When I first learned what carbon 14 dating was — in calculus class my senior year at the ungodly hour of 7:15 because it was first period — I immediately did what every other blossoming writer does: I began to make puns.

My friend created a very simplistic ‘dating’ service on her calculator — because that’s what every blossoming nerd does — that matched you up with a celebrity based on a series of questions relating to physical traits. We called this the Carbon-14 Dating Service and we planned to go global.

Alas, I have not become rich and/or famous and/or Internet famous because of this….yet. Ladies? I have all three live-action TMNT movies on DVD that we can watch on my super-fast computer. But, I have not lost my knack for making puns and setting up improbable dating scenarios.

I often peruse book stores for hours looking for that special someone who will bring joy to my life, hold a decent conversation, and smell nice. (Recently I found Rumo: And His Miraculous Adventures by Walter Moers and Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell. What? I can usually tell if I’m going to like a book by smelling it. No, I don’t smell burning feathers. Get lost.) And I also look for a certain ‘Andy’ at a certain ‘store’ so I can certainly start a ‘conversation’ with him about a certain book ‘selection.’ (My mind doesn’t get that dirty, but I’m sure a few out there are going someplace I don’t even want to fathom. Yep, my English teacher* would be proud that I have discovered the under-used purpose for quotation marks: the pseudo-giggity-suggestion.)

See, when at said bookstores, I like to look at the Staff Recommendations — Recommen-date-tions, if you will — and Andy has recommended for my reading pleasure The Idiot by Dostoevsky. This isn’t the throw-away I-had-to-read-this-in-high-school-so-I-guess-I’ll-recommend-it-to-sound-cultured suggestion, because nobody reads The Idiot until they really, really like Dostoevsky. And it’s not the I’ve-read-Sartre-and-now-it’s-time-for-the-Brothers-K-and-OMG-this-changed-my-life-so-I-must-share-it-with-the-average-housewife suggestion either. I don’t know this Andy, I didn’t put him up to it, so that means I must find him — as I’m sort of already stalking him — and talk to him — much like the rehearsed Kate Beckinsale conversation — and potentially date him.

*”Hmm, yes, when one quotes, one wants to use quotation marks like raisins in a box of raisin bran cereal. One wants them to be scattered throughout the paper like the raisins scattered throughout a bowl of cereal.”