There’s a reason New Yorkers avoid quiet, real dating and often opt for group revelry. Real one-on-one appointment-style dating is hard. And intense. And feels like an interview.

I’m great at interviews because in an interview, no one’s really interested in “getting to know me.” They just want to be sold on my professional skill set. If you sound like this on a date that’s, well, disastrous. Like, “I’m a non-snorer, Ivy League graduate and speak French fluently.” You can’t talk like that on a date. Unless the goal is to come across as an insecure freakshow.

So while one-on-one dates are scary like interviews, you can’t counter that pressure with professionalism. You have to appear relaxed. Confident. Like you’re just being yourself.

DIFFICULT!

And while interviews are essentially a one-sided conversation with you fielding questions, on a date, you aren’t only interviewed, you have to interview back. It’s like being the interviewer and the interviewed at the same time.

Multitasking.

DIFFICULT!

During a real grown-up date, you suddenly have a newfound appreciation for the ease of the drunken, late-night make out session. You value the genius behind the teen method of dating in packs of friends. Nothing is scary when you’re flanked by your three best friends and wielding a tequila. Social lubrication, come to find out, is a good thing.

So while I moan about the lack of real dating in this city, I should really be counting my blessings that dating’s not a big New York pastime because I suck at it. And Bartok and I have had running argument for weeks now in which she claims I engaged in a dating faux pas. I protest that I have not. Let’s imagine:

Say you’re on a second date, but it’s in some ways like the first because this is the first time you’ve met up out somewhere for drinks as opposed to hanging out during the day.

Say things go really well and you do two rounds of drinks over two hours. That’s a lot of talking, and you know quite a bit about each other already from previous encounters.

Say you happen to have a close male friend drinking at a restaurant around the corner who you’d also really wanted to catch up with that night.

You could:

a) Send your date home at 10:30pm and go catch up with your friend

b) Go to a next location with just your date

c) Bring your date to go meet up with your friend

I ruled out a) because 10:30 seemed a little early to be calling it quits. I ruled out b) because we’d already been alone, talking for two hours and I was craving some of that social lubrication. That left c), an option that after two glasses of wine, didn’t seem that awkward at all.

So you go to the restaurant around the corner with the intention of drinking at the restaurant bar with you, your date and your friend, but your friend is starving and you’re starving so you all just end up sitting down and actually eating.

Subsequently, I felt more relaxed, like myself, and conversation flowed easily between all three of us. Everyone ate. My date probably felt a little out of the loop since he didn’t know any of the friends we spent some time catching about / exchanging gossip on, but we did comical impressions of all of them to fill him in.

According to Bartok, I hijacked my date.

My actions were in “poor form.” She claims it was inappropriate to take my date to meet up with another man, and yeah, I see her point. Yet in my head, it wasn’t about derailing the date, it was about continuing it. To me it was sort of like, “If you left and our date was over, this is what I would’ve gone and done next. Instead of you leaving, why don’t you join in?” which is actually really nice and dare I say, intimate.

I insist that if the roles reversed, I’d have been flattered he introduced me to one of his friends. Who cares if she’s a girl? (Hm. OK. Maybe I would’ve cared. But not if there was clearly no vibe between them.)

Bartok claims I still met up with another guy on my date. Miss Manners definitely wouldn’t approve.

I think I’m willing to admit I committed a dating faux pas. Instead of protesting, I think my argument is more like, ‘Who cares?’ At the end of the day, it’s self-evident that I’m clearly not into girly protocol. If dating is about getting to know someone, perhaps the sooner someone learns that, the better. Then again, I could just be an insensitive, serial hijacker. I wouldn’t rule out any possibilities.

I know last entry I said I was going to move on but sorry, I have to harp on the extra-terrestrial appearance of LA women for just a few more sentences. It’s especially shocking coming from a place like New York, where you see runway models and the people in Calvin Klein ads humbly rushing around the city going to castings sipping coffee like the rest of us. These people posses a natural beauty so stunning that they often downplay their attractiveness with baggy clothes and ripped up sneakers. In contrast, the majority of women I saw in LA were desperately trying to conform to some warped Mattel/Hugh Hefner idea of beauty with the bleached hair, burnt skin, fake eyelashes and frighteningly short mini dresses that leave nothing to the imagination. I was perhaps most perturbed when observing a group of young girls stretched out by the pool. My guess is that they ranged in age from eight to fifteen. I spit up a little in my mouth when a scantily dressed eleven year old started “bitchin” to her tween companion about how she needed a bikini wax.

Bikini wax?

This girl wasn’t even tall enough to reach your local spa counter top. I didn’t even own or wear a bikini until senior year of high school, and even then I preferred my tankinis since they covered my lack of chest. Weren’t these girls self-conscious? What happened to the awkward teen years? Apparently they’ve been replaced with a lot unnecessary hair removal.

Ah – and as for the men. I was disappointed in this sector as well. It’s not okay for the guy I’m checking out to have better highlights than me. Nor is it okay for his eyebrows to be visibly waxed. There was a serious hunk drought in LA. I found this not to be the case however when I later ventured to southern California where men strip down and change into their wetsuits on the roadside by their jeeps. Talk about eye candy on the road. If you could actually sustain a conversation with these sun-kissed surfers is another matter…

Anyway, after some casual investigation I discovered that a place called Les Deux in West Hollywood was the supposed “phat” spot on a Friday night. So far my celebrity sightings had included Conan O’Brien, Lisa Kudrow, Shaquille O'Neill and Cuba Gooding Jr. At Les Duex I’d see miss paparazzi herself Paris Hilton out on one of her last weekends before heading to jail on this very day. Classy. I was personally more thrilled to see dancing at Les Deux Dr. Callie, cast member of a show I’m fond of – Grey’s Anatomy.

First we went to dinner at a swanky outdoor French place where smoking at the dinner table is acceptable. A drunken friend of a friend joined our lovely dinner gathering and announced he’d just gotten shit-faced at a museum exhibition on feminism. He vehemently and entertainingly described it as one of the worst displays of artwork he’d ever seen.

“Guess what I have in my car!” He shouted. We humored him and guessed.

“A cunt coloring book,” he announced.

Excuse me?

“This is supposed to empower women and shit? Are you kidding me? It looks exactly like a kid’s coloring book except that it’s pages and pages of different shaped cunts and you color them in. I had to buy one.”

Don’t worry, he went on:

“How is this feminism? You know, you go a museum in Europe and they don’t have these issues. It’s cause in Europe they had women as leaders. They had Queens and stuff. So no one finds it necessary to indulge in this kind of equality crap. Like I’m supposed to go to this exhibit and see photos of women taking a shit and a mobile made of tissues covered in menstrual blood and this is supposed to make women feel empowered?”

Good thing I’d already eaten. Guess I wouldn’t be stopping for a visit at LA’s museum of modern art.

Somehow, even in our slightly intoxicated condition, we all successfully entered Les Duex (not without a struggle). Les Deux, famed for being “phat” was actually just a run down house someone had redesigned to look like a French mansion and an outdoor area of a parking lot. The music was pop and rock, standard, nothing to write home about. There wasn’t even a real DJ, just a guy on an iBook. And there in the corner with her beloved sister Nicky was Paris Hilton, seated, looking sultry as ever with large, chunky, blonde bangs swept across her face. She remained seated all of the two minutes I spent looking at her – no dancing, no stripping, no acting like a hyena finally loose from its cage. Overall it was a pleasant evening, then just as I was starting to relax the club’s lights turned on at one thirty a.m.

HUH?

I knew for a fact that people on the patio area had a ten bottle (around eight to eleven thousand dollar) minimum. Are you telling me these people only have until one thirty to consume the absurdly expensive liquor they’d purchased? As the only who wore jeans and a sweater to this establishment while carrying a large daytime purse, I took advantage of this fact and snuck two bottles of Belvedere out with me (one in the purse, one under the sweater) so we might continue to drink and have fun elsewhere. What a waste!

I’d been slightly prepared for an early evening since someone had told me LA nightlife technically shut down around two, but I assumed that how in New York four a.m. closing really means four thirty, LA venues might stay open almost till three. Nope. One thirty and I was already squinting from the light and being herded out of room like a cow in a pack of cattle. I turned to a clearly LA-native blonde girl near and asked what the hell was going on.

Me: “I thought places closed at two?”

LA-native: “Yeah, well ever since Lindsay Lohan got pulled over for drunk driving at three a.m. the city’s been really strict with clubs about getting everyone out BY two.”

Lindsay’s pathetic little life now has an effect on California state law?

To LA: No, thank you.