The East Coast is depressing and dreary, the people (especially those who strive to attend the Ivy League) are uptight and driven to near-insanity by their Protestant work ethic.

And West Coast people are shallow emotional frauds who actually believe "I flaked!" is a bona fide excuse for not keeping a promise.

They were slim, but muscular and many of the girls were in their late teens. It was common to see girls who had nice, curvy, womanly bodies -- even breasts, LOL.

My favorite gymnast of recent memory was Svetlana Boginskaya. She was old by gymnast standards (21 in the 1994 Olympics) and taller (5'4"!) and more adult-looking than her counterparts on other teams (eg she had a woman's figure). She was my favorite to watch, because her height and the length of her limbs made it easer to actually *see* what she was doing.

She was also a superior athlete, in my opinion, because her height put her center of gravity way higher than the tiny little creatures running around by her knees, which can be a disadvantage especially on beam. I did gymnastics for about six years when I was small, then I shot up about four inches and that was the end of that (also I was kind of klutzy, so it all would have come crashing down eventually!) My best friend who came up to my nose excelled at it, though, and she had that short, blocky gymnast build that is so common these days.

That's a good one. I'd totally want to be friends with someone named "Bacon".

I asked about a new IUD on the market, asking why I'd need to be married with children like the commercial says it's recommended for

Tangentially, I'll try to shed the light you asked for. Two reasons:

1) Its easier to get the damn thing in and out once you have had at least one baby

2) STDs can be much more serious, and seriously affect your fertility (if you did choose to have it removed and have babies), if you have an IUD in place

My own doc said she'd be happy to fit me with the Mirena but wanted it to happen once I was in a stable relationship, not because of any weird moralizing on her part but on the not-unreasonable presumption that people are less likely to contract STDs when they are in a long-term monogamous relationship. It's not 100% foolproof, but a decent indicator of relative risk. If I really pressed her on it I think she'd do it, especially because I can't take BCP, but given what I know of her mad doctoring skillz I think her reasons for hesitating are sound.

I don't think that was the point of all these "she gave me crazy mixed signals" posts. That the guys didn't get a leg over is only incidental to the larger problem, which is that now they can't trust what's in front of their eyes. If you can't trust your own perception, what else is there? It really shatters your confidence not as a member of the dating public, but as a reasonable, intelligent person when you react to a very obvious signal X, only to find out that even though person was giving off signal X, they were thinking signal Y and never bothered to tell you. Its not fun discovering you've been played for a sucker.

It really blows having to try to read someone else's mind if they're telling you one thing ("not tonight!") but really mean another ("chase me!") and then have the balls to get *pissed* when you take them at their word. I know its an easy thing to say because I'm not the one who really liked that person, but to those guys I say you're really better off without them.

PS: both sexes give mixed signals. I did a dance of "I have no idea what the hell is going on" with a guy for *months* over the summer and again last fall. I pretty sure we were just really good friends, but there were at least two instances where it dawned on me that we might have been on a date, and I had no idea what I was supposed to do. I still don't know, but he's since moved away so the point is kind of moot now.

A woman I know told me about a year ago that she didn't want to sleep with me because "she liked me". Now, this is not what I usually expect as a result of being liked. But I accepted her reality, and we're still friends.

Sometimes you just have to accept what someone says without thinking about it too much.

She knew herself well enough to know that sex would destroy the friendship.

Intimacy changes everything. Maybe she knew herself to be the kind of woman that comes "with strings" and knew that you would never survive as a romantic couple once you were intimate with each other. She'd rather keep you in her life as a good friend than risk the loss of your friendship for a temporary sexual encounter followed by a doomed relationship death-spiral.