The per­ils and mis­ad­ven­tures of online dat­ing in No Fun City, with bonus date-stalking tips from a tech-savvy sin­gle lady.

I am officially in party mode. I eat toast for dinner off the lids of Tupperware because all of my dishes are dirty. I’m trying to shoehorn as much fun into my life as possible. There is no time for such banalities as cleaning. I’m gross. This, I’m sure, is the residual effect of being in a relationship for most of my twenties. This last year (last gasp) is my chance to party, and I’m taking it seriously.

I have tickets to see a band I like that no one else seems to know so I’ve decided to go alone. As I ready myself to head out I get a message online from a guy in town from LA. He’s bored. I ask him to accompany me to the show, which starts in half an hour. He responds immediately and just like that I have a date.

I wait for him outside the venue and as he gets out of the cab I wince a little cause he’s in a suit. He’s tall, and the suit…is not. But it is wide–as is his tie. Is this how people dress in LA? He’s perfectly polite and apologizes profusely for being five minutes late and quickly buys me a drink. We chat a bit about the band and watch the show, which ends early. I’m feeling restless and not ready to end the night when a friend/coworker texts me that there is a party in Railtown and do I want to go with her and her hubby? Elated that I actually have a date (albeit a poorly dressed one) I accept.

I introduce him to my friends and, probably due to the few drinks we’ve already had, he starts explaining how he’s writing a graphic novel. He pulls up a terrible Deviant Art-y rendering on his phone and explains how it’s kind of like Tomb Raider. I gesture to my friend silently that this guy is the biggest nerd by pushing up my imaginary glasses. I’m an asshole.

I continue drinking.

My girlfriend and I proceed to drink so much that later, when her husband runs into the guy who threw the party he’s confronted with,”Oh yeah, you were with those drunk girls.”

I am those drunk girls.

That was me almost falling up the stairs then trying to recover by making it look like some quirky lunge. That was me yelling, “I know yoooooooou!” to someone I recognized from a magazine. That was also me attempting a pull-up off the ceiling pipes. And that was definitely me making out in a stranger’s loft just to feel the pressure of someone else’s face against mine.

I don’t remember how I got home.

I wake up confused. I feel tangled up and it’s hard to move my arms. I then realize I’m half out of my bra and shirt with an arm out of each. I have no pants or underwear on. I step onto the floor narrowly missing a gelatinous substance–is that vomit? It’s white. I touch it. It jiggles. Did the cat do this? I don’t usually hurl when I drink, this couldn’t have been me? Could it? Can a human make this…texture? I continue to the living room to where the contents of my purse make a trail from the front door to my bedroom. I’m 95% sure I didn’t get violated but I did lose my bus pass and it’s the beginning of the month. I have reached a new low.

I call my girlfriend and describe what’s on the floor.

“Oh that, that’s just bile.” Oh, no big deal. This is not something I’m accustomed to finding on my floor! Her flippant attitude further illustrates how many experiences I must have missed by being in a boring couple for the last eight years. Still, I could stand to have missed the bile.

I get a message from LA guy and he says he had a great time (I bet) and that my friends are so nice and wants to see me again. I say I’m busy and don’t mention that I hope to never see him again, ever. He’s a perfectly nice guy, an actual gentleman. But kinda milquetoast. This is precisely why the idiom “nice guys finish last” exists. He’s just not exciting in any way. Also he doesn’t live here, so he could never really be a contender. This is how I justify blowing him off.

The day after is a workday and I wake up with a residual shame-over followed by the relief of knowing I didn’t do anything crazy the night before. It’s like my body remembered the previous morning’s guilt, “Shouldn’t we be checking our phone for errant drunk texts by now?” No. Thank God.

At work I walk past my girlfriend’s desk and she’s on Adrianne Curry’s Twitter page. I ask what she could possibly be doing there and she says, “Don’t you remember? Your date said he was seeing someone who was on Top Model, then, later in the evening he said his ex had over 300,000 followers. I’m piecing it together, this must be her!” I love her for doing this. This makes me judge him even more because Adrianne Curry seems like a dummy. Suddenly any wavering thoughts about blowing him off dissipate. I could never date anyone with such questionable taste.

He writes me a few weeks later when he’s back in town for work. I politely decline to see him again and he sends me the most decent response saying, “You deserve someone really great. I hope you find that person.”

Suddenly I feel guilty. I treated this guy like a rental car. I needed someone to take me to the show and he was right there. It hadn’t occurred to me that I could try to parlay this into something more or that he would even want that. Maybe I subconsciously prohibited myself from liking him to avoid the hassles of a long-distance relationship.

Or maybe he’s just not my type.