It’s come to my attention that I might be annoying.

As a single woman.

No one has said anything, per se. There was no intervention, no somber gathering of friends to break it to me gently — You need to calm down a second, kid. And possibly just get yourself laid. I’d talk excessively about the tumbleweeds rollicking through the ghost town of my bed, in order to score a cheap chuckle from friends. And then I started catching myself doing it. All the time.

There’s a line between the self-deprecation for which I’m known and the all-out desperation of the clearly undersexed. The joke within my circle is that I’m bound to embark on a “Slutty Phase,”  celebrating my singledom with a burst of promiscuity.  However, I’ve been single for nearly six months, which is just enough time to remember that I’m really, really bad at it.

Baby steps. Remember, people, this is territory I haven’t explored since the Summer of 2005.  And I’ll tell ya - the landscape has changed. Summer of 2005? I was a glowing, new college graduate. I was also living in a town saturated with boys who drunkenly shouted Dispatch songs from the abandoned couches of their fraternity front porches.

I still have the option to meet guys like this.  We have clubs where, “Hi, I’m ___, it’s nice to meet you” is replaced with, “I know you didn’t ask for this, but I’munna go ahead and grind up against your backside to Funky Cold Medina.” That’s an appropriate guy to kick off your Slutty Phase.  Someone meaningless that you never have to see again.

Alas, I don’t go to clubs.  (Which is a shame, because I do take a hip hop dance class, so I should really expose the world to my moves. Instead I break out the “stanky leg” in dive bars, for my friends’ entertainment.) No, I go to these music venues, full of boys in skinny jeans. Boys in skinny jeans do not approach you.  And you can run that fantasy in your head of you and him reaching for the same vinyl in the record store basement a million times. Ain’t gonna happen.

Also? Can you imagine me taking home the dude from the club? I mean, really? I don’t even want to see that guy naked. Pecs and delts and hair gel = not a turn on. Offhand comment about your favorite Beatles album = turn on. And let’s be honest, by the time you’ve made the Beatles comment, I probably already genuinely like you. Therefore, I don’t want to mess things up by trying to take you home and embarrassing myself [which is inevitable].

One thing I know for sure is that dating provides an endless stream of blog fodder. Hellloooo, who could forget British Guy? Plasma Guy? And of course, DUSTIN and the WORST DATE EVER?

It’s like you have a front row seat. Except you should probably bring a poncho, like if you’re going to see a show at Sea World. Or Gallagher.