Exersize 35

How to make yourself attractive to the opposite sex.

1. Tell them you're leaving town. For good.
It's fairly slap-yourself-on-the-forehead obvious, now I think about it. God. Sailors and travelling salesmen have known this forever. It's the perfect commitment-free, no danger of follow-up, one night stand. Guaranteed you won't have to see them again, or run into them at some future social gathering, or even in the street, and they can't stalk you (except by phone, email, facebook). Also, there's that undefinable sense of - not recklessness necessarily - but letting go, in the one who's leaving, open to change, preparing for a new adventure. They're leaving all current ties and responsibilities. Ever the optimist, the opposite sex might choose to imagine an untethered holiday atmosphere about the nearly departed and read it as a certain openness and accessibility.

So I'm just days away from putting everything I own in a truck and heading 950km north, where I can feasibly reinvent myself and suddenly I'm faced with several offers to end the longest drought in my life. So THAT'S what I've been doing wrong all year. I've been TOO AVAILABLE. (Slaps self on forehead.)