Not that you'd necessarily want to date me, but I have some really cute coworkers.

"To write well, one must utterly abandon oneself to it. You cannot keep secrets or hold anything back. You must spill your heart out on paper." ~ Carla Lacovetti
(Muhahahahaaaaa.....)

You know, as many times as I've threatened to blog about people in my life (and there are a few that I did when I was either mad enough at or when I knew they could take it), I'm generally too nice, which frankly hampers my ability to really put my unabridged thoughts into print. But today, there was a link floating around facebook about rules about dating a journalist. It linked to two or three other articles about the same thing, and it was mentioned several times that YOU WILL GET WRITTEN ABOUT.

So here's where I'm going with this:  Every time something REALLY effed-up happens in my dating life, I am one more step away from a free-for-all single chick blog making fun of people and their basic mating behavior. (Also because that's a safe topic since I have to stay away from opinion on things that may affect my job like certain news topics or public figures or writing about wannabe politicians who will annoy EVERYONE IN THE WHOLE LINCOLN COUNTY COURTHOUSE ABOUT IT. I'm not making this up.)

In the past few months, I could have blogged about:
1. The dude who thought it was okay to send a text that just says, "I'm horny, wanna have sex?" (I kid you not. Does that work on some planet I've never been to??)

2. The night in Oxford after a long day of jello shots and bourbon and partying with certain ex-NFL players that I ended up in a rented bed with one of my bffs from college and a great guy (we'll call him "Jim") who'd been nice enough to let me go to the Ole Miss game with him, and nothing happened except that we giggled our butts off from behind the locked door because my bff's intended hook-up was pawing at the outside of the door like a lost puppy and we KNEW what it looked like. (Jim was THE MAN that night.)

3. ANOTHER dude (we'll call him Bob) I was involved with who got in a relationship on facebook without telling me first, and it was not with me (which always causes a mental glitch. You're like, "He's in a relationship...  Aww... With me? No, wait... not with me... I think he would have said something about going all official on facebook... Wait... who's 'Candi'??"). Then, like the others (this has happened to me three times on different levels ranging, seriously. What the hell are mamas teaching their sons in the facebook age??), this dumbass tried to play it off as a joke. Rude, stupid, neanderthal, YES. But the best part was it was with a girl he had sworn for weeks was a lesbian, down to saying, "Well at least you don't have to worry about her being competition. She's not interested in men." (Well, Bob, the thousands of pictures she has posted all over facebook of herself in a bikini just months after her wedding in March that kicked off the marriage that only lasted like a month and a half begs to differ. And the best part is I didn't have to stalk to find that out. She was such a hilarious joke that my friends all came to tell me about it. I WIN.)

4. The day Bob got kicked in the groin by the 10-year-old son of another girl he apparently "wasn't dating" at the same time he "wasn't dating" me because the kid was like, "Don't come near my mama!!!!" I WIN BIGGER.

5. The fact that Bob is no longer dating the bikini queen, because, as (I've been told) he said, "That bitch is crazy." Ummm... What was your clue? The "look at me in my sexy bikini" gallery that she sent to half the law enforcement in three counties? The fact that she forced you into a facebook relationship when you wouldn't do that with any of the 3948573942 other women you've dated simultaneously since last summer? Or was it her three month (or however long, who really gives a crap) marriage? I would say it might be the fact that you were forced to make up incredibly outlandish lies to cover your relationship with her, but wait... that's all you know how to do anyway...

6. The married loser who apparently fell in love with me on some fire scene sometime because he always calls or texts and starts off with fireground talk, then does something charming like ask if I want to go get drunk at the GRAVEL PIT. Yeah. What the hell.

7. Umm, the next guy I'm not even dating who asks for "pictures" (ahem, yes, THOSE kind of "pictures") gets a mail bomb.
(SERIOUSLY?? Is this acceptable in the world today?? If so, where the hell have I been? Why didn't I get the memo??)

8. Or of course, there's the really good guy who has no freakin' clue, and I could hit him with a Mack truck that says, "I THINK YOU'RE FREAKIN' SUPER" on the grill and he'd be like, "Um... All of a sudden I have a headache... What's up with that? While I'm here can I talk to you about this girl I like?"

And I'm just evil enough that I almost posted a link to all these guys' facebook pages, which would be awesome from a writing perspective (think of all the blog hits I'd get, seriously. It would be THROUGH the roof, on Bob's girlfriends ALONE!!), but nobody would appreciate that part of it, I don't think, except me.

But I digress.

Bbased on all these "How to date a journalist" lists that were all over FB today, I'm writing a list of my own. Journalists are different animals, that's just all there is to it. Take that however you want.

(Yeah, it's another list. You'll be okay.)
1. A journalist will always have ink stains on the back pockets of at least one pair of her jeans. I carry a pad and pens in there pretty much all the time. If that bothers you while you're looking at my backside, you're OCD and should move on to some pretty pretty princess that eats tofu and doesn't wear jeans.

2. If I'm sitting quietly listening while you talk and it looks like I'm on another planet, it's because I probably am, and it probably has something to do with innards. Don't ask and I won't tell. If you press because you want to hear the details, be prepared to hear the gory, gory details. And sometimes we need you to press.

3. Don't act like you're afraid to drive through the hood. I don't want to know I'm more of a man than you are. I'm there all the freakin' time, buddy. This is my office. This is practically MY hood.

4. Yes, my name is in the paper every day, and you will see me on TV sometimes, and you will hear my name on the radio when the talk shows discuss what I have written. I don't care that I'm famous, but when you dump me for the lesbian bikini queen, I will talk to myself and my friends about that A LOT to help me deal with the rejection.

5. I have to borrow this from one of the other blogs, because I couldn't have said it better myself:
"We can figure things out. Understand, we’re paid to dig deep, find the secrets and wade through bullshit. We can pick up on subtleties, so what you think you are hiding from us won’t be hidden for long. Sure, we’ll act surprised when you eventually tell us you starred in German porn as a freshman in college — but we already knew."

6. "The most essential gift for a good writer is a built-in shock-proof shit-detector." ~ Ernest Hemingway.
Yes, I know I'm smarter than most people when it comes to detecting bullshit. I may not know exactly WHAT stinks about it, but I know something's up. I spend most of my day trying to find a way around the vague answers of law enforcement ("It's under investigation at this time, ma'am, no further information is available..."), so when you tell me some crazy story that isn't true and I smile and nod, it's because in my mind, I'm trying to figure out if I can delete you from facebook, twitter and the rest of my life from my cell phone RIGHT EXACTLY NOW. As the blog referenced in #5 says, "We don’t take shit from anyone, so don’t lie to us or give a load of bullshit. We spend all day separating fact from fiction, listening to PR cronies and dealing with slimy politicians. If you make us do the same with you, you’re just gonna piss us off. And don’t think we’ll be quiet about it. We’ll respond with the vengeance of an Op-Ed page railing against society’s injustices — and we’ll enjoy doing it.
Just tell us the truth. We can handle it."
Even if the truth is, "I'm about to get facebook serious with a complete whore. You should get checked."

7. Is best explained by this jpeg from another blog.

Yeah, basically we're not going to cheat on you or lie to you or pass on your secrets because for a living, what we do is NOT do those things. Unless you do it first. Then you might make the blog, like "Bob."

8. Yeah, my work schedule sucks. But I know all the cops in like eight counties. Tradeoffs, people.

9. We're generally jacks of all trades, masters of none. "Writers aren't exactly people.... they're a whole bunch of people trying to be one person." ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald

10. We love quotes, and we read into every television show, movie, whatever, for subtext and morals of the story (as evidenced by "Why Lois Lane will NEVER be good enough for Superman," my breakdown of Superman Returns... seriously). It's a problem, I know. I actually had my ex tell me one time, "We are not a movie! Life does not have a happy ending! Quit thinking like that!! We are not Buffy and Angel!!" Ummm, excuse me... Buffy and Angel didn't have a happy ending, sir. How 'bout them apples?

11. We're going to think too much. That's just how it works. I inwardly investigate every boring angle of everything that ever happens to me, every day, all day long. And if, like some people, you ever try to use it to make me feel crazy, see above, re: mail bomb. Saying, "You're overthinking again," gets you flattened with an 18-wheeler trailer like Will Smith in "Hancock" when he calls Charlize Theron "crazy ONE. MORE. TIME." (If you haven't seen it, go straight to wherever people go and rent it NOW. Do not pass go.)

12. Don't say, "I saw on the news where..." I don't give a damn what you saw on the news if I wrote the same story. Before you reference television, you'd better make sure I didn't write a story on the same topic. It's a thing. Sorry.

13. Because of all the things I've listed, I can say we're just weird. We're very weird people, and that's part of the blessing and the curse of being a writer. We have morbid, dark, cynical senses of humor, and small talk is usually not an option. At least we're not boring. And I finish this list on #13 because we're not superstitious. Quite the opposite. We like to tempt fate (at least the breaking news reporters among us do).

For more information on journalists, please visit my blog on the Clarion-Ledger website, or the websites www.stuffjournalistslike.com and www.overheardinthenewsroom.com . And here's another list, of which I've done all but #10. We're not all bad.