The Mandates Read Online Free PDF Page B

earmarked in their wills.
    Next time you are tempted to act too quickly during or after a date, remember these three “eager beaver” rules:
    Leave an awkward moment alone. As you are ending your date, don’t compulsively say, “I’ll call you.” It’s a male “trigger gene” somehow embedded in our DNA that makes us do this. Take a moment and think about it all before saying anything. Look in his eyes and hear what he says. Then decide how you want to end the evening. Chances are, if there’s no physical touching (e.g., hand holding, hand on shoulder, kiss) at this point, one or both of you might have dating doubts, in which case some distance keeps you from pushing the fledgling attraction over the edge.
    If you don’t talk to him for a week, don’t get bent out of shape or assume something’s wrong. Forty-two-year-old Doug from New Jersey summed up the feelings of many guys I spoke with when he said, “I ruined potentially decent romances when I ran into the guy I went out with a couple of days later and acted insulted that we hadn’t spoken. Yeah, I’m sure he really wanted to call me after I pouted on the street.”
    Do not free-associate into his message machine. Practice the message first by calling from work or your cell phone and leaving it for yourself at home. I once left a date a five-minute message, in which I not only reviewed our date, but also debated the pros and cons of going out again, as if I were some modern gay Hamlet pondering whether a future date was “to be, or not to be.” Needless to say, it was not to be.

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    ARRANGING YOUR CD SELECTION FOR THAT FIRST DATE
    (Or: Limiting the “Liza” Factor)

    Monitor the portfolio diversity in your CD selection today!
    Remember that CD selection is one of those key areas, like the medicine cabinet, where actions speak louder than words as potential dates sum you up. To be brief but clear: don’t have the complete collections of more than three absolutely fabulous female singers.
    How many times can he count the name Liza as he scans down the list?
Liza Live at Radio City, Liza Live at Carnegie
Hall, Liza Live with Mama, Liza Live without Mama, Liza’s
12 th Comeback Concert.
The same goes for Bette, Barbra, Cher, Patti, Diana, and those sixties retro divas Dusty and Nancy.
    As you are rearranging your CD collection, remind yourself to be vigilant when referencing these divas! Stop your mouth from betraying you with tired catchphrases from these women’s songs that may somehow have snuck into your everyday vocabulary. If your speech contains phrases from diva songs, such as “love hangover,” “stir it up,” “don’t rain on my parade,” “maybe this time,” “it’s all for you,” “oops, I did it again,” “if I could turn back time,” and “you don’t have to say you love me, just be close at hand,” you must excise them with haste.
    What key personality characteristics are associated with each diva? If the man you want to shag has more than three albums by any of these major divas, the following chart gives you a simple way to type a date by his music.

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    AVOIDING MATRON MEDICINE CHEST SYNDROME

    You are a thirty-one-year-old man living alone in your own apartment on the outskirts of Chicago. Yet your medicine chest has enough moisturizers, night creams, day creams, midday creams, tonics, salves, lotions, potions, Retin-A, and Botox to keep a boatload of Park Avenue matrons moist and molded for a month.
    What’s wrong this picture?
    Nothing, if your goal is getting a perfume-sprayer job at Saks. Or, if you are fast on your feet and have an empty locked drawer, you can have the best of both worlds. You can harbor your cosmetics like a fugitive, quickly throwing them into the drawer when the doorbell rings for that first date.
    As Lance, a twenty-seven-year-old self-described “flannel