The other day, I got an excited email from a friend I will henceforth call 007. This is because he is so beautiful he may as well have a License to Kill. It seems, according the screen grab in 007’s email (example to the right), that a certain someone’s facebook status had switched from ambiguous to “single.” And it also seemed that I may have inadvertently sent this certain someone a slightly flirtatious comment, as one does. But I myself had no idea that this certain someone’s status had moved from ambiguous to single, as I am not a professional cyber-stalker like 007 has so clearly become. I simply like to send slightly flirtatious messages through facebook to cute boys every so often, as one does.

Side Note: I have been told by relatively objective sources that my slightly flirtatious messages tend to have the subtlety of a steam roller.

But I digress. Back to 007’s email. The message and tone were both quite clear. “BACK THE &@#% OFF,” I believe it read, followed by the obligatory email smiley face. So I flew to my iChat to find out what was going on! As it turned out, 007 had had his eye on this certain someone for a few years, but this certain someone was in a very serious relationship. That is until facebook told us otherwise. Timing is everything in life, don’t you think?

Anyway, the whole situation got me to thinking, as one does. What has happened to our world? Has our instinctive mating dance been reduced to the way we choose to address our facebook relationship status? As we progress further and further into the information age, where everything is becoming faster and faster and more optimized, I have watched some of my friends’ sex lives dissolve into a brief series of email and IM encounters. Both parties answer a series of questions on a website and then agree to meet for a hookup. Hookup happens. Needs have been met. Life moves on until someone gets horny again. And then it’s back to the Question and Answer section of tonight’s program.

Now, with the advent of iPhone apps like Grindr and Loopt, we don’t even need to speak to people at bars, clubs, restaurants, libraries or produce departments, let alone bother with clunky websites. All we need is a GPS-enabled iPhone and we’ve got ourselves our own personal sexual homing device.

Come on people! Live a little! Get up from the computer. Put down the iPhone. Take a chance and meet someone in-person and for real. Introduce friends to each other. Set people up on dates. Get set up on dates! Go have a real conversation that doesn’t include abbreviations like LOL, QT, BTW, or ROTFL. Please.

OMG – look at the time. TTYL!