"700 miles? That has to be the world's longest booty call."

A few nights ago, I told a guy who was hitting on me to lose 50 pounds first. This was a new low for me, but since I'm obviously very shallow, a new low isn't actually that far down.

Corny jokes aside, I am very sorry to say that this portly would-be Casanova absolutely deserved my rude brush-off. Because my "Drop 50 pounds, then maybe we'll talk" was a knee-jerk response to his "I totally wanna do you."

Dating in L.A. is hard. I have made a slow and steady migration southward along the West Coast of the United States and I've traveled to a few different countries overseas. Nowhere else in the world have I had as much difficulty finding a date as I have in the City of Angels. It's not just the brash come-ons from overconfident fatties. It's that dating, which in and of itself is already a challenge, is now made even more challenging by all the additional problems that come with simply living in L.A.

It's hard enough to find someone you can talk to, who shares your interests, your values, your goals, your vision of the future regarding marriage and kids, and who is attractive enough that getting busy doesn't require drowning yourself in alcohol. It'd be great, too, if that special someone liked you back. This is true no matter where you live, but if you happen to live in L.A., you'll soon discover that discovery is not enough.

Let's start with the fact that here, it is possible for two people to have a Los Angeles address and still live two hours away from one another. If the definition of dating someone requires going out on dates, then distance and traffic will make it an annoying and time-consuming ordeal.

Then there's the problem of finding a place to go. All the good places will be packed with wannabe celebrities and normal people hoping to brush shoulders with real celebrities. What this means for me is a 45 minute wait for a table, snotty service when we finally get a table, and stupid conversations overheard from the surrounding tables.

And since everyone in L.A. has to drive everywhere, parking is a bitch. Even if you find a spot, you still have the task of deciphering three or four parking restriction signs and figuring out which ones apply to you. What day of the week is it? What time is it? Do I have to have a permit? What color is the curb? Is there a meter? Sometimes it's better to just save yourself from a huge headache and pay the $20 ass rape valet parking fee. Nothing kills a good overpriced dinner buzz like a parking ticket.

All of this assumes that you have found someone you'd actually want to go through all the trouble for, and despite its large population, the pool of dateable people in Los Angeles is pathetically small. Not everyone is chubby and delusional, of course. I recently met someone who was very attractive and fit, but unfortunately, he would not stop talking about how good-looking he was. He even felt the need to tell me that he knew he could get away with acting like a moron because girls would still like him anyway. He was sober. Needless to say, I didn't give him my number.

I could go into the various ways that douche-baggery ravages this city, but that's another blog post altogether.

So let's see... in the hopes that I've met someone who isn't completely retarded, I can spend an hour and a half getting ready, another hour and a half driving to the date, 20 minutes looking for parking, 45 minutes waiting for a table, half an hour driving to the next spot (because you always go somewhere else if the date is going well), another half-hour looking for parking there, another half-hour waiting to get in... or I can just take a shower, get some writing done, go to bed at a decent time, and not worry about whether or not he's retarded.

Yeah, I think I'll do that.