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i was bored at work yesterday and decided to peruse through Yahoo "personals", just for fun. i think it's interesting and fun to see who in my age group is desperate enough to use that service, and also who i may recognize. so i set the search options for male, 33-45 years old, african-american, portland-vicinity. i was shocked but no, not really that shocked at the prospects that came up.

the most interesting thing to me was that most of these black men lived in the outskirts, such as beaverton, tigard, and aloha. i didn't know there were that many black men living out there...but i guess with the gentrifying white yuppies taking over the inner northeast, there aren't a lot of choices left except for the outskirts for some blacks.

i also noticed that the prospects- about 108 of them, were pretty pathetic looking. i mean, i realize that not every black man in the portland area does yahoo personals, but the ones who do do it look pretty raggedy(sorry!). most of them were physically unattractive looking. a lot of them had pseudo-names like "sly" or "slick cat". some of them looked like thugs. one of them had a tag line that read: 'when i love, i love with my whole heart and when i hate, it's forever'. what the hell!!?? the rest of the tags lines from the other men weren't much better.

i looked at the ads objectively, like, if i were "looking", who i'd pick. not a ONE. they all basically looked raggedy. i know, i know, you can't judge a book by it's cover. but when people place those ads, the "cover" is what they're banking on.

my impression of those guys was that they were definitely the picked-over leftovers. although i didn't peruse the white guy ads, but i'd venture to guess it was the same deal. it made me really glad that i am married and NOT in the dating scene looking for a black man. i'd be pretty depressed if i were.