The ratio of losers to winners is like 100:1.

This weekend, while I wore my hair in ill-considered braids and Tom-Sawyered myself into repainting my bathroom a lovely color called Kitchen Twine, I did some thinking. When you're on your hands and knees trying to reach around the back of the toilet to paint that one tricky spot, your mind wanders to, what else: dating (it's somehow an apt metaphor). Specifically, online dating. Specifically, that I have been matched on eHarmony with 571 (!) men in the Austin area over the last 18 or so months. Though it would probably be more accurate to say that I've been Punk'd about 571 times.

571. The whole thing is rather exhausting.

Listen, this is all I want out of a date: either be spectacularly good or spectacularly bad. Because if it's good, there will be more dates; and if it's bad, there will be more stories. I can't see how anyone loses here.

And yet.

Here's a random sampling of what I've gotten (this is not a complete list; there are several that I can't mention here):

• a guy whose only question to me was "Is there a late-night Arby's open around here?"
• the local FOX weatherman, with whom I got into a wacky misunderstanding that really showed his lack of humor
• a guy who collects Garbage Pail Kids trading cards (please note the present tense)
• a guy whose full-time "job" was selling his DVDs and pawn-shop purchases on eBay
• a Dungeons and Dragons player
• a guy who lived in his parents' basement
• a guy who spent an hour explaining to me why he would be buying my drink because he is a man, and he invited me out and zzzzzzzzz....
• a blind saxophonist
• a guy who stole my profile and posted it as his own (my first plagiarism!)
• a guy whose third language was English and who still managed to beat me in Scrabble almost every time we played
• a disappointingly large number of guys who name Dan Brown's Angels and Demons or The Da Vinci Code as the most recent book they've read

If this has taught me anything, it's that you need to have way more filters than you think you do. Because I didn't think I needed to weed for D&D players anymore; I thought it was like polio: eradicated, a thing of the past. Not so much, it turns out.

So why do I keep re-upping my subscription? While I stood precariously with one foot on the soap holder in my shower and the other on the ledge as I reached to paint the wall, I came up with a two-part answer: A) there have been a couple fellas on there that were pretty cool and with whom I did have a lot in common, and B) it seems like there's really nothing to lose. In other words, it feels silly not to keep doing it. A good friend of mine once said: you're going to meet a-holes no matter where you go--bars, bookstores, churches--it just seems like you meet a lot more a lot faster online. True, of course. People know how to hide the crazy until you've gone out with them a couple times: you're not going to be able to necessarily see it right away whether you're emailing or chatting in the fiction aisle of Half Price Books. It doesn't really matter where or how you meet them; you're bound to be as lucky with one as the other.

I've heard of enough Match.com or eHarmony weddings to believe that these sites do work. And I think we're far enough into the 00s to no longer turn up our noses or lower our voices about online dating. It's the natural progression from The Dating Game. And I contend, a much better alternative than auditioning for the next season of Flavor of Love.

So, I beat on like a boat against the current, borne back ceaslessly, just like Fitzgerald taught me. In the end, we're all just looking for that green dock light.

At least my bathroom looks good.