In my life, meeting girls who like me has been a whole lot like winning American Idol: it hasn’t happened to me.

Okay, I guess I might be selling myself a little bit short. That’s not entirely true. The third time I saw Love Actually in theatres, I sat next to this smokin’ blond girl who seemed really interested in what I was doing there. I thought things were going great until she slapped me for being in her boyfriend’s seat. And I’m confident that the girl who called me a “tool” in my honesty box just misspelled “Tolo”.

Back in the ‘90s, this problem might have delegated me to the bottom of the social ranks, an Untouchable of adolescent America. But fortunately, the new millenium has brought a technological advance which can solve my plight: Lying about myself online.

The Internet was invented by Al Gore in the late twentieth century, and was originally intended so that twelve year old boys could search for “boob pics” on Google. However, it has expanded far past the scope that Mr. Gore or anyone else could have expected. We now have video sharing sites like Youtube, social networking sites like Facebook, and of course the kicker: online dating sites.

When I logged on to myLOL​.net, the online teen dating site, I was a proverbial n00b to the art of internet romancing. As a new member, my first task was picking a user name. I wanted something that would portray me honestly as a highly sensitive and emotional human being. hungDaddy99? FathurrUvYoChillun_1221? Soccerstar11? I finally decided on ganstauvluv67.

Zach Wener-Fligner is 17 years old, five foot eight, and likes five dollar footlongs, chess, and studying. But check me out on the net and it’s like the cover of one of those Animorph books. Ganstauvluv67 is six foot three with a description that reads: “WASSUP luv to kick it nd shit, party nd listen to music. message me yaddig”. Naturally, I listed my “Reason for being here” as “Looking for girl/boyfriend.” Watch out ladies! Ganstauvluv67 is on the prowl!

In practice, it turns out MyLOL is a whole lot like Facebook. There’s a wall where you post comments, private messages, and of course the crucial photo albums. You request “friends”, by which I mean people who look cute in their profile pictures. The only noticeable difference from other social networking sites is that on MyLOL, I’m pretty sure guys are required to have pictures of their abs, and girls have to have one of those self-taken downward-angled shots that makes them look kind of sad but also shows the essential touch of cleavage.

I’ve only been on the site about a week, but I already feel like I’ve made some lifelong friends. I cyber-met sexynaughtygirl my first day on the site, which has got to be fate or something. She’s totally perfect for me! I photo-shopped our pictures together so it looks like she’s standing next to me and we look really cute together. I even commented on her wall once, but I’m still waiting for her to reply.

I have another friend, SoccerPlayer23, but I’m not as close to him as I am to sexynaughtygirl. SoccerPlayer23 says his real name is Dylan, and he lives in Iowa. His description tells me, and I quote, “I cry easily from sad moves (The Notebook, A Walk to Remember, etc.).” Dylan was recently left by his girlfriend of over a year. I think it had to do with him being such a sissy. We initially bonded over the fact that we both have razor-cut six pack abs (Dylan, naturally, sports a picture of his on the front of his page). But our friendship deteriorated after I threatened to impound his testicles for admitting to having watched The Notebook, let alone crying over it.

I’ve been waiting for sexynaughtygirl to reply to my message for so long that I got to thinking a little bit. Well, not immediately. First I played Dolphin Olympics for like forty-five minutes. Then I got onto the Source and checked all my grades. I hit up Youtube for the latest Lil Wayne unreleased mixtape, cruised there for a while watching videos of “painful injuries,” and then went to CollegeHumor for the new Jake and Amir. I checked up on MyLOL again, but still no comment from sexynaughtygirl. I wondered if there was a way to find out where she lived, so that I could visit and talk to her in person, since she didn’t seem to be able to access the internet at the moment. I couldn’t think of anything, so I started surfing through her pictures. I was on her thirty-seventh shot, a picture of her swimming while on vacation with her parents in Hawaii, when a thought hit me. Maybe I shouldn’t be on MyLOL. It just might not be safe for me online. There are a lot of creepers out there.

Sexynaughtygirl never replied. But it’s cool. I’m done with MyLOL. Venoy Overton just accepted me on Facebook.