By Lady No Luck
I know what you're all thinking, what does a wizened no-luck hag know about dating anyway?
But you would be wrong to assume anything about me based only on my appearance. Like when I was watching my bald, 60-year-old father peruse dishwashers at Home Depot, the sales clerk came up to me and said, "You should pick out the dishwasher. After all, you're the lady of the house." To which I replied, "Oh excuse me, I think you have made an incorrect assumption based on my appearance. I am not the wife of this bald, 60-year-old man. I am just his prematurely aged 24-year-old daughter."
But although I do not pick out dishwashers, I do know a good deal about dating. And I am here to spread my wisdom, as it is only wasted residing inside the brain of an old hag like me.
As any leftist lady alone in a non-leftist world knows, our choices are sadly few and far between when it comes to finding that special leftist somebody. Take me, for example. I grew up in a suburb famous for bringing the world Enron executives and Senate Majority Leader Tom Delay. To say that my hometown is conservative is to say that I look a little old for my age. Call a peach, a peach, wizened old hag always says!
During sophomore year of high school, as my hormones raged, I looked around my Honors World Geography class in dismay. All I saw were self-important, overly ambitious brats busy drawing their painstakingly accurate maps of Indonesia, hoping that Harvard would hear of their map-making genius, that Halliburton would hire the person with the most precise replication of the country's jutting, irregular borders! What was a lonely leftist lady to do?
And then my eye happened upon the boy in the corner. This boy was not drawing a map. He didn't even have map pencils on his desk. In fact, he was fast asleep, drool seeping from his surprisingly sensuous mouth onto a geography book, opened to the wrong chapter. Why hadn't I noticed this man before? He was no corporate monkey. He would not jump through the hoops of capitalistic society. He would not fight his fellow man for pits and seeds while the bloated bourgeoisie gorged on the succulent fruits of his labor! We went on our first date that afternoon.
At first, we were deliriously happy together. As a couple, he and I were more than just two progressive individuals of color, we were a mighty force for social justice. With my disdain for corporate media and his aversion to reading, with my opposition to the local Hooters and his preference for a place that would deliver, with my refusal to attend an elitist university and his inability to be accepted into any college whatsoever, we were the change that we wanted to see in the world.
Slowly, however, I began to realize that we did not see eye to eye on all the issues. I believed that people shouldn't be so alienated from their labor. He thought it would be cool if someone could invent a robot to do all the labor. When I mentioned that our government should do more to encourage citizen participation, he replied, "Why not ballots in bed? As long as they came by after 11, I'd like to vote in bed." Then came the morning of the anti-war rally-he insisted that we should just sleep in, because sleeping was "the ultimate act of civil disobedience." "There's nothing those capitalist pigs hate more than sleep," he said, curling into a ball under the covers. But I knew the thing the capitalist pigs hated most was the unity of the working classes. And that was when I realized my fateful mistake . . . I had thought he was leftist, but he was really just lazy.
And so I urge you--do not make the same mistakes as this decrepit wrinkled mess you see before you. When you meet your next potential leftist lover, perhaps someone with greasy hair and putrid underarms, ask him or her, "Are you opposed to capitalism's commodification of the body, or is a shower just too time and labor intensive, you lazy, disgusting shit?" Once burned, twice shy, wizened old hag always says!
