On this site I have shared some very interesting things about myself related to my size, my tongue, and my thumb, and it really seems that my body parts end up being the star of many of my stories.  Well, here’s another of my favorite stories.

I have some friends who are…lets say…“exuberant” about Halloween.  As a teenager and in my early 20s, I basically ignored that it even existed, but for the past many years, I have costumed up.  Most recently, I was Dexter, complete with Saran-wrapped victim, which is actually a picture I used on online dating sites until I was informed that it was “creepy.”  Creepy is not usually what I go for.

Years ago, I was driving home from work with my then-girlfriend and one of my closest friends.  We were talking about Halloween and someone suggested that my girlfriend should dress as a “Ho” for Halloween, and I could rock the pimp costume.  She asked what a pimp would be doing with a gardening implement.  We explained.

My girlfriend was resistant to this but began to be needled by my friend.  She threw out, “Fine.  If he dresses as a ho, I’ll dress as a ho.”  I remember thinking that there is no way that my very shy and fairly socially conservative friend would agree.  Cross dressing for Halloween?  Never in a million years is he going to go for it.

He agreed.  To this day, one of my favorite memories is the evening where one of my female friends tried to teach him how to walk in high heels…. STOMP STOMP STOMP STOMP.

Anyway, this story is not about him, and I don’t want to embarrass him beyond what has already been done.

I started assembling my pimp costume.  Not to cheap out, I went with the high end real pimp outfits I found online.  Once I had acquired bling with some real gravitas, a pair of very sketchy- looking sunglasses, and a purple suit with zebra lining, I looked to what shoes I would wear.  I found some six inch platforms which fit the bill nicely.  I was not just any pimp, but a nearly seven foot tall pimp.  Ah, how the “bitches would be trippin”.

I purchased an extra long pimp cane as well.  Have you ever wondered why pimps have canes?  It’s simple really.  In six inch platforms, the risk of falling is high… excuse the pun.  Anyway, I needed the cane to keep me balanced.  Balanced on my feet that is.  Mentally balanced is a ship that sailed quite awhile ago.

That left one final thing to acquire… a hat.  So, I visited a bunch of costume stores and tried to find a “lid” as they are sometimes known.  Unfortunately, I began to think that my head might be larger than normal.  Girls I have dated in the past have accused me of having “a big head”, but I figured they weren’t being literal.

Turning my hopes to the Internet, I found a website called pimphats.com.  I found the hat that I wanted and checked out their sizing guide.  They explained how to measure my head.  I followed the instructions and was confused that the number I came up with didn’t show on the chart.

Not to be stopped so easily, I emailed their customer support department.  A few hours later I received an email that said the following:

———————–
Colin,

Wow man, that’s one big ass dome playa!  I’m sorry but we don’t carry tops that large.

Stephen
Customer Support Representative
———————–
I love that email.  He really made me laugh.  It gave me the impression that the people at Pimp Hats are, in fact, pimps themselves.  Then, that fantasy was shattered by his name being “Stephen”, which is not a very “pimptastic” name.

To this day I don’t really own any hats.  I bought a fitted Mariners cap that’s an eight.  Evidently, that’s the biggest they carry, but sadly it’s too tight to wear.  I’m sure that there are men out there with bigger heads than myself.  What do they do for hats?  I don’t know, but I have considered making my own out of construction paper.  If I affixed it with a large feather, perhaps then I really would be a “playa”.

I have often heard people explain how those who act, write, or create for public consumption do so because, at their core, they are crazy.  I think there is a certain amount of craziness that comes with such a desire to bare yourself out to the world.  I would add that there is absolutely some narcissism as well, and I’m guilty of both.

Every six months or so, I Google myself to see how my Internet presence is going.  Until recently, the front page of Google results was looking very strongly me, but something new has appeared.

Evidently, there is a person out there named Colin Sherman who has started the colinshermanart.net website.  You can tell that he’s serious about such a website as he attached the “coveted” .net extension.  Take a look at the site before I continue.  You’ll thank me later.

Here is what I know about this other Colin Sherman:

1.  He’s an oil painter
2.  He has a very unusual way with words
3.  He has a strong interest in male anatomy.

Other Colin, or as I like to call him “OC”, is quite the painter.  His talent is certainly very pointed.  It really seems to erect quite the visualizations when I look through his painting.  I just mean that he has a really good grip on his subject matter.  He’s clearly put long and hard hours into such meaty work.  To bare yourself as a painter takes almost a “cocky” attitude, to compete in the art world with such stiff competition.

Okay, now that my inner 12 year old got that out of my system and can stop giggling, let’s talk about his description of the art creating process.  It’s on the site under “some words,” but rather than have you read it, I think it would be better to have it read to you, so that you can experience it with the gravitas that I’m sure was intended.  So, instead, have it read to you by my Macbook Pro here…  Yes, my MBP is British.  What of it?  Read to you

There are other Colin Shermans on the net.  Don’t get me wrong.  This rather manly looking guy is not me.  This adorable baby?  Also not me.

Perhaps I should set Google domination as my life goal.  Maybe I need to make colinshermanart.com and focus on female anatomy, just to see if I can compete.

Like most Internet folks, I get a lot of email on any given day.  Across my three commonly-used email addresses, spam is a real problem and eats up quite a bit of my day.  I even use a professional-grade spam filter that everything has to sift through, and it’s still a big problem.  In general, I’m not really a fan of email marketing.  It’s such a problem, in fact, that I have an email account created entirely to handle all the random companies I have bought things from over the net.  That account gets hammered all day by companies trying to get me to buy a wide variety of products.

My most important email address is the coveted work email, which reaches me through my work computer, every personal computer, my iPad, and my cell phone.  The email where I am conditioned like Pavlov’s dog to salivate every time a message arrives.  After all, I’m in sales, and emails can sometimes directly translate to me “getting paper” as the kids would say.

When someone mentions email marketing to me, one of the first things I think is “flippin’ Amazon.”  So, let’s talk about them for a second. It’s only fair to start by pointing out that I’m one of Amazon’s biggest proponents.  Of the crap that I buy (and yes, I do typically mean crap), I would say that nearly all of it comes from Amazon. I’m not kidding.

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Way too many posts about online dating over the last few weeks.  I seriously do not want to turn this into the Colin-has-baggage-and-is-a-jaded-pathetic-man-who-dates-crazy-girls blog.  After all, that URL would be way too long.  I thought about some of my best stories, and I remembered that people seemed to really like the story about my thumb.  So, how about another story about my anatomy?

When I was 15, I stopped sleeping.  At first, it was because I wanted to be doing things that are more fun than sleeping, which for me has always been nearly everything.  Then it transformed into a complete inability to sleep.  I have battled with insomnia ever since.  I’m typically pretty good, in that I get five or six hours of sleep a night, and that’s enough for me.

A few years ago, it stopped being enough, and I began to feel tired basically all of the time.  After a few bouts of falling asleep while driving, I ended up in a sleep study, which is good because it’s very uncomfortable to sleep while driving, and you tend to really piss off other people.  You know, other people like other drivers or the people in your car.

For those who haven’t had the joyous experience of a sleep study, I will paraphrase it.

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I was really caught in the middle of it today.  I want to make sure that only some of my musings on here are dating-related instead of every post, because I want this site to be more than just related to online dating.  My plans for it are much more grandiose.  But, at the same time, I really wanted to get something written today, and this post, which is related to dating, is so resonant in my mind that if I don’t get it out I may have an aneurysm.

Recently, it came to me that if aliens came to the planet and could only learn of our culture through the content on online dating sites, they would get a very strange perception of what we are all about.

Here are five things I have learned about our world from using online dating sites.

1.  The most important criteria for a healthy, long-term relationship is perfect spelling and punctuation.

In easily 75% of the profiles that I have seen, girls say that they have a preference for guys who can write them an email without spelling, grammatical, or punctuation errors.  It’s extremely common.  The profiles usually read something like this: “If you can’t write an email with correct spelling and grammar, then we probably won’t get along.”

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I feel the need to share another story about Scott, the well-minded but poorly-executing family friend from my teenage years.  Just a reminder for those that need one:  Scott is the sort of man who pressure washed our windows without closing them first and demonstrated a complete lack of planning while working on a light switch.

At the time, my mother and I lived in a house with a large TV room on the second floor.  The roof above that room had an eaves section between it and the actual ceiling of the room.  The result was a small square opening next to the roof that certain flying animals could get into.  We had an annoying problem with pigeons making a home in such a comfy spot, and we would hear them scuttling around while watching TV.  More distressing than that was when they would share their fecal matter with us by covering our bay window with it.  As far as I’m concerned, pigeons are nothing but flying rats.  One friend claims that they are covered with diseases:  “If they flap at you, you might get chlamydia.”  I’m not sure where she got her information.

Scott was a man who believed that most problems could be solved with a pressure washer.  One day, as I pulled up, I saw an image so strange and memorable that even to this day it’s completely clear in my mind.  Scott was up on a tall ladder, staring into the hole.  Below him was a pressure washer fully running.  The hose trailed Scott up the ladder, and he was awkwardly positioning the long nozzle portion of the washer into the hole.

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