It has ridiculous lines like, “Oh, baby, welcome to my world” (this by hero Christian to heroine Ana after he introduces her to spanking…yes, I said spanking).

It has a conventional (almost) plot.  Jeans-wearing bookish virgin new college grad Anastasia Steele falls for tycoon prince charming Christian Grey, whom she quickly discovers comes in 50 shades of that color…from his sweet vanilla true love for Ana to the deep shade of grey that is his abusive past and his preference for BDSM.  (Say what?  That’s bondage, discipline, dominance, submission, sadism, masochism, according to Wikipedia.)  It’s not long before he presents her with a contract that would make her his “submissive” and he her “dom.”  Oh, and a “Red Room of Pain” features prominently.

It’s disturbing.  Why would this principled smart woman put up with the controlling, jealous, abusive behavior of this schmuck — and even kind of like it?  No matter how rich and gorgeous and sexy he might be?  Ana represents we women at our weakest, when all that matters is him, even if he’s bad for us.  And most of us have been there.

It’s been dubbed “mommy porn” because the desperate housewives set is apparently the biggest market.  I’m no housewife, and I’m NOT desperate.  What a cliché for a single girl to get her kicks from a romance novel.  REALLY.

It’s a bestseller, apparently, partly because of its clandestine e-book beginnings…pop open your e-reader on the subway and you could be reading the Wall Street Journal for all anyone around you knows, except for the telltale blush on your cheeks.  And the fact that EVERYONE’s reading it has made it okay for YOU to read it, too.

It’s 50 Shades of Grey, and if you haven’t heard of it you’re spending too much time going to church or volunteering for charitable causes.  It’s the top ebook download in the country right now, and its sequels are ranked right behind it.  The self-published book just got a seven-figure book deal and was the recent subject of a Hollywood bidding war.

And no offense to the author, but I think I just put it better than she did.  The writing is stinky bad.

And naturally, I’ve read every word of it.  Downloaded it to my iPad bookshelf, in between The Sun Also Rises and Pride and Prejudice.  And each night in those moments between climbing into bed and snapping off the bedside lamp, I ponder: Elizabeth and Darcy tonight…or Ana and Christian?

Are you kidding?  Polished off the first book over the course of three nights and am now in the middle of the second (50 Shades Darker).

Want my opinion?  It’s really awful.  Worse even than the Twilight series (of which I also read every word).  Ana completely loses herself in Christian and loses all sense of her former self, and Christian acts a hundred years older than his 27 years (which makes sense given these two characters were originally based on Twilight’s Bella and Edward).  Even the sex scenes, which you will eventually find yourself flipping straight to, lack creativity after a while.  My beloved Pride and Prejudice is a thousand times sexier.

On the other hand, it’s like that piece of chocolate cake staring at you from the dessert menu, or that one-wear pair of stilettos staring at you from the store window.  Or that sexy bad boy staring at you from across the bar.

You KNOW it’s bad for you.  But you should probably read it.

Every night, five hot men appear before me like a criminal line-up.  These men are, for the most part, the type I’ve always fancied.  Clever, not a spelling out of place, good-hearted, ambitious, hilarious, and even more important: straight and available and looking.  And even better, I have all the power.  After studying each man, I get to check whether I’m a) ooh — interested, b) mmmm…maybe interested, or c) not interested — into the trash you go like an empty soda can…crunch.

The stuff of fairy tales, you say?  No — the stuff of Match.com’s Daily 5.  I used to ridicule, then ignore, Match’s hand-picked-just-for-me options.  “You both like to eat!” Match would encourage about our obvious compatibility.  “He doesn’t hate cats (that much)!”  But about six months ago a drool-worthy crop of male specimens started popping into my bedroom nightly (er, via my iPad screen), and I started paying attention, to the point where it became appointment surfing each night at 9 p.m.  Could this be for real?  Seriously, where are they getting these guys?

That’s the catch.  Everywhere but Tennessee.  Hunky cowboys from Texas who read real books, handsome artsy types from Manhattan who would never be embarrassed to meet you at an art museum, Seattle nerdboy cuties who don’t know it, California surfer boys with jobs who speak non-surfer…hell, even some of the guys from the Jersey Shore seem slightly enticing.  It’s proof that the Good Ones are out there…nowhere near where I live…but why is it when I narrow my search to Tennessee, the options that stare out of the photos might as well be looking out of an America’s Most Wanted poster?  Downright.  Scary.

Yet this new book Situations Matter: Understanding How Context Transforms Your World by Sam Sommers, tells us proximity is a keener path to true love than are the usual appearance and personality contenders that top most of our lists: “face, butt, wit,” as blog author Jeremy McCarthy sums it up nicely.  Apparently Mr. Right is more likely to be next door than staring wistfully at the same moon from three states away, and it’s his very next-door-ness that makes him attractive.  Could this be because, through this forced and repeated closeness, we actually get to know those in our own communities and eventually see past their face, butt and wit to what really counts — their soul?  I can think of countless examples of men from my past who suddenly floated my boat after I knew them for months or even years, and not because they’d gotten an eye implant.

Typical girl, though, why settle for the boy next door when I haven’t seen all that’s out there?  Last weekend, so over the slim pickings in Music City, I flew to Chicago for a masquerade ball, excited to have an exotic citified new palate from which to choose.  And the palate was colorful indeed:

Bachelor Number 1 had that urban edginess but with a sprinkle of sweet in the skin that crinkled around the corners of his eyes.  He was wearing a wedding ring, though, so I didn’t consider him available.  Until he began to act, in front of his friends, like we were a couple, dancing with me, following me to the drink line, following me back to the dance floor.  I was perplexed.  This guy was not acting married.  “Do you think he’s widowed?” I whispered to my friend.  “How sad if that’s the case.”  “Are you married?” I finally blurted after he’d dragged me around the dance floor for the fifth number in a row and one of his acquaintances had asked if I was his wife.  (!)  “Yes,” he acknowledged to my question about his very marriedness without hesitation.  “Where is your wife?” I asked.  “She doesn’t like these sorts of events,” he shrugged.

Granted, DUH, Amy, but sayonara.  No sooner had I turned away from Married Guy then I had the amazing luck to run into Bachelor Number 2, the love of my weekend from last year’s ball.  Silk-tie-wearing ambitious business owner, health nut, funny as hell, ability to kiss amazingly for hours at a time.  It took me at least a month of REO Speedwagon songs to get over him last year.  This time around we clicked immediately, like no time had passed at all.  “I can’t believe it’s really you!  Is it you?” he kept asking, grabbing my hand and staring at me like the cat that swallowed the canary.

Only…“are you high?” he asked me.  “Um, nope.  Are you?”  “No,” he slurred, obviously high on…something.  “Do you get high?” I asked.  “Not much,” he said.  “Where’s your hotel room?”  Then he dove in for the full-on mouth-wide-open bad-kisser attack.  THEN he proceeded to confess that he had sold his business and was currently doing “nothing,” with no current plans to do “anything.”  Also (nonchalantly), should he propose to his on-again-off-again girlfriend?  “Um, is this girlfriend currently ON or OFF?” I sought to clarify, and quickly.  “On,” he clarified without hesitation, then asked if he could see my “boobies.”  The answer, you might guess, was no, and not only because of his word choice.

I almost kissed the ground on which Nashville’s men walk when I arrived back home the next day.  I thought about some of the sincere and honest and nice guys I know here who might make a perfectly fine catch if I ever thought about them in that way.  Maybe they wouldn’t stand out right off the bat if Match.com flashed them into my iPad tonight.  But maybe…okay, just maybe…I’ve been too quick to check the “not interested” box for my hometown boys.

The case could be made that there’s no place like home.

I wasn’t raised on football like the rest of you (gasp!), and I had no clue who in the world this Tim Tebow person was until long after the rest of the world. He’s become impossible not to know, though, and today someone passed along from a recent Tebow speech his philosophy for success: 1) take action; 2) live with passion; 3) finish strong. These motivating tips are not rocket science, but why do we singles have such a hard time applying them?

Now team, listen up! Here’s a quiz to see if you’re a Tebow on the field of love:

TAKE ACTION. You’re at the gym lifting weights, and the guy on whom you’ve had your carefully-mascaraed-without-looking-like-it eye for weeks lifts weights next to you in the mirror and pauses between sets at exactly the same time as you. You:

a. Stare straight ahead and keep your headphones clamped firmly over your ears. Talking is scary!
b. Grab a heavier set of weights and show off, grunting a bit for effect. Your biceps look really hot, you must admit. Surely he’ll notice.
c. Take off your headphones and ask him something. Anything.

LIVE WITH PASSION. What are you doing today?

a. Sitting around bemoaning the fact that you have no one to share it with.
b. Watching TV and eating corn chips.
c. Scuba-diving, volunteering, planting basil, or whatever it is that makes YOU happiest. Because that’s just automatically attractive without even trying.

FINISH STRONG. You’ve gone on a first date. On date two, you:

a. Date two? The first date was exhausting enough, and besides, you could tell right away he’s not the right one for you. Can you say SPINACH-BETWEEN-TEETH?
b. Wear your shortest skirt and drink too much wine.
c. Dare to go on one and get to know him better.

If you answered all A’s, you need to put on your big-girl panties and stop letting fear paralyze your love life.
If you answered all B’s, you are just annoying, and I needed a second category for the quiz. Obviously B is just the wrong answer.
If you answered all C’s, you are most Tebow-like. Congratulations!

(Confession: I answered A, C, and A. But I’m working on it.)

Go, team! Get out there and make me proud! You can do it!

The glass tipped and, before I could say *^@#$^!, the water splashed onto my laptop keyboard, not in one big slosh but in innocent enough droplets onto select keys, specifically onto my prize “delete” key.  I heard — no, I smelled, a sizzle, and then I was without.

Without the ability to delete — gasp.  For a girl who is forever speaking before she thinks, this could be a problem.

I’ve started a blog entry countless times over the last month, wanting to fill you in.  But in the interests of protecting the innocent (and maintaining an air of the mysterious sophisticate I aspire to be), each time I’ve deleted-deleted-deleted before publishing (the 2.0 equivalent of crumpling the paper and tossing it into the trash, I suppose).  As a result of this convenient one-button ability to delete, to self-censor, to bleep and erase and White Out, I’ve withheld from you the following developments in the life of this single girl:

1. Two weeks before Christmas I slid on a red party dress and swiped on some shiny red lipstick and ventured to a holiday party.  There I checked my usual inhibitions at the door along with my black coat lined with violet satin, knocked back three glasses of white wine, promptly reverted to my 13^th year, and spent a passionate hour dirty-dancing in a dark corner of the dance floor with a new acquaintance I would never see again.  And it was devilishly good fun.
2. In the car on the way home from the party, that Kenny Chesney song “Don’t Blink” came on the radio, and, as Kenny would tell you, life goes faster than you think.  “Best start putting first things first,” Kenny sagely advises, “‘cause when your hourglass runs out of sand, you can’t flip it over and start again.”  Which inspired me in all my white-wine-induced dreaminess to jump immediately onto the computer when I arrived home and tell certain individuals exactly what I think via cryptic Facebook hints, because what do I have to lose.  The next day I was cranky and regretful and desperately wishing to delete, which was by then impossible.  But it was fun while it lasted.
3. Also in this same time period, I invited someone on a date.  Someone who will read this.  Only he apparently did not know it was a date.  Now he does.  And it was fun.  I hope he had fun.  Next time I will make myself clearer.
4. I have a crush, of the schoolgirl type.  A couple of them, possibly, although about the second I’m not entirely sure.  At least one is forbidden, and both, I’m pretty sure, are unrequited.  How very 13, but fun distractions from the serious business of Life, nonetheless.

2012: The year of devilishly good fun?  The year of not blinking?  How about…the year of no regrets?

Quick — delete!  Oh.

His name was Scott, and he was not from my Tiny Town (population 1,000) but, ever more excitingly, a Small Town (population 10,000) 60 miles away.  Naturally I promptly set my sights on him.  Plus, he and I had attended the same computer camp back when we were 11, even though he likely didn’t have such a clear memory of this connection as I.  Not to mention he had dark spiky hair and matching eyes (dark, that is, not spiky), just like I liked ‘em best.

Never mind that he had zero inkling that I, nothing but a girl from a Tiny Town, existed.  Never mind that he was dating a cute cheerleader from his own school.  I, after all, was a cute cheerleader, too, so there was that glimmer of hope.

For the better part of our senior year, a group of us from my Tiny Town trekked to his Small Town to cruise the main drag in hopes of running into Scott and our other chosen Boys from Out of Town (but were usually relegated to munching on chocolate PopTarts and singing along to the likes of “Unskinny Bop” and Warrant’s “Heaven”).

Once during a party at another Tiny Town in between our towns we even crossed paths, and in the manner of a Hollywood teen movie we narrowly escaped when the party was “busted” by the cops, diving into the darkness together (with a group of three or four others, but nevertheless still “together” officially in my book, which I made happen with great effort).  Another occasion I got up the guts to call him (long distance without my mother’s permission), and I sounded like a total moron and had nothing to say except “um,” but I did announce who I was rather than just breathe into the phone, which I thought was fairly courageous of me.

How thrilled was I that he ended up going to the SAME COLLEGE AS ME.  The first weekend of college, we (with a group of three or four others, but nevertheless still “we” officially in my book, which I made happen with great effort) ventured to a frat party.  This was it.  Cute Cheerleader was miles away at Some Other School, and the first day of the rest of my love life was about to finally start…I could feel it.

My new college sweatshirt was so new it smelled like it, and my hair was freshly permed into spirals.  The night air was streaked with rain and the ground was layered with wet leaves.  The party was in full swing down a set of stairs in the basement of the frat house, and I entered in front of my chosen one.

Slipping, falling backward and sliding all the way down the stairs on my a**.

Just one of many examples of my love life falling backward like clockwork. Good thing we can count on springing forward with equal regularity. May we weather the fall with a sense of humor as we know spring is always just around the corner.

There’s a certain point at the end of the first four miles into my favorite hike, a point at the crest of the long and winding path, a perch, if you will. At this particular point rests a bench dedicated to someone who once loved this park as much as I do, a bench I’ve come to consider my own personal reward, a resting place, a delicious pause at the top, to look down at what I’ve accomplished, and at the pretty view, too, for a luxuriously meditative moment just before I descend in a mad sprint one mile down and back to my truck. This hilltop point is a particularly grand spectacle right now, as the reds and yellows and oranges of autumn make the trip and the view extra worth it.

What is my point, you ask? Patience, my friend. We’ll come to it in a minute.

I think about the point periodically as I climb those four miles, like it’s a chocolate chip cookie or a tall glass of lemonade.  Not quite that spectacular, I suppose, but, then, what could be as spectacular as a chocolate chip cookie?

As I climb I think about other things in between thinking about the point (and my weary limbs). Today, for instance, I wonder as I pass each male hiker/runner/biker whether he’s the guy who winked at me on Match.com this morning. Not because I’m crazy or bored but because he wrote: “My favorite place in the city is Percy Warner Park.”

Maybe that’s him, I think as a bearded fellow runs past.

The bearded fellow gives me nary a glance but just keeps running like I don’t exist, even though I’m wearing my sexiest pair of Kelly green running shorts.

I hope that wasn’t him.

According to the good folks at Match about this potential mate who winked at me this fine day, “Gardening is something we both enjoy.” And as if that weren’t uncanny enough, one of his “Favorite Things” is “settling down on the couch knowing that my new book is waiting for me.” Me, too!

And did you know that “[w]hen it comes to [his] free time, it’s best spent in the kitchen cooking up a new recipe or catching a good movie over in Green Hills”? I mean, he could be describing moi. Also, he spends “a lot of time reading and writing and people watching…” It’s settled. We’re a match made in heaven.

But don’t you know it, there’s always a catch. This particular Match specimen is all of 31 years old. Nothing wrong with that, unless you’re 39 (and a half). He’s a puppy. A guppy. A baby. He even has a baby face. And we all know how the whole Demi-Ashton thing is turning out.

But boy, would that bench at the top of the point feel good right about now. Or a chocolate chip cookie.

So I’m torn as to whether to acknowledge his existence and…gasp…wink back. This is a big decision. A decision best made in meditative mode on a park bench perched at the point. Which should be arriving…

Just…

About (huff, puff)…

Now.

Um, except, who’s that sitting on MY bench?

Damned if it isn’t a couple. A loving couple at that, not even one bickering or fighting like cats and dogs. In fact, the couple is clearly in love, the man’s ear practically touching the woman’s shoulder while he gazes at her with…blech…tenderness, and she giggles softly in return, like I’m NOT EVEN THERE.

At MY point, mind you! On MY bench! The one reserved FOR ME. Didn’t they notice the sign carved into the wood with a stick? “Amy was here.”

Exhausted by now and most deserving of a rest and a gaze at the glorious batch of colored leaves over yonder (if only the annoying couple would get their fat heads out of the way so I could see), I have no choice but to…

Carry on and start my sprint down the hill.

Hell yes am I going to wink back at that 31-year-old. I might even dare to email him. Or ask him to coffee. Or for a walk in the park (after I satisfy myself that he’s not a serial killer). It’s high time I dethroned the fat-headed park-bench-hogging couples in the world with a little coupling up of my own. Two is better than one, at least when it comes to claiming the most coveted bench in the park.

Do you see my point?

Dear fellow Good Ones,

You may have noticed that I’ve been pretty near AWOL from this blog and my Good Ones Facebook page in recent weeks.  This is not because I’ve suddenly become With Boyfriend or anything wild and crazy like that.  Nah, the same old single me has been strolling through my single life like always, applying mascara each time I leave the house just in case, carrying on whole conversations with my cats, devouring this juicy season of Bachelor Pad, ridiculing the options on Match and eHarmony but holding out hope each time I open the sites that donkeys really do fly and this time Mr. Right will suddenly appear in cyberland.

Except in recent weeks, each time I’ve dusted off my typing fingers to dash out a blog entry bemoaning the lack of Good Ones or quote an inspirational movie line about how to find one, my mind has gone…

Blank.  Blankety blank.

That’s because I’ve entered one of those phases of singlehood we all experience every so often, that phase I’ll call Boyfriend Block.  Like the writer who suffers the periodic blank page, singletons suffer the periodic blank mate slate.  It suddenly seems I’ve virtually exhausted all my options and there is not a single man on earth who floats my boat.

Oh, it’s seemed like that on occasion in the past, so I know this, too, shall pass, but right now I’m plumb out of ideas short of setting up shop in a convent.  To the point where even my fantasies have gone blank.  Even the ones about George Clooney.  I even need a new George Clooney, for heaven’s sake.

I need inspiration.  I need a fluttering heartbeat and blushing cheeks and a reason to stalk someone on Facebook.  I need ideas.  I need a face to picture as I’m falling asleep at night and silence to curse when the phone doesn’t ring.  I need a plotline.  I need a chance sighting at the coffee shop and an accidental kiss after an extra glass of wine.

They say the best way to cure writer’s block is to just keep writing.

So that’s what I’ll do.

Haven’t heard from Chicago Correspondent Marcie in a while…could it be because Marcie has found herself a…gasp…Good One? Read on, dear reader, and find out for yourself…

“When you least expect it…”

I’m sure when you hear this trite remark as a single person from your smug married friends about how they found love, it just makes you cringe, right? How many f’n clichés does it take, you wonder to yourself, before you “get” what they mean? Apparently, all of them. I used to think this stale saying meant “stop trying too hard” or “quit looking and it will find you,” and most recently I took to interpreting it as “just give up actively searching because he doesn’t exist.” I figured if I thought this way and I did meet a good guy, then I’d be shocked as sh*t when he did come along, and he’d change my ever increasing jadedness.

So, imagine my surprise when I decided to meet up with some friends to attend the Chicago Gay Pride Parade this year and show my support, only to meet…A GOOD GUY! How is it that a straight, single, not-looking-for-anyone gal meets up with a straight, single, not-looking-for-anyone guy…at a Gay Pride Parade???? Ahhh, the irony of it all.

I began to think…how did this happen and how weird is this? NOT so weird, my friends. Upon speaking with other friends, I found out that a good friend of mine recently met his lady-love at a gay bar where mutual friends had dragged them out to meet each other in a non-threatening environment. Is it the circumstance of being in a place where you would least expect to find someone who allows you to put your guard down and makes you more receptive to someone? I don’t know. What I do know is this: Neither one of us had any intention of going out to find that special someone when we left our apartments only to find ourselves deeply engaged in conversation for hours. My aforementioned friend who ended up meeting his current live-in girlfriend that night probably wasn’t thinking he was going to meet that special someone, either.

So next time someone says, “He’ll find you when you least expect it,” stop cringing for a moment and listen. Just when you’ve gotten to a point in your life when you realize you really don’t desperately “need” someone to come along and swoop you off your feet, he will.

He was instinctively thoughtful. Men up North aren’t born knowing to open the door for a girl, to back into the corner of the elevator so she can exit first, to run and get the car from three blocks away and pick her up in the most frigid of weather, to walk on the outside of the sidewalk closest to traffic, to help her into her coat.  Except this North Dakota boy.  He was a true Northern gentleman.

He was generous. He was a humble housepainter and farmer.  But he managed to conjure twenty-dollar bills out of thin air to slip into Christmas cards for half the town, was the first to take coffee or bread to the neighbors after a funeral, had a pocketful of quarters handy for his daughters’ every candy bar or video game request.

He did the dishes. Water so hot it cracked his hands, sink overflowing, he always insisted on doing the dishes.

He cooked, too. Scalloped potatoes and ham was his special dish, and sometimes beef stew with a bay leaf scenting the gravy.

He was low maintenance. His trademark uniform: bib overalls splattered with paint, a torn engineer’s cap, and dirty fingernails, one usually purple from a wayward hammer.

He loved best being a dad to his little girls. That’s what an old friend said in memory of him at the celebration of his life, and it made me cry the most.

He was hunky. Tall, tan, mischievously crooked grin, Paul Newman eyes with a constant wink glittering from them.

He was magical. He could pull a rabbit out of a hat and a coin out of his mouth and turn a spade into a heart.  And he could make me feel better when I thought I never would with a joke or an Archie Double Digest comic book or a Cadbury Creme Egg.

He had a soft spot for animals. Rued each time a new pup was brought home by a pleading family member, but by the end of it the new pup was riding next to him in his pick-up truck, the two fast friends.

He was a good sport. Best skier on the hill in those days.

He was funny until the end. He cracked jokes in church, cracked jokes the morning of his triple bypass heart surgery, cracked jokes with the ambulance drivers his last morning on earth, and is surely cracking jokes from above even now, likely inappropriate ones.

He wasn’t perfect (just ask my mother about that), but he was a good man.

He was my dad.  And I demand nothing less than his goodness in a mate.

Angie and Jeff, like most kids, probably grew up expecting that one day each would get married.  Maybe at one point they even imagined they would marry each other, because Jeff was the lucky recipient of Angie’s first kiss when they were in high school.  They did each marry, just not each other, and they long forgot about each other as the years passed.

But for one reason or another Plan A didn’t work out for either of them, and they both found themselves single again after their first marriages.  Lucky for me, because I met Angie while she was single, and the two of us, with singlehood, easy laughter, and a love of chocolate cake in common, became fast friends.

A while into second singlehood Angie ran into Jeff again, and on their first date, Angie ran up to her room to bring down their high-school yearbooks.  She flipped to a picture of Jeff and immediately closed it.  “You can’t see that one.”  He wrestled it away from her only to find that she’d scribbled all over his photo: “Hate.”  “What did you do to me?” she asked, and neither of them can remember to this day.

Never mind, because hate blossomed into love the second time around.

Plan B was implemented yesterday.  The day dawned brilliantly for the occasion, warm and sunshiny just like a wedding in the country should be.  Around 3:45 the bride and we bridesmaids were as spiffy as two hours of primping and three cans of hairspray will allow.  The day stayed brilliant, too, except for one inconvenient patch of rain from 4 p.m. to 4:20…

…smack in the middle of the wedding ceremony.  The minister (the “preacher,” as we call him in these parts) launched straight into the vows, and somehow the ceremony seemed not ruined but perfect when a man ran up with an umbrella to shelter the couple and the groom wiped a wet tendril from the laughing bride’s skin.  We bridesmaids cried through our ruined mascara in all the right parts, and when man and wife were announced, everyone ran for cover in a nearby barn, comparing melted hairdos.  The sun came out soon after and the party resumed with all the joy it deserved.

Jeff wasn’t Angie’s first choice for a husband, and Angie wasn’t Jeff’s first choice for a wife.  For that matter, neither of them would have picked a rainstorm to flood their wedding ceremony.  But somehow things all seemed to work out just right in the end, and everyone seems even better for it.

If you’re reading this, you likely had your own dreams and plans for how life and love might work out.  And if you’re reading this, probably your Plan A didn’t work out exactly as expected.  Somehow, for me, Plan B has always seemed to be the better option anyway.  What’s that saying?  If life hands you lemons…make lemonade.