Cliff recently read this piece live at Ed Lin and Jen Kwok’s reading series! – .ed

Every September, just after Labor Day, I do a kind of “self analysis”, just to see what’s working and what’s not. After a typical summer of reckless debauchery and shameless womanizing, I looked inward and had something of an epiphany: when it comes to dating women, I will look past superficiality and seek a deeper connection. Emphasizing things like looks, status, job, and style is a trap, and has not served me well. As I embark on my new love journey, these are the three qualities I will look for:

1. Spiritual connection. This is something I heretofore neglected but is now paramount: we must have an ineffable connection that transcends earth, the universe, and whatever comes after the universe. Our spirits must fuse, and for this to happen we must have great sex. Unfortunately, I am unable to have great sex with anyone over 110 lbs, so this woman must max out at this weight. Also, I’m mostly sexually attracted to brunettes of the Brazilian variety, so it would be best if she were one of those. A 110 lbs (or under) Brazilian brunette, so we can have great sex and therefore be spiritually connected, which I hold most important above all else.

2. Selflessness. An altruistic, selfless quality is immensely important as I embark on my new search for a soulmate. Perhaps she works at a homeless shelter once a month, or, better yet, for a non-profit. If she does, I would like it if she were at least above manager level, perhaps even director. It would be great if she were in charge of fund-raising, as she would get lots of perks and a large expense account that would benefit us as a couple. For instance, we could enjoy some free meals and Knicks games, all thanks to her high ranking position and magnanimous nature.

3. Compassion. My future soulmate must possess a compassionate soul for all living things and an empathetic approach to life. This means she will not only have her perspective, but will understand and feel the others too. She won’t step on a spider because she feels compassion for that spider’s life. She will not judge me when I come home at 4 am, stinking of absinthe and perfume – it’s not my fault I’m a wandering Lothario. The gift of understanding, of seeing from another’s eyes, is so rare and beautiful, but I am determined to find it.

4. Good relationship with her family. While this may seem trite, it’s important to me that my lover has a healthy, loving relationship with her family, since I’ve found this to be such a foundation for positivity in a relationship. It would be great if this family were wealthy – like, oil tycoon wealthy – and if my love would be in the possessionof (or, at least in the very near future) a considerable inheritance. Such wealth will make having a good relationship with her family that much more meaningful.

So in conclusion, I’m looking for a a 100 pound or under wealthy Brazilian nymphomaniac with ticket connections who won’t care if I cheat. Oh, and the spiritual stuff.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• Match-less
• Dating Doh!nt: online edition - 'model' pictures
• 4 really bad date ideas
• Baseball terms applied to dating and relationships
• Are you loving like a Darma or a Greg?

1. Avant garde anything - while the pleasures of watching a Stan Brakhage film after smoking a medically municipal joint are undeniable, bringing a date to a bizarro event in which he/she might get hit in the face with processed meat products is bad idea jeans.

A better idea: go to a revival film at your local art house cinema. It’s different but not frighteningly so.

2. Readings or lectures - here’s a question for you: ever gotten that ‘tingly’ feeling at a lecture or reading? Didn’t think so. That’s because they are utterly UNSEXY. You might contest this with the ‘learning is hot’ axiom, but you are wrong. Readings are the perfect thing to go to alone, and the perfectly wrong thing to go to with a date.

A better idea: go to an aggressive poetry slam. This is a non-passive version of the above, and will definitely get the juices flowing.

3. Face-to-face dinners - if anyone caught the first episode of this season’s Mad Men, Don Draper goes on a blind date. He takes her to dinner at a fancy restaurant; they’re both dressed impeccably. The scene is suffocating and painful, mainly because of the tense energy that surrounds face-to-face dinners. You’re stuck on a little island, held at the mercy of your waiter who is usually pretty terrible. They are tolerable when you’re in a longer relationship, but insufferable in the early days. Avoid them at all costs.

A better idea: eat at the bar. The service is better and you’re not forced to stare at them them whole time. In fact there’s usually a mirror, in which case you can catch glimpses of your beautiful mug all night.

4. Art galleries – while there’s something disarming about walking around a gallery and reacting to art together, there’s conversely something rearming when you come across a piece of penis art. What is penis art? It’s a piece of art with a penis in it (see above image for a very good example.) Surely there’s got to be some exhibits that are sans penis art? No. Every single one of them has the penis surprise – often when you least expect it. Stay away from those galleries, at least until she’s seen yours/you’ve seen his.

A better idea: Art Bar in NYC. There’s nothing arty about this dump but it has a great happy hour.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• 10 thoughts that go through your mind on a bad date
• 5 foods you should NOT eat on a date
• Recipe for Disaster part 2: the Accosting
• Recipe for disaster? Just add wine and meds.
• The (not having any) Sex Diaries

Baseball season is in full swing (har har), and even if you don’t like it you can’t help but appreciate our pastime’s terms and sayings. More than any other sport, baseball has such a fun, creative way of putting complicated plays and situations into words. We thought it would be a helpful exercise to apply these terms to another complex, unpredictable facet of life – dating and relationships. A start to the list follows with links that help show term in baseball action. I’m sure we’re missing quite a few; just add ‘em to the comments and soon we’ll have an index to be reckoned with. Play ball!

1. Fielder’s choice - that rare, rare situation in which you can choose between multiple suitors of decent quality. Of course, 99% of the time you end up dropping the ball anyway, resulting in getting charged with an….

2. Error - a blatant mistake that often tips the scales out of your favor, or is a factor in your self-destructive relationship patterns.  In baseball, in error is unforced – ie. not caused by an opposing player; the situation is the same here, that is, you only have yourself to blame*.
* in lieu of blaming yourself, you can and should blame your parents.

3. Foul ball - applies to kissing. A foul ball is either an attempted make-out kiss that gets rejected or a make-out kiss that’s bad for any number of reasons (foul breath, foul technique, foul noises, etc.)

4. Wheelhouse - in baseball, when a pitch is thrown inside of a batter’s comfort zone, usually leading to a hit, the pitch was thrown “in his wheelhouse”. In this case, if a person is in your wheelhouse they are your “type”, usually physically. So if you’re into guys with skullets, and you’re friend is setting you up with someone with one, they might say, “he is SO in your wheelhouse!”

5. Sacrifice fly - sleeping with someone you generally wouldn’t just to get on base and break your dry spell.

6. First base - making out (guys and girls)

7. Second base – hands on breasts (guys); hands on butt (girls)

>  Stealing second (successful) - when, after pushing the guy’s hand away several times, the girl finally lets him touch her boobs without interruption.

> Stealing second (unsuccessful) - when, after repeated attempts to touch breast, the girl gets fed up and tells the guy to get lost. Out!

8. Third base – HJ (girl); FF (guy)

9. Homerun – sex.

10. Grand slam – sex that includes more than two people or involves animals of any kind.

11. The bullpen - the bullpen are your reserve pitchers who are generally not good enough to start the game but will help out when the starter is struggling or worn out. In this case, your bullpen is the second tier love interests you call up when your first choice isn’t working out for whatever reason. A good bullpen is readily available and will understand when you need to send them back.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• Dating scorecard for women
• Sunday Morning Comin Down, part 3
• What to expect if you date: a professional paintball player
• List-less: 12 Things Not To Say In Bed
• Sunday Morning Comin Down, Part 2

All my life, I’ve dated Gregs (cranky intellectuals who need a laugh and my impulsive behavior as a sidekick on the dirt road to F-U-N) – until last year, when I dated Ben.

Ben was living on his own planet, where people only cared about organic vegetable gardening and hiking with friends, where wine flowed like water, where traveling was church and where girlfriends were a burden. There were no rules in Ben’s world and I eagerly stepped in, ready for vacation.

But being around a through and through Darma, someone so close to the KRAZY end of the spectrum didn’t further liberate me (like I expected), instead it turned me into Greg. After a while, I didn’t recognize myself.

Ben and I didn’t bring out the best parts of each other, but rather drove each other to personality extremes. But I learned something incredibly valuable from the experience: I am Darma and Greg. And I’m looking for someone who is also a bit of both; someone who doesn’t mind my wacky ideas, love of astrology and naive idealism, but also likes that I have a career, life goals, and strive for a comfortable lifestyle.

Now think about your relationships; are they are constantly bringing out your “erratic entertainer” (Darma) or your “voice of reason” (Greg)?

I’ll venture to guess that the best relationships are those in which one person doesn’t over-perform either role but can step in with good old-fashioned advice or a spur-of-the-moment pick-me-up when need be; where spontaneity and practicality walk hand in hand. But maybe that’s just my Greg talking…

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• The T.J. Maxx Principle
• How White People Date: Chapter 2
• How White People Date, chapter 1
• Post text analysis: to bar, or not to bar
• Dumped on email: a death letter analysis

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• 5 ways to not act interested in a girl while on a date
• Video in the Dumps Daily
• Video in the Dumps
• How to date when you're broke and jobless
• Cliff Golden's new approach to dating

When I broke the news to my family, the first thing my grandmother said was, “So you’re going to get even darker!”

Forget “won’t you need to wear a head veil?” Or the ever popular, “what about the terrorists?” The utmost important thing in her mind was, holy cow, my dark-skinned grand-daughter is going to get even darker, and nobody is going to want to marry her, not even a Saudi!

I, like millions of Asians, are born with a warmer tone of skin. Makeup foundations named “tan” or “Sahara” seem to fit my face just dandy.

For most white folks, that’s called beauty. Every day, silly white girls and guys all over North America visit tanning salons, lather themselves with sketchy chemicals, bathe hours on a beach and risk skin cancer just so they don’t have to look like a corpse. They do, anyway, or end up looking like a massive piece of cowhide, but whatever makes them feel better, right?

Of course, people are never happy with what they’re born with. Just look at the classified section of any South Asian newspaper — in South Asia or the rest of the world — and you’ll see dozens of ads like this:

“Parents looking for well-educated, beautiful fair-skinned woman to marry their handsome, fair-skinned IT consultant son.”

I’m not kidding. Some people actually think IT consultants are handsome. Granted, they are the poor bastard’s parents. Or should I say poor, “fair-skinned” bastard. To these people, “fair skin” is a hot keyword in their desperate search for a daughter-in-law, much like “double penetration” and “anal sex” are in YouPorn.

A few years ago, I spent a summer in Hong Kong, my ancestral home. Everywhere I went, people kept saying to me, “You would look so much cuter if you wear a light shade of makeup.”

Huh? Really? So my face could be a light bulb on a brown body?

But it’s true, a lot of women in Asia wear ivory-coloured foundation to make themselves more pale. They also pad their faces with whitening cream, SPF 100 sunblock every day. They’ll even brave the prospect of explosive diarrhea by drinking loads of milk because some other lactose-intolerant fool told them milk can make their skin, well, milkier.

So here lies the problem. I’m so dark, even Chinese people have problems identifying my ethnicity.

No wonder, then, I keep ending up with white dudes. Perhaps not for my ideal of what is beautiful, or the white people’s ideal, either, but my own people’s narrow ideal.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• How White People Date: Chapter 2
• How White People Date, chapter 1
• Cliff Golden's new approach to dating
• 4 really bad date ideas
• Baseball terms applied to dating and relationships

Figure 1: body language

Okay so you finally met a girl you’re interested in, maybe even beyond a night or two of bumping uglies. By now we all know the golden rule: you want what you can’t get. Therefore, your liking her puts you in an extremely weak position, and the only way to get back on equal ground is to act like you’re not interested, and the first step is by doing so on the date itself. This is a tough needle to thread, but if don’t your game will be over faster than it was the first time you played Arkanoid. It’s probably hopeless, but just in case, here’s a handy guide:

1. Body language (fig. 1). This is of critical importance. Have you seen two people on a date, and the guy is leaning in, back hunched over, hanging on to every last word the girl is saying? And of course she’s doing all the talking, because the fact that he’s sitting across from someone he desperately wants to bed has rendered him speechless, so the scene looks a little bit like a conversation with your near-deaf grandfather. Don’t be that guy. Pretend this person is the most hideous, nauseating beast you’ve ever encountered. Sit WAY back in your chair, and clutch your table knife with a death-grip that says, “get behind me, Satan!” The result? She’ll wonder why you’re repulsed, and be more interested in you.

2. Go to the bathroom twice. This technique is called “clearing the ice”, named after the two breaks in a hockey game where the ice smoothed over by the Zamboni machine. By leaving her alone for two periods of time gives her the opportunity to ponder the situation: do I like him? Does he like me? If he does DOES like me, how could he possibly pull himself away from me twice?? By dictating the point, you will be in control.
IMPORTANT NOTE: Do not exceed bathroom time by more than 3 minutes lest she’ll think you are nervous and having diarrhea.

Figure 2: going to the bathroom twice

3. Do NOT laugh at all of her lame jokes. This is mistake every guy makes when he likes a girl. Your cat sheds? HAW HAW! The F train smells? Hahaha! Your friend Tom might be a eunuch? (okay that’s kind of funny.)  Nothing is more pathetic than a guy trying to laugh-track his way into a girl’s pants. Use this test for every joke she tries to crack:  if your best guy friend were telling the same amusing story/joke, would you laugh? If yes, laugh. If no, smile a little bit to avoid being rude, but do not honor it with a fake gaffaw. She will respect the fact that you’re sticking to your guns and might even step up her game.

FIgure 3: don't laugh at everything she says

4. End the date early (fig. 4) Don’t try to prolong it with an excursion to point B. Don’t offer to buy her dinner like an amateur sap. Two drinks, max, and call it a night – maybe even ONE drink if you really want to be brazen. Pretend you have better things to do, even though the only thing you will be doing is going home and suppressing the urge to text or email her. Which leads us to…..

5. Do NOT text/email/call for AWHILE. To this we refer to Chapter 1 in How White People Date, but the rule is extremely simple: if you send her a lame-ass “I had a great time!” text, or a cursory “when are you next available” email the next day, you are THROUGH. You might as well send a note that says “eat shit and die I never want to see you again” because the result will be the same. Don’t “reach out” to her for five days at least, a week preferably.

Figure 4: end it within 90 minutes

Sidenote: the list works similarly for women trying not to act interested in guys, but this presents a problem: if both are interested, and following the same rules, you will most likely get nowhere fast. However, this zero sum game is consistent with dating in general, so it’s a wash. Fa!

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• Saturday funnies: hipster dating, scene 1
• 7 pick-up lines that actually work
• 10 ways a girl knows her love life is boring as all hell
• Listless: 10 things to say to unwanted creeps hitting on you
• 4 ways to instantly know you can't trust a guy

** the following comes to us from the great Denny Delveccio, editor of the insanely funny Your New Bad Habit, and will be doing a regular column on LITD (we’ll be posting on his site too). Visit his site, and join his Fan Page. You’ll only be a little sorry. – .ed

Although it may be difficult to believe from where you’re sitting, even your boy Denny Dance sometimes avails himself of a “Gentleman’s Overture” or two in order to increase his odds of biblically reclining with any number of otherwise virtuous, doe-eyed misses. Yes, on occasion even my carnal tractor beam is off. You may stop shaking your head in disbelief.  It makes you look rabid.

On the off chance that you can pry your way from the Myst chatroom this evening to join the party going down at your local pool hall or deserted farmhouse, you might consider utilizing one of the following DelVecchio-approved icebreakers. All are guaranteed to keep the panties dropping:

1. “You’re an elegant, bewitching beauty. Would you mind pooping on me?”

2. “Can I show you my etchings?”

3. “I hope you don’t think I’m being forward, but I’ve taken the liberty of booking a trip for us to Bootyland. Our Itinerary: Pleasure.”

4. “I know what you’re thinking, but I love a gorgeous, glowing pregnant woman.”

5. “So where exactly do you stand on the issue of premature ejaculation?”

6. “Do you, by any chance, have a picture of your mother handy?”

7. “If you were my burger, you definitely would not be on the value menu.  You’d be one of the special ones that are, like, $3.99, and are served with tomatoes and lettuce and onions. And fries. And maybe a drink.”

Happy hunting, lads!

With Copious Love,
Denny DelVecchio

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• 5 ways to not act interested in a girl while on a date
• iBad
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• And now, a word from our sponsor

I love to unearth a bargain.  Searching out of the way shops and finding that Vivienne Westwood dress I know no one else has – at the low, low price of $20 – makes manifest the visceral thrill of the hunt, the joy of discovery.

This is no easy feat.  Quite literally, each item must be poked, prodded and examined for label, fabric quality and potential defects.  Even then, the chosen garment may require alterations before it’s ready for prime time. But it’s worth it when I hear the inevitable compliments, “Wherever did you get that DRESS??” and the shock when I reply, “Steve’s Discount Bait, Tackle & Pants!”

How, you ask, does this apply to dating?  Posthaste, I will reveal: the T.J. Maxx Principle.

Inside every comic shop, hotel bar, or philatelist club, hidden among the spoiled tweens, fifty-something queens and larpers lurks a diamond in the rough, glittering with promise.  “Don’t let my proto-mullet and 13-year-old mustache fool you.  I’m hot, loaded, and great in bed – all I need is a good woman and a razor.” That’s right, readers – just as the the $20 V Westwood dress might require some tailoring work before wear, the T.J Maxx man will also need a few alterations before you can take him out with pride. You see, the principle is not for those who seek instant satisfaction on all ends of the spectrum; Mr. T.J. Maxx requires patience and perseverance.  But it will be worth it.

The bottom line: y’all can keep your Bergdorf men.  I’ll stick with my Salvation Army guys.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• Are you loving like a Darma or a Greg?
• How White People Date: Chapter 2
• How White People Date, chapter 1
• 4 ways to instantly know you can't trust a guy
• Rule #12: Don't sleep over after 'relations'

“Look, Lady Lumberjack – spring and summer is mating season, c’mon! You’ve gotta have SOME kind of game!”A man-friend said to me upon the first 65 degree day in NYC after a long, cold winter.  Sure, it’s mating season – random strangers are going-home together from bars at a faster pace, the hems on my dresses are inching shorter, couples are canoodling at outdoor cafes in nauseatingly high numbers – yet I’m bored as hell.  I polled several of my gorgeous, smart, funny, sweet yet spicy single gal pals, as well as dipped into my own personal arsenal, to come-up with the Top 10 Signs that a Girl is Bored With Her Love Life.

10. She’d rather go home with a pile of bodega food at the end of a long, drunken night than the dude she’s seeing.

9. She continues to go through the pain of Brazilian bikini waxes because just like the NY Lotto – Hey…you never know.

8. She has already been introduced-to and ultimately dated her best guy friend’s guy friends. She is now blackballed from every future BBQ and roof-top party of the summer.

7. She recycles past lovers, regardless of prowess, as a way to keep her numbers low.

6. More than a few attached gal pals have recommended that she read “Why Men Love Bitches.”  So she hides it in an issue of US Weekly , and reads it in a dark corner of a Barnes & Noble basement.

5. Craigslist “Missed Connections – M for W” makes more than a few appearances in her recent internet browsing history.

4. After swearing-off online dating for the umpteenth time, she reconsiders her criterium and re-enables her profile. Bring it on Jersey!! Speaking of Jersey….

3. She breaks her “No dating boys who live in Queens, Long Island City or Hoboken” rule since summer TV is all re-runs anyway. Miss you, Jack Shepard.

2. She convinces herself that her married or attached ex may be fair game after all. Karma schwarma (mmmm, schwarma…).

1. She goes on date #10 with a dude whom she still hasn’t slept with and doesn’t even particularly care for.

But Wait! There’s More Like This:

• Types of dysfunctional daters: The Boyfriender
• 5 ways to not act interested in a girl while on a date
• Post text analysis: to bar, or not to bar
• Dumped on email: a death letter analysis
• Listless: 10 things to say to unwanted creeps hitting on you