Would you buy advice from this woman?

I recently received an email from the CEO of a site called Wizpert.com.  The gentleman said that he had read my blog, and thought that it would be a great fit for his site, which basically takes on bloggers to give readers advice in their particular area of expertise, most of which is actually great advice.  Apparently, from what I've been able to glean from others and by visiting the site itself, the 'experts' make themselves available via Skype, and readers/callers are charged a certain amount to have their questions answered.  I was initially thrilled at the thought that someone was impressed enough by my work to want to hire me, and PAY me, but then reservations started gnawing away at my fragile little mind, the first of which came in the form of a series of questions.  Since when am I an expert on dating?  Has this man actually READ the blog?  Doesn't he realise that the reason people keep coming back to it is to marvel and (I hope) laugh themselves stupid at my baffling ineptitude and lack of social skills?  The more I thought about it, me giving advice to the lonely and love-lorn would be like Charlie Sheen leading an Amish youth group.

Another concern was the thought of having to be available - on call, if you will, - anytime to chat on Skype.  I have toyed with the idea of Skyping to my readers, at my own discretion, but then some friends rightly pointed out that doing so might also lead to unwanted attention from people who weren't necessarily interested in the blog at all.  Add to that the prospect of being yanked away from any number of activities, some of which I've only just gotten back into (nudge, nudge, wink, wink), and the idea was about as attractive as having my next pap smear streamed live on Vimeo.

My final, and greatest, worry was the money.  Utterly blissful as it would be to have a grocery budget high enough to not ever have to buy Z-grade vaccuum-packed minced meat again, I think that the guilt of taking someone's money in exchange for providing them with a guesstimate as to their romantic prospects would soon have me depositing my twenty dollar steak into the cylindrical bio-waste collection pail.

As flattered as I am that the blog has warranted such attention, I am going to have to decline the Wizpert offer, dear readers.  The laughter-derived aversion therapy both you and I get right here will just have to be enough for now.          

Back in the swing.

Dear readers; set down those hot beverages and brace yourselves: your humble narrator actually went on a date.  Well, technically a couple of them.  I set up a profile on yet another dating site, purely for the purpose of doing some research for a new post I was working on, (which I've since abandoned).  In the interests of full disclosure, I was completely upfront about what I was doing there, and even included a link to the blog.  Curiously, for all the discretion that forms part of the site's modus operandi, and asks for from its members, I garnered double the responses I usually get.  A lot of them were from guys who had followed the link and become readers (hey guys!), but I got quite a few other offers too, (most of which I can't mention in this forum due to their 'adult' nature).     

Anyone who was quick enough to have caught my last post before I deleted it, and I was so instantly unhappy with it you would need to have been, will know that I actually accepted one offer, (from someone single), and ended up having a lovely evening with a very intelligent and interesting guy who ended up staying the night, (and that is the most detail you are going to get lest this post turn into a cheap(er) Sex In The City rip-off.  I am still very much a single woman, but I will be removing my profile from the site shortly because, to use a horrible Hipster term, it isn't the 'organic' way to meet someone, but I'm not entirely sorry I did it.  I'm an unemployed,  forty year old single mother of a special needs child.  I have a psychologist on speed-dial, and if ever there was a movie made about my life, nobody short of Jessica Lange would be fit to play my mother.  These things put me very much at the bottom of the totem pole in terms of eligibility, but the point of this post is that I won't let that put me off getting back into the swing of things, because it doesn't scare me anymore.

Unlike some of the responses I got from the above-mentioned site.

Aint no way I'm blogging about those!