Great Dating Blogs Award

This should be on my blog for realz, instead of just a screenshot I uploaded…

Dearest Readers,

I’ve been nominated* for a ‘Best Niche Blog Award!’ Surely I am nothing if not niche. Ridiculous dating stories from the middle of nowhere desert outback remote Australia? C’mon, pretty niche right there. So if you’ve liked my humble little blog enough to ‘like’ it on Facebook or subscribe by email, know that I already appreciate you very much but I’d appreciate it even more if you went one step further and clicked here to vote! Go on…

If you also feel like you might like to share a desertdate story or two with a friend, perhaps strengthen the solidarity of the single sisterhood or shout out to a mate who’s had a bade date, then Dear Readers, now is the time to share! I’d just about explode with appreciation. True.

For my New Readers, welcome strangers to the show! Start from the very beginning or feel free to peruse my newly categorised categories. If you’re into Online Dating, Speed Dating, Blind Dating or even if you’re a city slicker, there’s something for most people here and I hope something for you. Bon appetite dudes!

Oh, and don’t forget to….

*Not gunna lie, I nominated myself. But hey, gotta back yourself right?

Babin’ Chocolate and Being Vs Doing

I haven’t had sex in over a year. I kissed one guy one time a few months ago. My last relationship ended five years ago, about the same time I moved to the desert. I can count on one hand the times I saw my family and friends last year. I have lost count of all the birthdays, housewarmings and births I’ve missed. I don’t have FOMO, I just MO. I know, call a wambulance, cry me a river etc. Soz to bring down the vibe, but stick with me, it has a happy ending.

I told my Dad last year I was sick of waiting to figure out what I was supposed to do with my life, I just wanted to be doing it already. He told me I’d never figure it out. He reckons he hasn’t figured it out, even though he’s been a teacher his whole life. Mum hasn’t figured it out. She’s re-trained and changed careers dramatically so many times. They’re both using their skills to contribute something to make the world a better place, constantly challenging themselves, broadening their horizons. They both still sometimes find it hard to balance family, work and relationships, but they’ve turned out OK. They are happy where they are at whatever stage they’re at. Mum tells me I focus too much on DOING and not enough on BEING.

It’s time for a change. I’m going to move back to the east coast. I’m going to live somewhere that is with a day’s drive or one plane trip to my family. I’m going to live somewhere with a dance studio and a theatre.

I’m going to move to a city. I’ve never lived in one before. My hometown of Canberra is really just a small town. I think I’m going to move in October. I’ve been reading frankie magazine and The Bedroom Philosopher Diaries in an effort to understand the hipster thing, but frankly, I don’t think I’m whimsical enough.

I don’t know exactly what I’m going to DO, but here’s what I’m going to BE: a sister, a daughter, a granddaughter, a cousin, a niece, a friend, a dancer and hopefully a girlfriend.

So wish me luck, Dear Readers. I won’t abandon you, this is just a new chapter, literally and metaphorically. I’ll keep writing. I’ve joined (and paid for!) eHarmony and I continue to peruse the old Oasis. I’m starting guest posting on dating advice sites. I also want to write about other aspects of living in Remote and Regional Australia, working in an Indigenous Community. Capital letters. Don’t worry, I aint gunna get all political on yo ass, just putting the ‘desert’ back in ‘desertdates’ yo.

Finally, just because this entry has been a bit serious, here’s a list of search terms that people have punched into Google to come across my blog, enjoy:

• Dance floor ratio
• Pilbara hipster
• Meeting a contortionist on a blind date
• How to fling it formula
• Self indulgent introspection
• Babe radar asian cute girl
• Lao object puppetry
• Western desert hand signals
• Real hot dress
• Carpenters waistcoat
• Reverse culture shock aboriginals
• Weird speed dating Australia
• Kardashians empire 2013
• How to make a good hipster house party
• Middle aged women want a future
• Bed woman horse riding.com
• Babin’ chocolate
• Electrifying eye contact

And my two personal favourites

• Is there any desert in Melbourne?
• Could a Mormon break dance?

Don’t Tell My Mother I Write About Sex On The Internet (Motorbike Man Pt 2)

I’m on top of a hill at sunset with a man who rides a motorbike. After we got the ‘hello, how are you’ out of the way he gave me a pair of gold earrings with delicate fish engravings.

The only place open to eat was at the Casino bistro with the soothing sound of poker machines in the background. He was lovely, polite and our conversation was the best I’d had on any internet date. He was impressed to learn that I knew what Sofism was and I was impressed to learn that he was the first guy to ride to some ridiculously high Himalayan mountain on a ridiculously small motorbike. Adventure man! My dad would approve.

I wasn’t immediately attracted but I thought all this good conversation should lead to a second date. He cooked me butter chicken from scratch.

Gift giving + motorbike riding + conversing + cooking = fairly sweet so far. Then three things happened:

1. He asked me to go overseas and meet his family

2. We slept together

3. He told me he loved me

Let me awkwardly elaborate further on point number 2* in a non-erotic manner.

I snogged him after dinner in a lull in the conversation. Was I bored? Was I genuinely attracted or just curious? Had it been more than two years since my last sexual encounter, was I just really hot for it? I can’t recall my motivations but the result was wet, sloppy and uninspiring. Undeterred, perhaps confusing urgency for passion, I went wandering with my hands. He grabbed them and led me to his (single) bed.

My Dear Readers, normally I’d agree with the ‘It’s not the size that matters, but what you do with it,” but nothing was being done with it and I had to ask the dreaded “Is it in?” Poor fella, I know it’s hard to hear but I genuinely didn’t know. It was tiny and remained flaccid no matter what I tried. Despite this he continued to assure me ‘I’m OK sweetie, I can go all night.’

Now, I don’t really mind what I’m called in the bedroom, I don’t even mind having my breasts referred to as ‘Mary Kate’ and ‘Ashley.’ Hell, I’ll even call your triceps ‘Des’ and ‘Troy’ if it boils your potato. ‘Babe,’ which I abhor in daily life, makes me feel a little bit naughty in the throes of passion, but ‘Oh, sweetie!’ made me feel like I was out to high tea with my grandmother.

So I’m being referred to as an endearing aging pensioner and I actually cannot feel a thing. I fake it so it’ll stop. Before I ‘get there’ he cries ‘I love you!’ repeatedly.

We had lunch a few days later. Conversation was strained. He again asked me to meet his parents. I told him I didn’t think it would work between us. I left a real nice hat at his house.

*Seriously, don’t tell my mother I write about sex on the internet!

Motorbike Man Part 1: Montage Soundtracks & Sunsets

It’s true. I’m running out of old dodgy dates to write about. I live in a real and metaphorical desert. The real desert is a dateless, barren man-scape and the metaphorical desert is (conveniently) drying up too, all the stories have been told, evaporated into the blogosphere. Leaving me with nothing almost nothing to write about. Almost nothing. I could always:

- Blush over my newfound crush on Ricky Martin in a bizarre new twist in my reality television addiction

- Gush over the sensational run I went on last night- the standard loop along the beach and backstreets. I did lunges, squats and shadow boxed in unlit corners, with Kanye and RATM as the soundtrack to my very own training montage. Down near the old jetty is a clear, wide asphalt turning circle for trucks. I pelted around the edge and down the middle, my heart pounding, my head tilted upwards taking in the Milky Way as my stride and speed increasing in time with the music…

- Giggle girlishly at my early stages of a steady relationship with the local gym. It’s still in that exciting phase where I get dressed up beforehand and make a special playlist for the occasion! We’re still getting to know each other so we’re not bored of each other yet, I still get nervous and clumsy sometimes but I feel elated and exhausted afterwards!

- Rant about the physical, political, social and emotional aspects of working in a remote Aboriginal community where the most irritating aspect is the other white people

- Mark the miraculous and dramatic start of winter, which began with a Wednesday hail filled dust storm! It’s so nice to be occasionally cold outside!

BUT NEVER FEAR, OH READERS DEAR! There’s one last story stacked away in my backpack of broken hearts! One last Alice Springs online dating fail! You’re saved from my political ranting, exercise obsessing and Ricky Martin swooning! I’m temporarily saved from going on more bad dates just to write about them!

Our tale begins with a sunset on top of ANZAC Hill- where grey nomads shuffle out of their caravans and high-schoolers make out in their parents cars. Tradies perch casually on the front of their utes, chowing down Maccas after a shift. Tourists point their enormous lenses towards the fading sun, disappointed at how green the ‘Red Centre’ really is after rain. Small children proudly point out Mt Gillen in the distance and their primary schools below them to their visiting relatives, who are too tired to take in the beauty of the changing colours on the rocky ranges, the suburban pools, playgrounds and Jacarandas.

The low prowl of the only Harley in town interrupts our collective peace. I take a seat and get busy trying to look busy and unfazed.

‘I’m the one in the red dress,’ I text.

‘I’m the one with the motorbike helmet,’ he replies.

I turn around and try to appear unfazed.*

TO BE CONTINUED…

Ha! By the way, welcome to any new readers! If you’re new here, this is who I am and this is where I live. Thanks for dropping by, subscribe over there on the side, comment your heart out down below and join me on the book of faces. There, now we’re acquainted!

*Why did I feel the need to appear unimpressed? Why hide my excitement? Why try to be cool? I think maybe from now on I’ll try to be less cool, less busy and generally be OK with being fazed.

Jack Monetti Discovers Art

I’m walking along the Beachville beach with an Italian engineer. There are lots of things about that sentence that may excite you. Potential Italian homemade cooking, for one. So why, when he asks me to take of my sunglasses so he can look into my eyes, do I cringe internally? Why don’t I want to run into the sea with him right then and there and frollick like the other lovers do? Let’s backtrack.

It’s 2012 and I’ve just moved to the Pilbara.  In an effort to prove to my housemate Jackie how easy online dating was, (and to satisfy my own curiosity) I log back in and suss out the local talent. Once again ‘lives within 200kms’ is my main searching criteria. Once again it unearths the same beer, bike and car loving guys. A few stick out – Jose_inK-Hole lists his favourite book as ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude.’ He has a favourite book! Fantastic! He reads! He has a curly black haired Spanish god of a headshot. We chat, but never meet.  His schedule of 8 days on, 3 days off, 12 hour shifts combined with the bus timetable from his miner’s camp all becomes too hard. So I never found out if Jose was a literature loving Spanish god or not.

The next fella had a well written profile. Complete sentences with monosyllabic words are such a turn on. We arranged to meet up that weekend. His name was Jack Monetti.* What a name full of mystery! Outback Jack? Mob boss Monetti? Intrigue increased.

Monetti’s first mistake was arriving 45 minutes early. Few things annoy me more than people being early, mainly because I am consistently late. Second mistake: texting me three times between arriving and meeting me. Cool your jets Monetts! His third mistake was eating lunch before I got there, even though we were meeting for lunch. So our inevitable awkward silences were made even more awkward by him watching me eat.

Monetti is quick to tell me how much money he earns and that he has an investment property in Perth. Neither of these things impress or interest me, so I pull out one of my top three conversation starters (when I get really desperate):

1. What would you do with a million dollars?
2. Who would be on the bill of your ultimate music festival?
3. If you could pick one super hero power, what would it be?

“One million dollars?” scoffed Monetti, “No one can do anything with that much. Ask me what I’d do with ten or a hundred million, then I’d have to think about it.” If you weren’t already thinking “What a douchebag!” then you will when you hear his answer to the second question: “Oh, I don’t really know, I like all kinds of music.” Puh-leeeze. I didn’t bother asking the third question, I didn’t care what lame superhero power he chose.

Monetti was fascinated about my work in the “Arts.” Ecstatic to discuss what “Art” was. I was less than ecstatic about him, but he’d driven all the way out here so I thought I’d stick it out for at least an hour. For some reason I suggested a walk along the beach, forgetting that for some people this isn’t something you do every couple of days for exercise, that for some people it’s only SUPPOSED TO BE THE MOST ROMANTIC THING YOU DO WITH SOMEONE OF THE OPPOSITE SEX.

Beachville: you see romance, I see fun fitness times…

So when Monetti asks me to take of my sunnies so he can see my eyes, I cringe. I don’t want him to see my eyes. I want to keep these windows to the soul slammed shut! I take them off for two seconds anyway, and he just says ‘Wow,’ in a manner that I’m sure is attempting to be flattering, but just seems creepy.

Monetti texted me five times that evening, one time to say ‘So I looked up art on the internet, apparently people just spray paint on street walls and they call it art these days! Smiley face.’ Ten minutes later he texted ‘Did you get my last text?’ I neglected to engage with Monetti’s deep insight upon discovering art in a Google search, I also neglected to tell him I’d previously managed a graffiti art project and was passionate about its legitimacy as an art form. I simply politely informed him of my intentions to not see him again. It was my first (and last) online date in the Pilbara and I haven’t checked my profile since*.

*It wasn’t really, it was some similar Italian sounding last name.

**This is a lie, I check it every couple of months, just in case…

Dates With Myself

I went on a date with myself this arvo. Nothin’ suss, just quality beach time.

The water was so clear the sunlight danced on the sand below me. I duck dived down to chase huge schools of hundreds of tiny silver fish. Little stripy fish and rock hugging ugly fish darted in and out.

There was a pregnant lady lying in a shade tent, there were terns and gulls and kids looking for Nemo through their snorkels. There were pot bellied men drinking beer in the shallows and bikini clad women sun baking on the sand.  I was doing laps with my rashie and foggy goggles, clearing them every ten seconds lest I mistake a stingray for an oyster covered bombie.

Beachville – where the desert meets the sea

A few weeks ago we nearly had a cyclone. It never came. We got a week of drizzle and wind and it was cool enough to sleep without the air conditioner or the fan. It left behind a huge billowy cloud over the ocean with an electrical storm going on inside it every night for a week.

Sometimes when I drive over the bridge from Darcytown on a night with a full moon, I can see its reflection in the water. That magic silvery pathway to the horizon.

Some nights in winter if it’s cool enough I go running around the streets of Beachville (all 12 of them). I run and leap and air punch and click in time with the music on my iPod.

The sun shines here every day. Every single day. My commute to work is a ten minute drive through the desert, with rain and fire the country changes and huge eagles float above it all.

Some nights the sunsets are so beautiful that it’s worth coating myself in tropical extra strength mozzie repellant and venturing off for a solo stroll along the beach.

Saturday Night in Beachville

While y’all can’t decide which hipster bar to go to I’m deciding between shouting at American Idol judges or shouting at Fashion Star on TV to write to you, my dear readers. Now that I’m back west I have nothing to report other than that I’ve joined the Darcytown gym. I now spend my evenings in a confined space with a bunch of intimidatingly large, tattooed, huffing and puffing triangular men. It’s become too hot to keep jogging, lunging and squatting my way around the oval with the Boot(y)camp.

Since I have nothing to report on the dating front, I’ll re-open the vault of endless stories of bad online dates I had in Alice Springs.

The beautiful (but unfortunately devoid of decent men) Alice Springs

I had committed to ten online dates, by date number four I thought I might as well get some decent meals out of the experience. I’d forgotten that a dinner date locks you into a least an hour-long date as you order, wait, then eat your food. So I went on a harmless enough dinner date to a decent enough Chinese restaurant with a mildly attractive electrician.

The great thing about internet dating was getting to meet people I would never usually come in contact with in daily life. Then again, I met different people working for the Census, and I got paid for that! Through online dating I learnt about a lot of different occupations and learnt more than I ever want to know about cars, motorbikes and the alcohol content of different brands of beer. The men I dated were outside my social circle, were interested in different things and were generally really different from my friends. The problem was, I actually like my friends! I’d rather date people like them, who are interested in SOME of the same things as me so that we have something to talk about. There’s gotta be some car, bike and beer loving women out there for those other guys.

Anyway. So I’m at harmless restaurant with decent guy who has amazing bone structure in his face. I mean, his jawbone and cheekbones were incredible. He’d been in town for a few months, hadn’t made any friends, didn’t have any ‘pastimes’ or ‘hobbies.’ Not even bikes or beer! He just went from his job on night shift straight home to sleep. Our conversation consisted of me asking him a question and him answering it, often with a yes or no. No offerings of anecdotes. No return questions. I got sick of interrogating him and monologued for a while. I told him about the Flashmobs I organized and invited him to a first rehearsal the following day. Our food came and we ate in silence. He grinned at me whenever I looked at him.

He must have been perfectly happy with the ‘comfortable’ silence, as he asked me out on another date. My desperation should come as no surprise to you by now, dear readers, when I tell you that I accepted. The next day he rocked up to rehearsal, but sat in a corner and watched. When my friends asked who the guy in the corner was, I explained he was a guy I met on the internet but I didn’t introduce them. I knew it was over. Who comes along to a rehearsal just to watch? Either join in or don’t come! His failure to grasp the inclusive and participatory nature of Flashmobs was the final straw. We parted with the usual ‘I just don’t think we’re compatible’ text message. Sometimes good facial bone structure just isn’t not enough.

Until next time, dear readers, here’s hoping I bump into and American Idol hating/secretely loving, participatory dance appreciating kind of guy with appropriately sized shoulder muscles at the gym. Ha!