missy from watertown

with pretty good frequency when i open my yahoo mail, i find the pleasant countenance of a late-20's blonde with unblemished, pearly-white skin staring back at me. perhaps you've seen missy too -- she's the cover girl for yahoo's personals service.

pretty faces are so abundant on the internet -- although this one stands out because it leaves out the ample bosom that normally accompanies a woman's smile -- that i usually just gloss over them. but this one caught my eye for another reason: she's from watertown, ny.

for those unfamilar with this place, consider yourself lucky. during the winter, it quite regularly boasts being the coldest city in the continental us, and during a particularly desolate winter of 2003, the temperature didn't break zero (fahrenheit!) for more than 30 days consecutively.

i only know this, because my brother happens to make this arctic village his home. after finishing his residency at a harvard hospital, he had the choice of a faculty position at johns hopkins and a lucrative private practice in watertown. inexplicably, he took the money and a long-term residence in the frozen tundra.

as the good brother that i am, i decided to see if missy were available for my brother to date. after all, in a town where fixing a pothole warrants a front page headline in the town paper, a doctor is a small celebrity. and in fact, he made appearances on the local network twice within the first three months of moving there.

but after looking through several pages of personals, i was disappointed to find missy absent. intentionally, i filtered out characteristics that it was obvious missy did not possess. from her face, i knew she had blond hair, i knew she wasn't fat (no double chin) and i knew she was under 40.

still no missy (as a consolation, however, i did find a somewhat goth looking female in search of a nsa tryst).

think of that poor bloke in watertown who shoveled a dozen driveways of 2-inch thick ice to save up the $200 to buy that yearly description (as a gentlemen, he would need time to woo missy) only to find his cherubic girl has deserted him.

and now our pimple-faced 25 year old just sits in the bedroom he's called his own for the last nine years, curtains pulled, staring at the cream-colored paint peel off his walls, as his mom berates him for wasting so much money on a girl he should have known he'd never have.