Dear Dr K,
How are you so charming and witty? Please tell us your secret so that lonely souls like me know how to find someone for Valentine’s Day.
Q Pidd
Dear Pidd,
I am so glad you asked me this question. Of course I should know more than anybody else about this since I am a serial charmer and I have managed to woo the incredibly talented and beautiful Dr Q to spend Valentine’s Day with me on multiple occasions.
As I write this she keeps shaking her head and telling me, “When will you understand? I’m your imaginary girlfriend! I don’t exist!” Haha, that Dr Q, I should say she is incredibly talented and beautiful AND funny! I can understand your pain, however, and I shall divulge some of my top-secret tips for wooing someone of the opposite gender. These are sure-fire methods guaranteed to never fail.
1. Demonstrate your presence: It’s often the case that the loneliest guys and gals are lonely only because they haven’t been noticed yet. If you remain unnoticed, it is impossible to make any progress. I keep trying to explain this to Dr Q, as she was lucky that I noticed her in the crowd, everyone else continues not to notice her.
The first step to fixing this problem is to make sure you stand out in the crowd, and you can achieve this by wearing an elephant costume all the time, constantly shouting random phrases from your physics textbook to appear smart, spraying yourself with cat pheromones (deodorant is so 2000s), and demonstrating your physical prowess by high-kicking the blackboard whenever you get the chance. Suddenly you will find that everybody knows your name, and people are talking about you all the time.
2. Pick a target: Once you have made your presence felt among your peers, it is often simply enough to sit back and wait for advances from those who are interested in you. Often, though, you will find that this is not enough, possibly because the people who are right for you are too shy to be so forthcoming.
It is now time for you to isolate and target your newfound charm towards a person of interest. You may demonstrate your interest in them with a simple gift. This is a tricky thing to get right: your gift must not be too common or very expensive, yet it must be thoughtful and funny. I, for example, gifted Dr Q a box full of live maggots that I was easily able to harvest from some piles of garbage around my home. As the maggots were pupating, I asked her to open the box again in a week, and when she did, a beautiful swarm of houseflies flew out of the box.
What insects will you gift to your person of interest? Ants? Cockroaches? Mosquitoes? It might be worth finding out what their favourite insect is before gifting it to them.
3. Seal the deal: One of the unfortunate realities of young love is that it is full of drama and heartbreak, and this is most often because of inadequate or imprecise communication between the parties involved. When you have made your presence felt and indicated your interest in a person, rather than asking them out informally, it is best to fill out an application form to their heart. The application might have certain requirements you have to meet, such as having lost all your baby teeth or scoring a minimum percentage on that person’s entrance exam. I scored 99 per cent on the entrance exam to Dr Q’s heart, and she tells me that 1 per cent is the sanity that I have remaining.
Best of luck!
Yours questionably,
Dr K