While I’m on vacation, I’m letting some associates, friends, and two lovers steer the ship for me.  That means there will be guest bloggers this week.  Today’s is 123 I Love You.

When Jason asked me to guest post I was immediately in. I wrote back to him as quickly as possible, letting him know how glad I was that I finally had a massive audience to see the mind-blowing nude pics that I had my cousins take of me over Thanksgiving.

I’m sorry, was that too much too fast? We’re just getting to know each other here, so why don’t we start slow. Let’s start with the words first, and then we’ll move on to the pics.

(You just scrolled down to the bottom of this post to see if the nude pics were actually posted, didn’t you? I appreciate your interest, and I would have done exactly the same thing, but I decided that I just have far too much respect for the internet to post naked images of myself on it.)

I am a high school teacher. This supplies me with a lot of material for blogging. For example, I’ve devoted quite a bit of space to describing the complex series of emotions that I go through when my students walk in on me when I’m sitting on the toilet. I really should expect it by now, because just before the student barges in, I always hear giggling voices outside the bathroom door saying "Do it! Just do it! It’d be hilarious!" I’d always thought that they were just encouraging me to wipe properly.

I should really consider getting that lock fixed. This and finding a suitable kidney donor for my mother are my number one priorities at the moment.

It just struck me now that perhaps I should use this opportunity to ask for the kidney donor, but since my life motto is "live, laugh, love," I’ve decided to post something on the lighter side. But if anyone out there has a spare kidney kicking around, get in touch.

I try to use dating as a source of blog material, but it’s hard to meet women, and not only because I am plain-faced and poor. I work mainly with men, and there are only three women who teach at my school – one is the lesbian gym teacher, the other is a very religious woman who is trying to convince the other teachers that I am the devil, and the other is another lesbian who is also trying to convince the other teachers that I am the devil.

There is also a person who works in the cafeteria who may or may not be a woman. I’m not sure. It’s an Asian person who is either a guy with an exquisite pair of breasts or a girl with a 5 o’clock shadow à la Bruce Willis. I’m not ruling this out as a romantic possibility, however. At the moment, this individual is the best thing I have going for me. I just pray that it has a vagina.

Now, I haven’t written about dating for a while, but this doesn’t mean that I’ve been too busy to go on random dates with strange women that I’ve turned up after hours of scouring the internet. That’s not true. I’ve met plenty of strange women over the past couple of weeks. Today I thought I’d describe these women (well, if you want to nit-pick, one technically wasn’t a woman, but it was still a date, so I’ve included it).

I have a 1-to-10 scale that I use to rate the quality of the dates. 10 means that the conversation is so good that I end up spontaneously combusting into orgasm, and 1 means that the date goes so horribly wrong that someone ends up dying, losing a limb, contracting the rabies virus, or a little bit of all three. I’ve never experienced a 1, but I have gone as low as a 3 (the police are called and a restraining order is later filed). I’m not going to say which one of us filed the restraining order though. I’m tricky like that.

Here we go:

Date #1:

Ranking: 7
Looked like: The saucy, outspoken white woman from "The View" (not Rosie)

A very nice girl. Nice personality, nice looks, nice laugh. She and I seemed to hit it off. Unfortunately, having only a double-digit IQ, I thought I would appeal to her more if I waited for her to send me the first post-date message, and then wait for a week before sending a response. I did this, and she still hasn’t written back. Oh well. I hope she’s found a handsome and muscular man to satisfy her sexually.

Date #2:

Ranking: 3
Looked like: Laura Ingalls from "Little House"

Looked like Laura Ingalls. Wore a cape and a blue and white cameo brooch. Said "oh dear" a lot. Seemed to have a skin-flaking problem. She got so nervous after one of these skin flakes drifted onto my Starbucks brownie that she accidentally spilled her coffee onto my lap. The burn and the tenderness remain. She won’t stop e-mailing.

On a side note, the burn is beginning to look a lot like the Toyota logo. Maybe eBay has a market for this kind of thing?

Date #3:

Rating: 6
Looked like: Chris Hansen, the famous host of television’s "To Catch a Predator."

I say this date looked like Chris Hansen because it was Chris Hansen. I happened to stumble onto the set of "To Catch a Predator." I watch the show regularly, and who would have thought that they’d go to Murphy, Texas twice! Anyhow, I gave this date a 6 because even though I was humiliated in front of an audience of several million people, I got to meet a major celebrity who really seemed to take an interest in what I thought!

Date #4:

Ranking: 7
Looked like: A goddess

Gorgeous and extremely interested in me. This always makes me very suspicious. But before we get any further, no, she was not actually a man, and no, she was not gay. Let’s just say that she was extremely experienced. Her dating history – which she constantly talked about – sounded like the resume of a seasoned diplomat. She spoke of her experiences with Iranians, Nigerians, Italians, Canadians, and she even had a story about an Eskimo. She never actually told me that she’d slept with all of these guys, but her stories about meeting them nearly always ended with the words, "And then we went back to his place, you know what I’m saying?"

Now, I’ve fantasized about this kind of woman before. A lot. But I’ve found that when this kind of thing actually happens, it’s never quite as exciting as it seemed in your imagination. This is probably how most people feel when they ask someone to pee on them for the first time. It starts off sounding all awesome and kinky, but in reality you just end up ruining your favourite sweater and wanting to get home. At least, so I’ve been told.

So, the moral of this post is this: If you break up with someone and you’re looking to start seeing what’s out there, don’t let anyone get your hopes up by telling you that there are plenty of fish in the sea. Actually, there are fish, but they are the ones that will make you feel queasy – even if you cook them properly.

I like to think that, if I’d put a little more effort into it, I could have come up with something better than that crappy fish metaphor to end this post. Especially since I am an English teacher, and I get paid to teach others about metaphors and similes.

On that melancholy note, I now think I’ll retire to my study and enjoy a glass of port.

And by "study" I’m talking about the broken milk crate in the corner of my room, and by "glass of port" I am basically referring to diluted contact lens solution.