Tips on how to date a felon

I've been losing a lot of sleep lately, finding myself on the couch at 2 am, bleary-eyed and wishing I could get my ass in bed.  But every time I get into bed, I toss and turn, busily engaged in a staring contest with my alarm clock. 

So, at 2 am, instead of sleeping in the world's comfiest bed, I'm either watching TV, or surfing the internet. 

TV is a lost cause, because - surprise surprise - there's very little on at 2 am that is worth watching.  Except, of course, MSNBC's Lockup.

The premise of the show is simple - an inside look at the prison system of the United States.  And man, is it an addictive show to watch.  Officers searching for shanks, murderers bemoaning their fate, and weird mexican dudes with moustaches doing karate in a cage.  Seriously.  Weird mexican dudes that do karate while prison guards watch on.  And then there was this great bit about a murderer who used Yoga to escape prison. 

And people say Yoga is harmless. 

The best part, though, are the prison weddings.  You get to see lonely men who have had little contact with women, and then they somehow meet a woman and fall madly in love with them.  Rather quickly, they get married (mostly because the men want the conjugal visits, I'd guess).  Here's the great thing - those women tend to be rather, um, unappealing.  They are usually a tragic combination of at least three of the following traits:

• Stupid
• Overweight (and not in the "well, most north americans are overweight" sense, either)
• Unattractive
• Annoying
• Excessively Confrontational
• Stupid

"Stupid" is on the list twice for an obvious reason:  you married a guy who is convicted of killing his ex-wife.  How dumb are you!?  And the greatest thing about these women is how oblivious they seem to be of their character flaws.  I watched a bit about a woman who had all of those traits (yes, she had both "stupids") - and she carried herself, and addressed the camera, like she was Halle Berry. 

So, I laugh when I watch Lockup.  Let the prison men get their conjugal visits.  And they can suffer through having to make it with a woman in a plus-plus-plus size pink nightie who needs two full tubes of lube for one night of passion.  I'm all for prisoners having to suffer for their crimes, and this seems like an imaginative way of doing it. 

After Lockup ends, I flip to the internet.  And do my late-night perusals of all sorts of topics.  I read books on Project Gutenberg.  Or, for nights when I have the attention span of a gnat, I browse profiles on Plenty of Fish. 

There are a lot of attractive women on Plenty of Fish.  And I'd like to think that I've messaged many of them, and made them uncomfortable in new and imaginative ways.  But then, there are also women who are not really my "type".  Girls with profiles that contain racist comments, obvious lies ("I love hockey - big fan of the Celtics!"), massive amounts of spelling/syntax errors, excessive lol'ing, or any picture in which the woman is standing next to a horse. 

But I'm a kind soul, and I always feel bad for these women.  I mean, they're on this dating website, but every time I'm on it, I see them there.  Over and over again (and don't make a comment about how I'm in the same boat as them, since I check the site over and over again - it's not polite).  They must be lonely.  They have to be searching for someone.

I have some advice for these lonely women, that I've discovered from watching Lockup.  There are plenty of men that have been married, while in prison.  And every one of these prison brides is generally a combination of stupid/unnattractive/unhealthy/argumentative/stupid.  So, while you may not be the number one pick on Plenty of Fish, I can guarantee you'd make a wonderful prison bride.  If you find yourself a guy that has a life sentence without parole, you can get all the conjugal visits you could want, a loving and devoted husband who you only have to talk to a few tims a week, and absolutely no chance that he'll kill you in your sleep.

Lucky you.

As for me?  I think I need to invest in sleeping pills.