Hot or Not?

I shaved my head at the beginning of my five lonesome days, but don’t worry the adventure’s didn’t stop. I left the house after my mother doctored my hair with a great sense of being alive. I had no places to be and no people to see, but I did have a lunch date with Mr. Challenge and Ms Sense of Adventure.

We met at Blue Baker and like usual I sat and studied the Major League Baseball web site while they sat annoyingly close to me. While reveling in the depths of the greatest American institution I caught the faintest whisper of an extraordinary idea. I’m not sure if the Ms or Mr. suggested it, but it was a dandy of an idea.

You see, a few months before my lovely friend Fernando had introduced me to a site where people post pictures of themselves and let other people rate their “hotness”, it was cleverly titled hotornot.com. We spent many an entertained hour on the site looking at some incredible pictures. When I say incredible, I’m describing the feeling one gets after seeing someone trip and fall face first down a flight of stares. Then, a few weeks after that, I was at a former place of employment visiting with my friend Josh Harrison. Somehow the site got brought up and he thought that he may know someone who had posted their picture. I quickly looked up the site, but you had to be a member to do searches. So very cleverly, and in the spirit of hoping to make fun of someone else, I posted my picture. His friend wasn’t on there.

Well I’m sitting at blue baker and the idea sneaks up on me. I heard it plain as day in my right ear, “hey you should become a member and see what kind of responses you can get, see what your rating is. You know have fun with it.”

The idea, and excitement, quickly grew on me. Looking back I should have more closely considered the company I was keeping (Mr. Challenge and Ms Sense of Adventure), and just who it was that was feeding me these ideas. Instead I found a cozy corner at blue baker, shelled out $5.95 and became a star member of hotornot.com. Let me list some of my star member privileges: I can keep track of my public rating, get notices of double matches, send e-mails to double matches, and meet as many people as I wanted.

Let me explain the lovely dance that is hotornot.com. First of all you don’t have to be publicly rated, you can just meet people if you want. Also the site is pretty clean, no naked pics. When a user clicks on the meet other people tab of the user menu three things pop up: a picture of someone, their keywords, and a short message. The keywords are usually interests, favorites, and characteristics. Now if the picture, keywords, and personal message interest you, you just click the “yes I would like to meet this person” tab. If you do click yes on that special someone they then receive an exciting message in their e-mail that says “someone from hotornot wants to meet you!” When they open the message your own picture, keywords, and personal message appear. If they approve they click the yes tab and you are then put in each others' double matches folder. This process also works the other way too, if someone likes your bio they click on you and then you get the message in you e-mail and have the option of clicking the yes tab for them. Once double match status is established you may then send messages to each other.

Another great feature the site offers is the search feature. You can do a search based on sex, sexual preference, location, age, and keywords. So, if you happen to be interested in a twenty two year old straight female teacher from the Dallas/Fort Worth Metroplex who likes fishing, family guy, baseball, and also professes the Christian faith, you could look it up and you’d meet Alexia, she’s one of my double matches.

So I dove right in as soon as I was a member I spent hours doing searches and clicking on people, some were yes and some were no. Sometimes I clicked a yes just to be crazy sometimes I clicked yes hundreds of times just to be annoying to some really stuck up people. Well I had my fun and went home.

When I woke up the next morning I was excited to go check my e-mail and see what kind of responses I got. Got a lot of cowgirls. The picture I posted was a little misleading. I was wearing a cowboy hat and boots and also had my dog in the picture; in short I looked like a country boy. Not only were they cowgirls, but they were…well…horny. One response started off with, “hey your pretty sexy in that cowboy hat!....I hope we can meet soon…I like your dog…see you later sexy xxx.” I don’t think so. While curiosity did have his time on the floor he was unanimously voted down by the rest of the house. Besides for the horny cowgirls I also got a message from a girl in Scotland, Scandinavia, Ohio, Dallas, and New York. I was excited, but then confused. What do I do? What do I say? I’m not interested in dating any of these girls. So I did what I normally do with strangers, I said hello. Through this simple little written verbal message I am now an international friend to some very attractive ladies. Talking to someone across town on IM never really interested me, but Scotland or Scandinavia is completely different.

Since that first confusing and very interesting morning I’ve gotten quite a few hotornot e-mails, and honestly they make me smile, some make me cringe, bust most make me smile. It’s kinda like steroids for your self confidence, and yeah it is a little sleazy, so.

I’ve noticed a few things about the site. First of all, most of the people who are still in college and on the site are just looking for some hot sex with random people or interesting conversation with people from far off lands. People out of college usually seem either desperate or genuinely interested in conversation, relationships, sex, or for relationships. There are lots of school teachers and military people as well…just something I noticed. And, of course some people just want to know if other people think that they’re as hot as they think themselves. Oh, and some of them are obviously cheap shots at people who someone is really mad at. These are pretty obvious when you come across them. They have awful pictures and often have key words like gassy, no bathing, hairy butt (for girls, not so outrageous for guys), and smells sour.

In my opinion it’s no different than face book, or even hitting the bar in some ways. At least at your computer you’ll be sober and don’t have to worry too much about making conversation, just look at the keywords list. For me, it was lots of fun, I did let all the people I talked to know that I didn’t want a relationship, which was a little akward, but necessary.

The only thing I wonder about now is what I will say if one day, walking down the street, or heaven forbid in a crowded restaurant, someone stops me and says “hey I’ve seen you on hotornot!” I think I’ll probably turn a little red and laugh. What do I care? Everyone’s got stuff they can be made fun of for, and this definitely isn’t the most embarrassing thing I’ve ever done. Besides I think I’ve made fun of enough people over my life that I can take a little coming back at me.