I’ve known people who admitted to their having exaggerated their own good qualities on dating websites, and I’ve read enough of these fictionalized rhapsodies to find them quite entertaining. I decided to create one based upon a made-up person named Gwendolyn Glossup. I feel tempted to post it on one of those dating sites, like Match.com or E-Harmony, but I doubt that it would be worth the money to have it rejected by the sites themselves. Still, I wonder if Gwendolyn would receive any takers, were her profile to be posted somewhere. Exaggeration is the key to the unintended humor of such websites.
Gwen as a child
Before facial surgery
After winning the Nobel prize
Sex?
Screen name: The Purple Sex Kitten (Gwendolyn Glossup)
Age…….39 plus
Married….four times
Height…5’7”
Body type…A bit of this and a dab of that
Religion….Unorthodox. Worship in the pastry section of Treasure Island Foods
Music…New Age and anything else I can roller blade to
Eye color…violet (left eye), green (right eye)
Dislikes: cilantro, cracked pepper, people who use their cell phones as substitutes for real human contact, George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Peewee Hermann, and people who leave their shopping carts blowing around the parking lot
Hobbies: Collecting shrunken heads and potatoes that look like shrunken heads
Pets: Two goldfish named Laverne and Shirley
Politics: Independent (Republicrat)
Exercise: Are you kidding?
Children: Something will have to freeze over first
Ethnicity: Hawaiian/Dutch/English
Education: Diplomas and degrees from matchbook cover schools
Drinking: Like a fish
Hair color: Mauve and lavender
Smoking: Only Cuban cigars
Income: Occasionally
Favorite pastime: Trying to put my feet up over my head while watching OPRAH
About my date: Someone with arms and legs, who enjoys watching reruns of THE LOVE BOAT. A very special turn-on would be if he looked like Floyd the barber from THE ANDY GRIFFITH SHOW or Eb from GREEN ACRES. Otherwise I’m not fussy and will date anyone who is not currently in an oxygen tent or iron lung. XOXOXOXO
About John
About John
John Bolinger was born and raised in Northwest Indiana, where he attended Ball State University and Purdue University, receiving his BS and MA from those schools. Then he taught English and French for thirty-five years at Morton High School in Hammond, Indiana before moving to Colorado, where he resided for ten years before moving to Florida. Besides COME SEPTEMBER, Journey of a High School Teacher, John's other books are ALL MY LAZY RIVERS, an Indiana Childhood, and COME ON, FLUFFY, THIS AIN'T NO BALLET, a Novel on Coming of Age, all available on Amazon.com as paperbacks and Kindle books. Alternately funny and touching, COME SEPTEMBER, conveys the story of every high school teacher’s struggle to enlighten both himself and his pupils, encountering along the way, battles with colleagues, administrators, and parents through a parade of characters that include a freshman boy for whom the faculty code name is “Spawn of Satan,” to a senior girl whose water breaks during a pop-quiz over THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS. Through social change and the relentless march of technology, the human element remains constant in the book’s personal, entertaining, and sympathetic portraits of faculty, students, parents, and others. The audience for this book will certainly include school teachers everywhere, teenagers, parents of teens, as well as anyone who appreciates that blend of humor and pathos with which the world of public education is drenched. The drive of the story is the narrator's struggle to become the best teacher he can be. The book is filled with advice for young teachers based upon experience of the writer, advice that will never be found in college methods classes.
Another of John's recent books is Mum's the Word: Secrets of a Family. It is the story of his alcoholic father and the family's efforts to deal with or hide the fact. Though a serious treatment of the horrors of alcoholism, the book also entertains in its descriptions of the father during his best times and the humor of the family's attempts to create a façade for the outside world. All John's books are available as paperbacks and Kindle readers on Amazon, and also as paperbacks at Barnes & Noble. John's sixth book is, Growing Old in America: Notes from a Codger was released on June 15, 2014. John’s most recent book is a novel titled Resisting Gravity, A Ghost Story, published the summer of 2018
View all posts by John →