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Understandably, gift-giving as part of early courtship has fallen off considerably in the last half century or so. It seems quaint and maybe a little sexist, at least in its hegemonical subtext. Nonetheless, too many compliments are ungainly, so sometimes, it's nice to be able to fall back to giving someone a present.
As far as I can tell, no one has sincerely expressed affection through candy since the end of World War 2. Girls don't like flowers. Some of them like being given flowers, but once the giving is done, it's just something rotting in their house. Any number of women have assured me this is true. (Admittedly my taste runs more toward the cynical young women than the hopeless romantics.)
Luckily, the last half a century has also given us the technology to deal with this problem. The mix tape.
Or, since I haven't had a working cassette recorder since the mid-'90s, the mix CD. I fully recognize that a mix CD can never match the soft hiss of analog sincerity that is the mix tape, but for the last ten years, I've used the money other guys spent on their music collections to buy liquor for pretty girls, so all my music is pirated, and putting it onto chromium dioxide would just be adding a disingenuous step.
So, in those same ten years, I've gotten the process of making a mix down to a pretty reliable algorithm.
1) Assemble a list of your all-time favorite songs.
2) Add a shorter list of songs you've been listening to a lot lately.
3) Add a shorter list of songs you've only recently discovered, or only casually enjoy, but seem like the sort of thing the lady in question would like.
4) Rearrange these songs into a pleasing order, with your favorite songs, as well as, if possible, the more upbeat numbers concentrated toward the beginning and end of the list.
5) Begin to edit. First remove whichever one song you've been listening to the most lately.
6) Remove all but one song by each artist.
7) Remove any songs that remind you of a past relationship.
8) Remove anything too clever or novel.
9) Remove anything that charted in the last five or six years.
10) Remove anything you've heard more than once on The Current.
11) Remove anything with the word "love" in the title or chorus.
12) Take the remaining two songs and start over at step 1.
Needless to say, if I assume that a lady is going to get a mix around week three after I meet her, I pretty much start the mix right away.
Hi. I'm Dan. I'm probably free this Friday.
- Location: Suburban Minneapolis
- it's NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests
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