Zack Meets Internet People

Happy Holidays or "I Met an Internet Grrl"

I feel obligated to follow up on my original cynical post about the holidays given the number of sympathetic and friendly e-mails I received about it. For those of you who missed out, here is the article where I discuss bank account pillaging and a long car ride with my grandmother. Really exciting, I know, but hopefully this article will be less depressing.

"Fisty" is no doubt thinking "Wow, he is loud and annoying! Shut up about Return to Castle Wolfenstein!" while (inset) I'm about to do something loud and annoying.A ten year legacy of sad and angry family Christmases came to an end this year, with the most happy, relaxed and close Christmas I've ever shared with my family. It was one of the first times in a long time I can even point to spending time with them and say "I enjoyed myself that day". This means I need to go back on a lot of my bah-humbuggery and say; "Christmas isn't always a sock full of doorknobs in the night". Part of my positive attitude might have come from the fact that I had some odd, nerve-wracking, but very positive New Years arrangements planned.

I was going to Chicago to hang out with one of the forum admins. Not just any forum admin either, we'll call her "Fisty", and in working with her somewhere along the lines we had become friends. A little farther along the lines we had begun to wonder if maybe there wasn't something else there too. So all in all it was the post-modern equivalent of finally meeting that penpal who has been sending you the perfumed letters for months. This was a very weird situation indeed, one that had all of that horrible blind-date anxiety mixed in with a huge helping of "this could fuck up the workplace environment really bad". On the other hand she was a great person, I felt like I knew everything but her body language and I was willing to make the trip.

It was a disaster.

Handsome gentleman Dante Passera hams it up with his inflatable friend in this artistic shot also taken New Years Eve.I got you nay saying bastards! It was fantastic. We hung out together, we saw a movie, we got pizza, and my anxiety passed. The next day we went shopping and out to lunch and then for New Years Eve went out drinking, where we met up with Dante Passera, creator of the Kitty & Fatty cartoons and all around good guy. He was already drunk when we met up with him but we still shared a lot of laughs. The next morning we went to brunch at her friend's apartment - her friend who was the female version of Vince Vaughn, talking and being comically bossy constantly - it was a great time. That evening was spent curled up on the couch watching the entire first season of Twin Peaks and being attacked by the most affectionate cat ever invented by the Free Masons.

I left the next morning and I miss her already. Suffice it to say that I'm in some bizarre futuristic long range relationship now, which is why I'm telling you all this. I need your advice, I need to keep that spark burning bright, so I'm going to lay some of my ideas for romance on you. If you've got any others, please, feel free to e-mail them to me as I am very open-minded.

Valentines Day Cake

I tried to show off my fantastically horrible cooking skills to Fisty while I was in Chicago but I think she somehow sensed it would be a disaster and made sure there wasn't enough time. If I surprise her with a baked good she would not have the opportunity to call off the cookin' and I know every man wants a woman who is skilled in the kitchen. Wait…well, okay, it's the future and all, roles can be reversed! I am going to bake her a cake for Valentines day, but the thing is I don't want to use a cake mix because I think women can taste the lumps in it and somehow identify them as cake mix lumps. I've been working on a machine that will actually fire the scratch ingredients for a cake - fully mixed - into a waiting pan. The only downside to this machine is that it has a bad habit of leaking its primary coolant (Diethylbromide) into the "cake propellant hopper", contaminating it to the point that only myself and a few of my friends can eat it. I think I can straighten out this problem before February, but the icing is a whole other issue. The rats with the porous icing reservoir feet absolutely refuse to run in the shape of a heart. And they keep trying to bite my eyes. And they are diseased.

Jewelry

"Here you go honey, rescued from Saigon at the last minute by a CIA helicopter!"Shiny things impress the ladies, I know this from a long history of trading trinkets to the Native Americans for vast tracts of land, and Native Americans are basically like ladies only bigger. From my dealings that went awry I know that you must carefully choose the jewelry or you'll end up with some serious tomahawk wounds to the head and neck. I could go with something like a heart pendent or something like that, but that's generic, and women, much like the Narragansett Tribe, like to feel important. What I intend to do instead is go to the local "Everything is a Fucking Dollar" store and search through their refurbished jewelry bin. Most of these things are plastic baubles spray painted gold and encrusted with an equal mass of various translucent plastic gems. I'll purchase the largest of these I can find because bigger is definitely better and I want my special lady to know that she has super sized my heart. No seriously, I have an enlarged heart.

I'll place it in an old-looking box and set up a romantic evening with her, at which point I will launch into a long story about this piece of jewelry that has been passed through the generations of the Parsons family. I'll tell her the story about how it was once captured by the Nazis when my grandfather got shot down by a German pilot and he parachuted into a French farm house. Refusing medical attention he recovered the jewelry from an SS castle that included death defying leaps and possibly zombies or mummies. After I've hyped it up beyond belief I'll give it to her and watch her eyes light up, then guilt her incredibly any time I catch her not wearing it.

Erotic Lingerie

Nothing says "I want to defile you" like a set of extremely risqué lingerie. Since I'm on something of a budget I know Frederick's of Hollywood is out of the question, but that doesn't mean I'm going to give up so easily. I intend to go to the finest undergarment dealer on the block (Wal Mart) and purchase a three pack of Hanes Her Way white cotton panties and a bra that will probably be the wrong size. A few snips of the old tailor's scissors and I will reduce them to a series of hanging strips barely connected to the elastic. Ladies like things frilly and the thesaurus in my loins says a synonym for "frilly" is hot glued "crepe paper", which I will apply liberally to the edges of the bra. LOOKIN' HOT TONIGHT, YOWSAH!

Flowers

Agggh, these flowers are infested with weevils!Tradition dictates that flowers are a great gift to give to the young lady who is tugging at your heart strings, but for my special lady not just any flowers will do. Unfortunately I don't know much about flowers other than they come in various colors and that they are named after women like "Rose" and "Daisy" and "Margaret". I do know quite a bit about computer components and World War II however. I've got an old Voodoo2 card lying around this place somewhere and if I can melt off the circuit board into a stem-like mold I've got myself a green stem. While the mold is still hot and malleable I can tear pages out of "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich" - don't worry, I've got two copies - and shape them into petals and stick them at one end. Spray on some of my ex-wife's perfume for a touch of class and BAM, perfect flower. That's a good one, I can't wait to see the look on her face, I sure hope I get some sex out of that. I bet I can if I tell her I used my ex-wife's perfume.

Other Options

I haven't fully considered these options, but they've been floating around my dreamy mind and they would all rest within my capabilities.

• Make her a unitard, because women love clothing and what can be more efficient than one piece of clothing for everything?
• Construct a zip gun for her in case she gets involved in gang warfare.
• Buy her a cook book so she can cook better food for me and not that crap she usually makes.
• Hire a hooker on Valentines who is willing to work with couples, then spend weeks trying to drink off the image of her moaning in another woman's arms.
• Buy her a gift certificate to "All Things World War II" so that she doesn't have to spend money on my birthday.
• Pay some of my friends to stage an attempted kidnapping of her and then scare them off with pepper spray.
• Dub my porn collection onto video CD so she can "take a little of the action home".
• Get her a calling card and in bold red marker on the front write my number and the caption "CALL ME ONLY WHEN IT'S WET."

I'm sure I'll come up with more, but if you devise any, please feel free to let me know.

I think I've got the start of something wonderful on my hands here and I sure hope I don't fuck it all up with my big mouth like I usually do. Wait, I just reread this whole article and I am a fucking moron. Oh well, I may be a moron but I make up for it by being too lazy to start this article over from scratch and not make an ass of myself.

– Zack "Geist Editor" Parsons (@sexyfacts4u)