Kim and (your name here) sittin’ in a tree…

This is probably the very last thing I should be broadcasting to the campus (except maybe something like "I kill babies and eat their bones and then step on kittens!") but man, it’s time to be blunt. I need a boyfriend.

Now this is the part where people start getting mad. "You don’t need a boyfriend for anything," they say. "Oh, sure, it’s nice to have someone to hold hands with, someone to share your life with, someone to comfort you in times of sadness, someone to care about you no matter what. But you don’t need that."

This is usually said to me, may I note, by girls sporting hickeys the size of Texas.

All I know is, TV lied to me about college. I was supposed to be dating up a storm. I was supposed to be getting some action.

So far, the closest I’ve come to action was a drunk guy "accidentally" bumping into my chest at BW3s. And I was even happy with that.

I guess this wouldn’t be so bad if I had been a dating whirlwind in high school. But the only boyfriend I had there was John, who was into science fiction and calculus, and probably owned at least one pair of Spock ears.

As I’ve told the story and all its humiliating details several times within these pages I will refrain from doing so again, mostly to preserve what remains of my dignity. All you need to know is that, if it were possible to have previous relationships annulled like marriages, I would have done so long ago.

I think the big problem for me is asking people out. (I hear tell that in some strange lands, men ask women out. It must not be America, though, because it’s never happened to me. And there’s no way I could be the weird one, right?)

This is, no lie, a word for word transcript of my first (and last) attempt to ask someone out.

Me: Hey, wanna go out with me sometime?

Him: (After pondering the question for a good two minutes.) Do you have any Kleenex?

I’m pretty sure that means "sure, you freakishly ugly banshee of death! I’d be more than happy to go out with you when my flesh begins rotting off my bones and the world has dissolved into white hot fire. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go wash out my ears with bleach to remove your foul words from my brain!" Needless to say, we did not go out.

So I’m done with going the direct route. My new plan is to take the sympathy path. Here goes:

"Dear prospective friend that happens to be a boy, I am dying of cancer and my cat got hit by a car last week, oh, and my mom, too, and there are monsters the size of the Eiffel Tower threatening my elderly family members and my car has a flat tire and my brain is growing at an unusually high rate which means soon it will explode and I will die.

"Oh, yeah, and if I die, you can have my CD collection. Your soul mate, Kim Shable."

(If sympathy doesn’t work, bribe them. I learned that from Richard Nixon.)

Now that everyone knows I’m single, I’m sure all the men will be beating down my door. Probably to mock me and my perpetual isolation from humankind, but hey, at least then I’ll have boys calling my room.

I guess those girls are right—I don’t really need a boyfriend. Just someone to give me really, really big hickeys to make all the other girls jealous.