Normal and not so

Is it strange to be engaged to a man who doesn't want to have sex? And what about a girlfriend who's gone Republican?

By Cary Tennis

Feb 19, 2002 | Dear Readers,

Hope you had a good Valentine's Day. Crusty and iconoclastic rebel that I am, I resent the fact that some great czar of the collective heart has ordained that on this day we will be reminded that we have a friend in the diamond business and be given heart-shaped Mylar balloons.

Even the Italian restaurant my wife and I ate in on VD was serving pasta shaped like little hearts, which melted my heart a little, but not enough to overcome my sense that this is one more holiday that might have started out as something cool and wild but has been bought and paid for by capitalist philistines. So I celebrated it with surrealist poems and with continued feverish work on my own novel, which is indeed one day soon going to be finished.

Dear Cary,

I'm a youngish guy who dates frequently and have come to discover something disturbing over the course of my last several dates. Namely, that I'm too weird for all the normal women I meet and too normal for all the weird women I meet. What on earth do I do? I feel if I don't resolve this dilemma I'm going to wind up like Steve Buscemi in "Ghost World," except I won't be sleeping with Thora Birch.

Stuck in the Middle

Dear Stuck,

I keep meaning to see that movie. I hear it's really good. But what do you do? You just keep dating. And maybe -- Oh, here, this is it: I was out at Fort Funston in San Francisco this morning, walking the dogs, and there used to be those giant guns out there to protect the California coast from Japanese attacks, and I was thinking about how the gunners would get the range. They wouldn't hit the first target they fired at. They'd see where the shell landed, and then they'd adjust. And fire again. And adjust. And bit by bit, by firing and adjusting, they got closer and closer. Really, that's what I was thinking about.

And dating is the same way: You see how close you got, and you adjust your aim, and you adjust your target. You collect coordinates: Let's see, last date had three colors of hair and 17 piercings, I wasn't weird enough for her, but the sorority girl before her didn't even know who Steve Buscemi was, I was too weird for her, so I'll search for a girl with maybe one color of hair, five piercings and at least a rudimentary knowledge of, say, R. Crumb and who has seen, maybe, "Ghost World" and would like to see "Amelie," if she hasn't already.

Break the problem down into its constituents and triangulate!

Good luck. You sound like a pretty cool guy.

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