Match.com stats:

Total profile views: 1062 (28 since yesterday)

New received emails: 2 unsolicited, 0 solicited

New sent emails: 0 new, 1 reply

Optimism level: Surely things will pick up over the weekend.

I tweaked my profile slightly today, removing the “falafel” request. I think it’s been well-established that most guys either don’t read the full narrative or they forget to include “falafel” in their emails. Since I’m not going to reject a guy on the basis of its omission, I figured I should eliminate the appearance of a power trip from my profile. Farewell falafel!

The only change I made to the profile was to remove a few lines but a while later I received an email from Match saying they couldn’t approve my profile because either my headline or username didn’t meet their terms of service. I was a bit baffled since I hadn’t changed either of those. Long story short, my page was down completely for several hours for some unclear reason so that certainly didn’t help in the page views department.

EMAIL #1: FINALLY, another email! He wrote: mi nombre es javier la verdad es q te ves muy bien There’s no picture to go along with the email, but I’m going to go out on a limb and guess he’s not blonde. I do have a thing for foreigners, particularly Hispanic boys, but when I can detect spelling and grammatical errors in another language, that’s a really bad sign. Moved to folder: Usted no puede manejar la verdad.

EMAIL #2: Just in- one more email. This guy’s the first to write me who looks attractive in his photos. His profile is well-written and he doesn’t want children. Sounds good so far. He lists his faith as “spiritual but not religious.” I usually take that designation to mean maybe the person was brought up with certain religious beliefs but that he hasn’t attended church services in years. That’s a good thing. However, underneath it he writes that he often listens to Christian XM radio at home. Given that he calls “sarcasm” a turn-off, it’s not likely he’s joking. Even Christians tease people who listen to Christian music. What the hell is a “spiritual but not religious” guy doing listening to it, not just occasionally, but “often?” Everything else about him sounds pretty tolerable but that one really has me perplexed. I have to stop being so picky so I’ll probably write him back. At the very least, maybe I’ll get some answers. Moved to folder: When Elaine discovered Puddy listened to Christian radio, did she still consider him sponge-worthy?

Late last night I sent Bodybuilder Boy my phone number. There was something about the tone in his previous email that really made me think he’d never call. Needless to say, I was quite surprised to hear a message from him a couple hours ago. I have to admit, he sounded good on the phone. His message was fairly brief, but his personality sounded more like the one I detected in his profile than the one in his emails. Now I’m not sure what to think of him. I dread having to return his call, but as much as I feel I need blind-date practice, I think I need pre-blind-date phone practice even more.