NEW HUMOR AND SITES FROM GREG BULMASH

Recently the subject of my being single and being snapped up was brought up in my e-mail version of this column. It was a compliment from a reader, but my friend, Lori, took it as further proof that I should have an online romance with a reader. So I thought I'd re-run the almost absolutely true story of my first and probably last online romance from the May 20th column.

I've promised some friends that I'd tell the story of my one and only online romance. And since I'm writing it down for them, I thought I'd share it.

I was fairly new to the internet and had placed an ad on alt.personals. Amazingly, I got some responses. I say "amazingly" because it seems most guys get none. Then again, the average personal ads read...

Hey Chickyboos, I'm seeking a supermodel who will look past my chronic acne and knittable tufts of back hair to find the wonderful guy inside. No fatsos please.

or

I'm a really sensitive guy. I cried at the end of "Terms of Endearment." In fact, I cry a lot. I'm never happy because women just don't seem to understand me. In fact, after I paid her rent and walked her dog, my last girlfriend left me for a biker. Then she asked him to beat me up. And he did. And I cried.

Those have limited appeal. My ad was different. It was sane.

Anyway, back to the story. She was a college student on the East coast. We started out writing for a couple of months. Going from short letters to long ones, telling our life stories, mailing each other pictures by snail mail. Then we began chatting on-line. Somewhere around a few weeks later, we fell in love. The multi-hour chats turned into multi-hour phone calls. We sent Christmas presents by mail. And we planned to meet when school let out for the summer and she came to California to visit her aunt.

Here's where it becomes bizarre. Early-January, she's driving back to school from her mom's in another state, but she's gonna be a few days late. Then I don't hear from her for a couple of weeks. Turns out she dropped out of college and went back to her mom's. I'm wary, having doubts about her stability, but we talk a bit more, then she disappears again.

A week later I get an e-mail from a friend of hers. My girlfriend's best friend's husband's younger brother had gone down to Guatemala for some reason and now was planning to hitchhike back. Since my girlfriend was "the only person he really listened to," she flew down there to talk some sense into him. He wouldn't fly back, so they ended up buying a beat up old VW and driving back through Central America and Mexico together.

Then I start receiving occasional progress reports from her friend. "She called from such and such country. They're doing okay, the car's running. They're slowly making their way back..."

Then her friend prefaces a letter with "it's probably not my place to tell you this, but you seem like a nice guy..." Turns out that my girlfriend's best friend's husband's younger brother was my girlfriend's ex-boyfriend, and with them spending all this time together...

True to the prediction, the Dear John letter came when they got back. "We were camping on a beach and things got romantic... I think I had only been replacing him with you... We're moving in together... I hope we can still be friends."

To prove she meant that last statement, we tried to keep writing to each other. Of course the frequency and intensity diminished sharply. Then, a few months later, I get a letter in which she tells me that he dumped her and started dating an older woman.

A lot of thoughts ran through my mind. How beautiful she was. How incredibly we'd gotten along. How I'd been given the perfect opportunity to try to rekindle the romance. And I said "gee, I guess karma really is a bitch."

Sometimes you just live for those moments.