zip file is you need to be supervised while online.

Clue number 4 was the proverbial lack of a leg to stand on. What, have I “shared” too many silly cat videos on Facebook?

Now, in some computer forums I quickly skimmed, it sounded like otherwise tech-savvy players on this world-wide stage may have opened the darn file, and I have no sympathy for them. But the best was the poster who copied the email, warned us all that the file was full of malware, and then attached the file to his post. Thankfully, the owners of the forum were smarter than he and deleted it.

Some people get very irritated by this junk. Some people consider the world got lucky when it hit their inbox because they will post in various forums the dangers of opening the file. Me, I just find them a source of entertainment.

Case in point; apparently I have outstanding traffic tickets in New York (never been). These might be why the FBI was trying to contact me (because they can’t use the phone book). I suppose it was a letter from FBI lawyers (no doubt located in New York) that was to be delivered by the USPS and FedEx up to ten times a day for a month, which resulted in multiple delivery failure notifications (coincidentally, they all contained zip file attachments). But on a bright note, two random people I’ve never had direct or indirect contact with both sent me $200 Amazon gift cards on the same day, again with file attachments containing retrieval instructions. This is all in addition to the inheritance I’m due from South Africa as soon as I hear back from that sweet old lady’s lawyer.

I figure you have to laugh at the preposterous. It simply serves no other purpose.

THIS is why I should never drink.

We never have parties here. In fact, Tony and I have been together nearly 20 years, and we have never had more than four people over unless they were mostly under 12 and here for a birthday party. But we have been invited to several around the neighborhood and it is simply time to reciprocate. The date of this blessed event is coming soon.

Maybe I should have known better to even consider a party, but the idea hit me after too many glasses of wine at my friend Nicole’s house (who has been the best bad-influence, like, EVER). During the ingestion of these too many glasses of wine we were discussing the fact that Nic has several parties a year. Being more than a little drunk and in a party mood, I very generously offered to have the next one at our house.

The next day, I remembered our complete lack of experience at grown-up parties. The last time we had a large number of adults was at our daughter’s fourth birthday (she’s thirteen now). My husband, worried about hurting feelings of other kids and their families, invited two full preschool classes plus parents and siblings, and every other kid in the neighborhood. At some point during the festivities someone counted the number of guests. The tally was 18 adults and 32 children, plus myself, hubby, birthday girl, grandparents who were here to assist, and two hired teenagers to do face painting and bouncy castle.

It was a hit. Except for the fact that the day of the party is the only time in our 20 years I have ever seen hubby hung over, and he had it bad. Plus he was making balloon animals. With no pump. But I had warned him to stay away from the Grand Marnier.

In the years since that fateful day we’ve talked about throwing a party, because we apparently refuse to learn from our mistakes. The problem has been that regular party times are hard for us. Tony’s a professional magician, mostly children’s entertainment. December and weekends? HE WORKS WEEKENDS! AND DECEMBER! Summer is festival season and he’s rarely home. If he isn’t working, then that’s not the time to be spending $500 throwing a party.

Wait, did I just say $500? Really? Wow, that would be getting us off cheap. Because hubby started looking around the house, and all he can see is problems. The bathroom’s awful (true, it was awful when we bought the house in 2002 and it did not improve under us), the doors were outdated (true, they were original with the house in the early ’80’s), the chair rails and baseboards needed painting (not that badly) and the furniture in the front room is an eyesore (okay, it’s not lovely, but it’s not that bad).

Bathroom overhaul: $4,200 in labor, $1,500 for fixtures, $250 for toilet we forgot to buy with the other fixtures (oops), and $300 on accessories. Heck, let’s add in another $200 for random Home Depot runs. Bathroom total: $6,450. Total time: 4 days overhaul, 5 days shopping for stuff.

Hubby did agree, at that point, that the other projects could wait. He’s such a liar.

Ugly doors: $650 in new doors and handles (thank GOD they used the old doors as a template to cut the new doors, a service well worth the $30 per door), $250 on paint and accessories. Total was $900, plus a solid week of removing doors, washing, sanding, and painting the frames, installing new doors, and painting those. Yes, we painted them while they were hanging. Sue me.

Chair rails: you would think that since we had just painted the doors we would have the equipment we needed to paint the chair rails and baseboards. Ha! No such luck. I think about another $200 in supplies there, and a freakin’ eternity taping, washing, and painting.

He has now forgotten about new furniture and has moved into menu insanity. I’m not sure our marriage will make it to the party, except neither of us will give up that bathroom.

Are They REALLY Related?

The other night I was watching while my two children, our 12-year-old daughter, Shayla, and our almost 7-year-old son, Dimitri, were having cereal as a bedtime snack. I was watching because they really have to be watched. Really, Corn Pops shouldn’t be a challenge, but with our kids, one can never presume. But as they ate, I took notice of their little quirks, those little preferences that make them so, well, themselves. And I marveled at just how different these two are.

My son, as usual, had most of my attention. He is generally just one poor choice away from the ER. This time he was swinging between the table and cupboard. He supports his weight on his arms while he swings his legs from a foot off the ground. I very nearly stopped him, but I remembered how proud he was of this skill just last week, showing everyone and announcing, “Look how strong I am!” Because of this activity, the snack time conversation went something like this.

Me: “Dimitri, take a bite.”

Dimitri: “Okay.”

He drops down, takes a bite, and swings again while he chews. I wait for him to swallow, and we start the script over again.

Meanwhile, I kept close tabs on my daughter. She’s a terrible eater. This isn’t a new development. It started when she was a baby, so we are rather used to it. However, I was pleased to note that she ate quietly and calmly, in complete contrast to her brother.

I was suddenly struck by something at little eerie. Shayla eats like me. Or rather, like how I used to. I used to drive my husband crazy with the tiny bites I insisted were just the right size. We argued often about spoon sizing. He got bored in restaurants while waiting for me to nibble my portion to death. His biggest peeve was spaghetti, which I ate one strand at a time. Can you imagine how long it took me to eat a plate of pasta one strand at a time? He tried to teach me, several times in fact, how to put three or four strands on the fork. The thought made me want to gag.

But – and to this I say “HA!” to my husband – our daughter followed in my footsteps. Shayla won’t use a soup spoon for anything. Cereal, soup, Jell-o, you name it, it has to be eaten with a teaspoon. “Bite-sized” in our house could mean microscopic portions. And one strand of spaghetti? Forget it. While her brother needs a shovel to get this food in his mouth, Shayla takes a single strand and, while it is hanging at full length from her fork, takes a bitty bite from the tips.

This is just one example of how she is. Shayla is a dainty girl. We had a cat when she was a baby (Squeaker died before Dimitri was born), and she was the very definition of gentle. When she was a toddler I used to joke you could keep the fine china at knee-level and it would be safe from her. She would look at the stuff, admire it, but you could always trust her not to touch it. Nothing (much) ever broke under Shayla’s touch.

She never climbed the furniture. Never used the lower cupboard shelves as a ladder to get to the counter. At the park she was happiest on the swings, and she didn’t like climbing.

In her room, she keeps her papers in neat stacks, and though her stories look scattered over the various surface areas, to her they are “away”. She knows where each story she authored is, and she gets very upset if they are moved. All her stuff – her toys, her figurines, her stories – has a “spot” and she gets them back in that spot when she’s done. Move something out of that spot? It HAS to go back to where it belongs.

Not so with her brother. He’s a little hurricane. He thinks it’s funny to run into walls, and does so at every opportunity. I wouldn’t bring a pet into the house until he was old enough. The bigger the mess, the funner the game.

He learned how to get out of the back room (when the gate was locked) by climbing over the ledge and into the kitchen. At the playground the only way he will face forward on the slide is if he is going UP.

His room is full of toys scattered all over his floor, many of which are missing pieces. Many of these missing pieces would just pop right back on if only we could locate 1) the piece and 2) the body, preferably at the same time. This is more work than he is willing to do, and would much rather just replaced the toy. (Of note, he actually got away with this once. Within hours the replacement toy was in pieces.)

Yet, as I watched them chowing down on cereal that night, monitoring my daughter’s food intake and my son’s recklessness, I noticed they have the same face. Their eyes, their noses, their jaw and chin – Dimitri is a boy version of Shayla. So I can look at Dimitri and remember when Shayla was nearly seven, and I can look at Shayla and picture what Dimitri will look like when he’s twelve.

They will always be so different, but they will always be ours. And they will always belong to each other. Because that is just what family is.

My Addiction

I have a confession to make. I have an addiction. Not only do I have an addiction, but I have become the ultimate low-life; a pusher. I have gotten my husband addicted, too.

What is my drug of choice? It is “The Bachelor” on ABC.

Now I should point out that before this season, we never watched this show. This means I completely missed Brad’s last run, when he left not one, but two women at the end. Going into this season, I felt like I needed Cliff’s Notes on Brad.

Like all addicts, I didn’t plan on getting hooked. Really, I didn’t even plan on watching it. I stumbled upon the season’s premier whilst surfing the channel guide, desperate for something to record and watch after the kids were in bed. Nothing, and I mean nothing, on any of our fav channels, all of which are cable. And then I thought, “Hmmm…ya know, we never watch the network channels anymore. Wonder if they have anything good on”.

I am going to digress here, to whine and complain about the cable channels. See, hubby and I watch a bunch of those other reality shows, the ones that made us a little bit smarter in subjects we have no use for. If there’s an auction, ghost, conspiracy, or weird monsters…we were so there. Unfortunately, we only get these channels through Canadian cable stations, which purchase the episodes from their US counterparts. I know there are way more episodes than what we see, because right now we are in repeat hell. Not only are the same dozen or so shows cycled through, each one played a minimum of fifteen times throughout the week. One day hubby and I together were able to name all six “Conspiracy Theory” episodes and most of “Destination Truth” before we got bored.

And now, back to “The Bachelor”. I’m hooked. I can’t wait for the next episode. This is so not like me. Usually I don’t give a damn about anyone’s love life, including my own all too often. And it’s not like I know anyone on the show. The closest I come to personal investment is the bachelorette who looks a lot like a woman I know (Ashley Hebert will forever be known in this house as “the Mary Polly look-alike”). But I care about Brad. I care about the ladies. I have opinions on everyone, even though I KNOW it is all based on what the producer and director actually want us to think.

So we’ve been recording the show, every Monday night. I even double-check at least twice during the week to make sure it’s set to record, and I run down at 8:00 just in case the PVR has been shut off (thank-you, daughter). Yes, I’ve got it bad.

Still, I got to thinking about this formula for finding love. Take one very hot guy and twenty or so very hot women. Hot Women live together in a mansion, but in dorm-like conditions and ready to pack up and leave at any time. Hot Guy lives in another location. He doesn’t get to see who wakes up grumpy, who drinks too much coffee, or who leaves toothpaste in the sink for someone else to clean. These may seem minor, but if you have to live with this for the next thirty years? You can see my point.

So, Hot Guy can’t even see these women except for the dates. And let’s not make these dates just dinner-and-a-movie. No, that would be too ordinary. Let’s fly the group around the world so they can rappel down waterfalls. Or take them to Vegas so one of them can blow through $50,000 of someone else’s money (really not clear on whether that shopping spree came out of Brad’s pocket or the producer’s) and the rest can seethe in jealousy.

Next, every week Hot Guy has to eliminate Hot Women. He must base this decision mostly on how these women connected to him on their dates or, for the majority of the time, the little snatches of privacy they can steal with him. What a lot of pressure on these women! One random moment of insecurity or PMS, and they could be sent packing.

So, let’s see this formula for Perfect Mate: 1 Hot Guy + many, many Hot Women + isolation from support (let’s face it – in the real world, all the mothers and girlfriends of Hot Women would be telling them to dump his ass) + Cinderella dates + intense competition = HEA.

(That’s Happily Ever After, for those unfamiliar with romance novel lingo.)

If this really works, they should patent the process and sell spots on the Internet.