First Date with Keith Mars, P.I.

Posted on June 23, 2014 by S

I’m sure some of you just read that title and thought wow, the Stucu ladies have gone completely off the rails and are now just casually revealing their dates’ full names on their “anonymous” blog. Next up it’ll be their home addresses and social security #s. I should probably stop reading before they get slapped with a huge lawsuit.

Source: wifflegif.com

For those of you who don’t recognize the name ‘Keith Mars’, let me assure you that it’s NOT my date’s name. It is, however, the name of an infamous dad slash detective on one of the greatest, most underrated teen crime fighting mystery TV shows (that yes, we’ve gushed about before) of our time. That’s right, I’m talking about my homegirl Veronica Mars and her wonderful, hilarious, brilliant private investigator dad, Keith:

So why have I gone on a tangent about a fictional middle aged TV character? Because, readers, last week I went on a first date with a real live P.I.!

Source: www.survivingcollege.com

You guys. Stalking/sleuthing/investigating shit/being nosy is honest to God one of my favorite pastimes. Well, I should say our favorite pastimes. As we’ve mentioned before, we here at Stupid Cupid take our ~~stalking~~ investigative skills VERY seriously. L and I always ~~dream~~ joke about opening up a ladies’ detective agency because we’re so fucking good at getting information. TRUE STORY: L once impersonated a college guidance counselor on the phone in order to pump a girl (who we’d never met but who happened to be dating a friend’s ex) for information on her relationship. AND IT WORKED. I mean:

Source: www.someecards.com

So when this guy contacted me on Okcupid (I’ll be posting an eHarmony update in the next week but as of today I still refuse to give those crazy bastards my money) and a few messages in revealed that he’s a private investigator, I went from mildly interested to:

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Back to the name. Good old Keith garnered this nickname well before I decided to blog about him or frankly, even meet him, for two important reasons:

He bizarrely shares a name with H, the guy who I dated and was super into last summer and who it took me a while to get over. Obviously I can’t reveal the actual name to you, but trust me, it is NOT a common name. H1 was the first person with that name that I’d ever met, so when Mr. P.I. introduced himself, I kind of maybe thought someone was playing a prank on me. Saying that name in reference to a different person felt so weird that I knew he needed a nickname, and he needed one fast.
In case you forgot/just stumbled upon this blog, we recently started referring to our dates using nicknames. And when I hear the term ‘private investigator’, a certain balding, badass vigilante of the law hailing from Neptune, California who literally walks through fire to save his only daughter inevitably comes to mind:

After messaging back and forth a handful of times, we set up a date. Truth be told I wasn’t totally excited about Keith, aside from the prospect of interviewing him about his job, cases, busts, whether he carried a fake ID/got to taser people,

Source: www.sheknows.com

and general tricks of the trade. Besides the fact that he was a P.I., here’s what I knew about him going into the date:

He went to Penn State
He lives in the suburbs (what is with me and suburban dudes??)

Aaaaand that’s basically it. It should also be noted that this was my first date since my breakup with D two months ago, and my first first date in over six months. Needless to say, I was feeling a bit rusty.

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We decided to meet for drinks in my ‘hood. The night of our date arrived, and Keith was running late. Like, a half hour plus late. STRIKE ONE. I mean, I’m kidding (sort of), because I know shit happens, but this seems to be a common theme among suburban guys I go out with: they are all SHOCKED that the traffic into the city is bad. At rush hour. On a notoriously awful two lane highway. I mean, am I missing something? How hard is it to leave yourself an extra 20 minutes figuring that you probably won’t be flying down 76 at 6:30 pm? Especially when you’re the one who set the time of our date? FOOLS.

Anyway, I was already salty about the delay, but I tried to brush off my irritation. Luckily the bar was close enough that I could just hang at my place and not awkwardly loiter or pathetically drink by myself until he arrived.

When we finally did meet, it was a classic case of picture fraud. Keith Mars was…not as cute as his pictures. More importantly, to me, he was not as tall (but as we know, ladies, they pretty much never are). He wasn’t bad looking, it was just a bit of a letdown.

I knew within the first five minutes that I wasn’t into him. He was perfectly nice, and not wholly unattractive, I just felt nothing. Zero interest. Zero attraction. Zero connection. The more he talked, the more I thought:

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(What’s that? I use this GIF in almost every post? I don’t care, I fucking love that creeping octopus. You’re welcome.)

I was doing my best not to pounce on him immediately with my list of 900000 P.I.-related questions. As we exchanged standard small talk, I started to realize something: Keith Mars was kind of a bro.

If you have a chance, check out this excellent comic on bro criteria. Do you see the example at the very top? “Still brags about getting wasted years after college”?

DING DING DING DING DING

God, you guys. Keith Mars would not shut up about how much he and his friends “partied” at school. NEWS FLASH, BROS: everyone partied/drank in college. It’s COLLEGE. This does not make you cool or unique or interesting. In fact, as a 30 year old still telling these stories to strangers, it makes you kind of pathetic.

Thoroughly turned off by my date’s troubling brotastic tendencies, I decided to get to the main event. And I will give Keith credit where credit is due: he answered every single one of my P.I.-related questions (and I asked what some might call an uncomfortable number of questions). He didn’t seem annoyed, not even at the end, by my endless curiosity. If anything, he was bemused by my sheer excitement and joy. I feel weird about revealing specifics because, you know, this dude is a private investigator, and I don’t want to be a dick (HAHAHA get it?) but of course I’ll share some general things I learned:

His firm works almost exclusively on civil cases, which means entrapment isn’t illegal. According to Keith, you can entrap the shit out of people. He once Catfished a dude on Facebook and posed as a hot girl asking him out in order to get him to show up to a bar. It totally worked.
He doesn’t carry a gun or a taser, at least that he would admit to me, but if he has to make a house call that could be dicey, he’s usually working with at least one government bureau that will send someone along with him.
He has a few aliases, but no fake IDs (again, at least that he would admit to me).
Cell phone fraud is apparently a huge international problem…? And the main case he’s working on. He also does a fair number of insurance fraud, cheating spouse and custody cases.
He sometimes works with Homeland Security as well as the Secret Service. !!!!!!!!!!!!!
He claims he never does background checks on his dates (I call bullshit, because who wouldn’t), but that he’s done it for friends, and he did it once for his sister’s boyfriend.

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Guys, I was in heaven. HEAVEN. I forgot that Keith Mars was a bro. I forgot that he was three inches shorter than he claimed to be and a half hour late. I left out some other really cool details that he shared with me, just because I feel funny putting it on the internet, and also because, well, he’s a P.I., so I wouldn’t put it past homeboy to find this post. He certainly wouldn’t be the first. Luckily I never mentioned that I had a dating blog, so he wouldn’t even know to look, but still.

Finally, after a solid 40 minutes grilling him about his job, I cut myself off. We went back to chatting about normal things, but it wasn’t as interesting. After we finished our second drinks, I was over it and ready to go home. We left and walked a few blocks in the same direction.

“Well this was a lot of fun,” Keith said. “We should do it again sometime.”

I wasn’t about to be like thanks but no thanks right there on the street, so I think I just said a vague “Yeah, it was nice meeting you, thanks for the drinks”. He awkwardly went in for a kiss on the cheek, I wiggled it into a half hug, and fled.

Well readers, to use the LINGO of those of us in the business, this was an open-and-shut-case. We met, we drank, he bro’d, I pumped him for information, and that was that. Except not really, though, because the Law of Dating Inverses held true: predictably, because I wasn’t into him, Keith Mars continued to text me after our date. I’ve been polite but brief, and I’m just waiting for him to actually ask me out again so I can say thanks, but no thanks, Mr. Mars. To quote a great:

Source: thoughtcatalog.com

Date Rating: 5/10. I was so enthralled by the P.I. stuff I’m seriously considering a career change, but the rest of the date was mediocre. And regarding the bro thing:

Source: www.tvatemybaby.com

Catfishing on a slow day: Chats with Tacosdelish

Posted on January 27, 2014 by L

Ever wondered what the worst of humanity looks like and sounds like? Or where they are hanging out? Well folks, if you want an answer to that question, just go ahead and create a fake online dating profile.

Many months ago, a commenter altered me to this original piece, which demonstrates, in SCARY detail, just how far some individuals COUGHmenCOUGH will go to try to score with a somewhat ~~attractive~~ living, breathing person.

Now, if you have ever read this blog before, you are probably acquainted with my dear friend and alter ego, Tacosdelish. And if you’re new, welcome! I strongly advise you read this Introduction toTacos post partially for your amusement and partially for your safety, but in the meanwhile, let me summarize: Tacosdelish is my second, fake online dating profile where I take on the personality of a gaseous, gluttonous Chechen with an extra thumb. A few months back, OKC nudged Tacos incessantly to add a photo, so my friend and I googled, “mediocre looking girl” and slapped a blurry head shot from a random catalog up there (I am confident the model in this picture is either 20 years older by now or so significantly airbrushed she won’t recognize herself).

The new, cute picture resulted in the number of messages Tacos received SKYROCKETING through the roof. She also receives some unsavory chats, usually from “funcouple232” soliciting her immediate availability for a weird combination of a threesome and a poetry reading.

Usually, I immediately press ignore when I get chat requests on Tacos. But, thanks to the lack of new Sunday night programming on my favorite networks yesterday, (THANKS GRAMMYS! NO ONE WATCHES YOU, BTW!), I was performing a lackluster search on Tacos when a chat box from a fine young fella in the MD suburbs popped up, and I decided to engage with him a bit. And boy, am I glad I did:

First of all, let’s thank Bachelor #1 here for cutting to the chase. Even though he claimed to be a college student in his profile, he wasn’t scared off by Tacos’s information, which indicates that she’s 38 years old. I actually meant to type, “I think I’m friends with your mom,” which would have been scarier and funnier. However, this guy was not concerned with my wit. He was also not concerned with the fact that Tacos’s proclivity for guns matched that of a mass murderer. What would it take to scare this guy? I tried a different tactic:

That’s right. I was going to turn him off by misspelling things. Oh, and mentioning devil worship. And mentioning I was a DIY plastic surgeon. Oh, and mentioning I stole from my employer. But still, he did not relent. When he asked why I joined OKC, I replied:

Identity theft is real folks. Just ask these guys:

But yet, he replied:

CHECK MATE, SIR. I f you were trying to beat Tacos at her own game by being perverse, offensive, and just plain random, you have WON . I tip my hat to you!

Upon receiving this response from him, I promptly signed out of Tacos’s chat, fully disgusted by the whole exchange. (I also didn’t know which answer would be in the negative, yes or titties? They both sounded affirmative to me.)

I mean, I cannot lie, I did get a full seven minutes of LOL-ing out of this, and if you did too readers, we may make chats with Tacos a regular section on the blog.

And you thought this winter would be cold and boring…

OKC Questions: S’s Makers and Breakers

Posted on May 4, 2013 by S

Last week L kicked off our three part series by sharing the OKC questions that mattered to her. Now it’s my turn. So without further ado, here are my three picks…

1) The personal hygiene question:

In the same way that having peace loving parents influenced L to care about a war question, having a mom who worked in the dental field for most of my life taught me to care about this one. This was the first question that I really paid attention to when I joined the site because I was shocked by how many dudes FREELY ADMITTED to brushing their teeth once a day or “only on days when they feel like it”. First and foremost, guys, you… don’t brush your teeth twice a day? Seriously?! Obviously we’ve all had nights when we’ve been super tired/drunk/whatever and didn’t brush before bed. No one’s perfect. Sometimes shit happens:

I’m talking about your standard everyday routine. Brushing twice a day is basic, basic hygiene that all second graders are aware of. And if that didn’t stick with you, I’m nervous to find out what else didn’t make it into adulthood.

Second, even if you only brush your teeth once a day or less (!!!!), you still know that twice a day is the normal, acceptable standard for human beings living in the first world. So why are you voluntarily admitting to having subpar personal hygiene on a dating site? You do know that the goal is for us to eventually kiss, right? Do you think making me imagine these scenarios staring back at me when we get to that moment is helping your cause?

*FYI consider yourselves lucky that I chose these super tame pics because there were some seriously grizzly alternatives available. Google imaging ‘bad teeth’ is officially the most traumatic thing this blog has done since L Wiki’d sociopaths last week.

Last but not least, why the sudden candor? L, D, and I have all experienced the lies dudes tell on Okcupid firsthand, most notably in the height and looks department. Height exaggeration on OKC has literally been documented:

Click here if you want to read up on the other things men (and women) lie about on Okcupid. Spoiler alert: it’s looks and money. My point is, men are obviously cool with lying about all. kinds. of shit. So why not this? Why not just tell me you have exemplary oral hygiene, and I’ll be none the wiser? You literally are 100% kosher with claiming that you’re 4 inches taller than you actually are, but when it comes to brushing habits you’re suddenly Honest Abe? Next time do yourself a favor, sir, and skip the question altogether.

2) The cheap date question:

I promise I’m not attempting to fan the flames of our ‘who should pay’ debate (which PS was our most hotly discussed and contested post to date. We love how fired up you all got!). This question has zero to do with gender. It is, however, a major pet peeve of mine and has been for as long as I can remember. I can’t stand bad tippers. To me, the bare minimum you tip a server in the US “who did a fine job” is 15%. Really unless the service is bad, I always try to leave 20%. If the service is amazing I try to leave more. You’re probably thinking I feel strongly about this because I used to be a waitress, but my Vaudeville routine level of clumsiness has prevented me from venturing into the service industry. Also, watching Rachel Green struggle for so many years was a bit of a deterrent.

However, while I may not have waited tables, I have had my share of low paying thankless jobs *coughjuniorsdepartmentatKohlscoughcough*. And there’s nothing worse than working your ass off and feeling like you have nothing to show for it. Actually, there is: being out to eat with people who basically make it rain at the beginning of the meal ordering drinks and food…

but when faced with the bill are suddenly too broke to tip properly. I’m not going to stand on my soap box any longer, I promise, but this one is important to me. Be kind to your fellow humans who work hard for little pay. Tip your servers! If you don’t, I can’t date you. *End PSA*

3) The wtf are you doing on this site question

You would think that this one would be a no brainer. YOU. WOULD. THINK. After all, you sign up for online dating voluntarily. No one puts a gun to your head and makes you do it. So the question is, if you don’t want to eventually meet in person, what exactly are you doing on here? Just browsing? Window shopping? Fair enough, except I’ve actually been messaged by seemingly normal dudes who I later discover are “not interested in meeting in person”.

First of all, I have zero interest in a creepy online only relationship (unless it ends like You’ve Got Mail did. In which case, sign me up!)

You know what else I have zero interest in? Being catfished. I’ve seen that MTV show (PS, if you want to feel really effing old, watch some MTV) and it terrifies me. And what do the people who lie about their identity all have in common? Oh I don’t know, maybe that they’re RELUCTANT TO MEET IN PERSON. So I don’t think I’d be remiss in calling this question a red flag. With all the liars and creepers that lurk on online dating sites, the sooner we can meet and I can confirm that you’re not a 15 year old boy or a 65 year old woman, the better.

Stay tuned for our third and final installment of Makers and Breakers featuring the lovely D!

Stupid Cupid

three single girls. three cities. adventures in online dating.

Tag Archives: catfishing

First Date with Keith Mars, P.I.

Catfishing on a slow day: Chats with Tacosdelish

OKC Questions: S’s Makers and Breakers

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