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N.B.: I posted twice yesterday, in an attempt to make up for accidentally not posting on Sunday. I get so confused. . . .

Tonight is the Hurry Date event I signed up for. I don’t want to go. I don’t ever want to meet anybody ever again, much less 25 men, which is what the organizers claim will happen. I want to stay in my room and never come out and eat nothing but chocolate and get monstrously fat and then die.

Which means it must be Tuesday.

But I’ve already paid for the event, so I’ll suffer through it somehow. At the very least it should yield some good blog material.

Is it possible for me to be on a search for love and have lost all desire to find it?

N.B.: This is today’s second post.

This year I decided that, since new year’s resolutions offer far too many opportunities for failure and self-loathing and punishment, I would make new month’s resolutions. I have been remarkably successful at keeping January’s, which is “I will not leave dirty clothes on the floor.” Today I came up with February’s, which will be “I will not leave little pieces of paper in my pockets.” My intention and hope is that the effect will be cumulative, leading me to become, by the end of the year, a reasonably tidy person. I’m pleased, because both the plan and the resolutions themselves are specific and manageable.

But my friend L.N.’s new year’s resolutions are masterpieces of inspiration.

Two years ago, her resolution was “I can open anything.”

Last year, it was “Between any two options, pick the one more likely to make me pregnant.”

This year, it is “No thinking.”

Unfortunately, she is already failing miserably at this year’s, and last year’s wasn’t a great success either, but still, I bow down before her.

Note: This is the entry I thought I posted yesterday. Somehow I failed to do so. Perhaps it’s the Alzheimer’s setting in. Consider this today’s first post, to be followed later in the day by a second. Because God forbid anybody should miss a single word I write. I mean, what if Colin Farrell is reading this and today’s second post is the one that would make him realize he is my soul mate but he didn’t know to read it because he didn’t know there was going to be a second post and we would never be together?

—

On Tuesday I am going to a Hurry Date event. This means that over the course of an evening I will have 25 three-minute dates. Apparently a whistle blows to tell you when your three-minute date is over and it’s time to move on to the next one.

The more I think about it, the more absolutely ideal this whole setup seems for real dating. Because although three minutes isn’t enough for you to find out if you like somebody, it’s often more than enough for you to find out if you don’t like him. For example, if he says any of the following things:

“It’s not that I disagree with you. I just think you have a lot to learn, is all.”

“The Log Cabin Republicans meeting last night was really great!”

“I’m not racist. I think lots of black people are nice.”

With the hours I would have saved by having a whistle blow to end these dates then and there, I could have written Pride and Prejudice.

Or at least Emma.

A chance examination of my site statistics has revealed to me that I may be in the running for a Bloggy Award. I am thrilled at the prospect of winning a Bloggy, but the knowledge that it’s a real possibility has given me the worst case of performance anxiety I’ve ever had, even worse than when I played the part of Litter in the second grade Arbor Day pageant and at the climax of the piece, when I was supposed to throw a piece of litter at the hero (a move I executed with great panache in the dress rehearsal), I missed him and threw the litter in the garbage can instead, thereby ruining my character’s credibility and the dramatic arc of the whole play.

Not that I’ve been beating myself up about it ever since or anything.

Anyway, the possibility of winning a Bloggy Award has caused me to develop a horrible case of writer’s block, which in turn makes the pressure to write well even worse, because of course people are judging me now, not that people aren’t always judging me, of course they are, aren’t they?, because I am certainly always judging everybody else, but there’s an actual AWARD at stake now and writing badly could RUIN EVERYTHING and mean the difference between living a happy, fulfilling, glamorous life and dying friendless, unprotected, and alone.

God, I wish I did drugs.

Today I went to a dance class that started (as, apparently, it starts every week) with a quote read aloud by the teacher and then posted on the wall. This week’s was: “Failure is only postponed success as long as courage coaches ambition.”

This means I am not failing to find a boyfriend.

I am simply postponing success.

The problem is that I don’t know if courage is coaching ambition and, if it is, what happens if it stops? Does failure, instead of being postponed success, become just plain failure?

Or does postponed success become actual success?

The class was way too hard for me and made me feel like a complete loser but the only way I will get the answer is if I go back next week.

My acupuncturist has put me on a liver-cleansing diet for a week. One might be led to wonder, since I don’t drink, why my liver needs to be cleansed, but she insists that it will do me a world of good, and since following her advice has so far cured me of my allergies to any number of unpleasant substances (including apples and cats but not, alas, Antonin Scalia), I have chosen to place myself completely in her hands.

The problem is that the main feature of the liver-cleansing diet seems to be that one isn’t permitted to eat anything that resembles food. No wheat, no sugar, no dairy. No eggs, no beef, no pork, no corn. Bizarrely, no peanuts and no oranges (though other nuts and citrus fruits seem to be okay).

So this is what I have had to eat today: puffed rice cereal with almond milk, carrots with hummus, celery with cashew butter, some dried apricots, and a piece of grilled chicken.

Understand that I usually have Coke and M&Ms for breakfast.

I feel as if I’ve died and gone to hell.

When I was four, I came home from playing with my across-the-street neighbor Meb and went looking for my father.

“Daddy,” I said, “what’s a nigger-loving kike?”

As soon as he recovered from his apoplectic fit, he asked, “Why?”

“Meb says that her daddy says that you are one.”

And people ask me why I’m never going back to South Carolina.

I was going to write a long and amusing post about the gay slumber party I had for my birthday last night, which involved watching teen movies, eating pounds of junk food, giving each other mud-mask and peel-off facials, telling fortunes, and talking about boys, but this picture of me from the mud-mask facial portion of the evening says it all:

If that isn’t enough to make men fall in love with me, I don’t know what is.

In less than twelve hours I will enter my fourth decade upon this sphere.

I can’t even think of anything witty to say.

Wish me luck.

Okay, next time I agree to go on a date with a Republican, will somebody please SHOOT ME?

I would have done it myself this evening, only I didn’t have a gun. As it was, I was within seconds of stabbing myself in the jugular with my fork or attempting to choke on my chicken biryani just to put myself out of my misery.

And, for the record, the correct pronunciation is ELL-ee vee-ZELL, though wee-ZELL is also acceptable.