WHAT'S YOUR SIGN?
I've heard from a lot of female friends that they're having trouble finding male companionship. Why they choose to burden me with this issue is beyond me, but burden me they do, so I do my best to help. Case in point, Cosmopolitan recently came out with its list of the nine best places to pick up guys. And what's more, yours truly read the article and I'm here to offer a little commentary on it. You people have absolutely no idea the lengths I go to for your edification, so I hope you appreciate this.

Now, according to Cosmo, the best places to meet a guy are as follows: the weight room in the gym, a Fortune 500 company, a political rally, a sports bar on Sunday or Monday night, Boston (seriously), a volleyball league, a grad-school coffee shop, a rock-climbing center, and a steakhouse.

Let's start with the weight room thing. I'm not a big attendee at things like gyms, so I can't speak from too much experience here. But I would think that if you're holding a couple hundred pounds worth of metal over your chest, the last thing you really want to do is make plans to go to a movie later on.

Moving on to the idea of going to a Fortune 500 company, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it's not that easy to get one of those jobs. Given the recent news that the job market is the worst it has been in several years, I'm thinking you might need to set your sights a little lower.

A political rally? Are you serious? Nothing like very opinionated people screaming at one another to really set the mood. Next.

Now as for meeting guys at a sports bar, I'm going to give the Cosmo folks this one. Call it a gimme. Beer and football on plasma screen televisions…and guys go for this? Who'd a-thunk it? Unfortunately, though, it's not football season, so your pickings might be slim.

The city of Boston is, for all I know, full of guys who are just searching for their female soul mate. Ladies, knock yourselves out. Cape Air will fly you over there and drop you right at Logan. Of course, you'll now have the problem of actually finding your way around Boston. But it's not that hard, really. Just take the Ted Williams Tunnel to the I-93 exit, which is closed on alternate days that start with the letter T, so you might have to circle back to the Callahan Tunnel, which is easy to find, unless of course it's a weekday, at which point you'll need to take a slight detour through the city of Newark, New Jersey by way of Omaha, Nebraska, to get back to exit #23 off the Williams Tunnel, which might be under construction, and if it is, just make a U-turn at your first available opportunity and shoot on over to Chelsea and take the shortcut through Revere Beach over to Medford

Street. Simple as that.

Volleyball? It's March. Who's got the patience?

Now, moving on to grad school coffee shops. While we're not blessed with a tremendous number of local graduate schools here on Nantucket, we do have our fair share of coffee shops. And truth be told, I've spent some time in them. And woe be the fool out there who tries to talk to me before I've had at least two cups of coffee. Long story short, try this one at your own risk.

Rock climbing seems to be catching on as the new indoor sport for people who are "in the know." And, I have to say, it looks very cool. It also looks like a tremendous amount of work coupled with the potential pain of quite a long fall. That combination explains my absence from climbing walls, but I digress. Personally, I'm thinking that hanging on for dear life as you lie prone against a ninety-degree wall isn't quite the time to be dropping pick-up lines. Call me old-fashioned, I guess.

Which brings us to the steakhouse option. Restaurants in general are a great first date spot. My own beloved and I had our first date right here on Nantucket at American Seasons a few years back. But there was that whole, "Hey, Jill, do you want to go out to dinner?" thing that preceded the actual event. And, in my experience, that's typical for most diners. It's really, really bad form to go up to another person's date and start making small talk. Trust me on this one. Hindsight can be oh-so-valuable at times like this.

So now we're back at square one, with nowhere to meet guys on Nantucket. Thank God the fishing tackle shops will be opening soon.

Can I borrow a quarter? Mom told me to call home the second I found a segue.

Friends and neighbors of the guy-seeking variety, fear not. Nantucket has its own bastions of all things male, and one section of that bastion is made up of fishing tackle shops. Consider the benefits of meeting a guy in a tackle shop. He clearly knows how to provide food, or at least to tell you a really good story as to why he can't. You can also be pretty sure he won't spend a lot of time around the house during the summer. And trust me when I tell you that there are few better guilt trips to use than the old "you got a six-hundred-dollar spinning reel, so I deserve new shoes."

Recently I spoke with Nat Reeder, coowner of Bill Fisher Tackle, and he told me that new inventory (guy speak for "cool stuff") is due in the shop any day now, and plans are to open the doors for the season pretty soon after it's all unloaded and stocked. So it looks like the singles scene on Nantucket is about to get a little better.

There. That's enough getting in touch with my feminine side.

Tight lines. I