Mea Culpa and all such things.

I'm sorry.

I'm just plain sorry.

As I geared up to return to the mission here I considered how best to address this, my first post in weeks. I could give you all sorts of excuses, but I'm not gonna. I thought about just telling you everything I was doing when I wasn't doing this, but we're not about that. No, we're about one thing:

The mission.

We're about the mission! In all the time we've known each other we've been, more or less, about the mission. I've tried very hard to keep from being a diary blog or a "cute tangent" blog or a blog all about my inner demons. (by the way, you can jump in and disagree with any of this via the comments at any old time!) So I'm not gonna take you guys down any tangent roads. I was doing non-mission things and so the mission was back-burnered.

Conveniently enough, during this time of back-burnering the mission it seems that the mission took a break too. In other words, one of the reasons that I wrote of nothing was that nothing was happening to write about.

You know how nobody really hires new employees at the end of the year? Because there's too much other stuff going on, and because everyone's really thinking about the holidays, and because you just don't know what's gonna be what come the new year? I think the dating universe does the same thing. "Well, I have been hoping to bring a new person on to take care of things like eating out, movies, possibly to handle some, if not all, of the various sex to be had, but really I can't focus on that right now. I'm gonna go back to filling the position again after the new year. Hey, hand me some more eggnog, eh?"

But the new year is here (oh hey, happy new year everybody!) and so it's time to get back to the mission. And like magic my good friends at Wove.com seemed to just know it was true, as I was met this morning by FOUR MATCHES! I was pretty jazzed until I started looking at them. Apparently Wove.com had forgotten where I live? Or that I wasn't particularly interested in moving to Salt Lake City, UT or Las Vegas? In other words, What the F*ck?

As is the case with most e-things, once I poked around a bit I found the teeny, tiny explanation. They call it "Flexible Matching." I call it "OK, you're wrecking our curve -- are you sure you won't move hundreds of miles away for this elusive treasure we call wove? Pwease? Pwetty pwease? Come on, you're totally making us look bad! You shut up! No, you! No you! No, you're a whiny bag of cr*p!!" (you can see why they went with "Flexible Matching" instead.)

Apparently if you can't be matched for long enough they get desperate and forget what your settings are. Of course they describe it a little differently. Here's how they spin it:

"Flexible Matching is a means by which we can offer more matches for your consideration - and hopefully help you find your special someone all that much sooner."

(No, I'm not kidding. But wait, they go on...)

"With Flexible Matching we temporarily relax the Match Selection criteria which you indicated are least important to you. This often allows us to find you more matches."

(Of course they could also let one shop for men OR women -- that would increase the possible matches too. But that, of course, would be wrong. And not, apparently, in the good way.)

"Rest assured, we never relax our compatibility criteria because we know these deep dimensions of compatibility are a crucial foundation for a happy, lasting relationship."

...which begs from me the question "then why are you doing it now?" Within an hour one of the guys had done what I'm fully planning to do: reject the matches due to "what the hell were you morons thinking? I DON'T LIVE THERE." And then we're back to square less-then-two. But it's all worth it -- for the mission! Happy new dang year everybody!