Am I flirting?

22. If I Feed Him With My College Meal Plan?

Today we return to the halcyon days of all-we-could-eat pasta covered in a layer of french fries, and the girls who swiped their university meal cards to deliver it to us. If you go to a school where the cafeteria is a main social hub, the exchange of meal cards can be confusing or misleading. In the real world, when someone buys you a meal, it’s a date (unless there’s some other reason you know it’s not.)

But what about in the college world, where someone’s parents buy you a meal? Is that a clear-cut case of flirting? Generally yes, but with two huge, gaping exceptions. If you use your card to get someone into the cafeteria, and you don’t want your generosity to appear like an attempt to get laid, just don’t eat with them. Say, “Ok, have a good lunch! I’ll see you later!” and go do your own thing. Problem solved. That’s exception number one.

The other exception applies at the end of the semester, when some kids have beaucoups of excess meals that they’re never going to use, and others would blow you for some chips and salsa. In this case, the college economy evens itself out, and meals flow freely from the rich to the poor, no fellatio required. If those extra meals are yours, feel free to give them away with no expectations. If you actually wanted to use your meal plan to flirt, shame on you. Ask the object of your affection to join you at a real restaurant instead.

Even if Sarah Palin is Smiling

The three talked late into the night. Schmidt and Salter probed and pressed and looked for gaps between her views and McCain’s. Palin shrugged off substantive differences. “What’s the big darn deal?” she asked, smiling and, in her frontier-girl way, half defying, half flirting with her interrogators. - Newsweek

No, America. Sarah Palin, for all the “probing” and “pressing,” was not flirting with you.

An Am I Flirting? Flirt

Seriously, all 120-something of you? Dead cute. How do we start pairing you off? By complementary patterns of plaid & stripes, or alphabetically according to username, or some other system yet to be be deployed by Young Master Karp?

Oh! The Tumblr-dating-dashboard. You heard it here first.

An Am I Flirting? Field Report

Am I Flirting? is beginning to receive reports of people mentioning our blog while flirting. If you’ve done this, we’d like to hear your stories, and how your flirtation turned out. As always, we assume none of the risk of mentioning this blog in the same sentence as anything romantic. That’s on you, you crazy person.

Here is a message from a gentleman — presumably a barista by trade — who gave this a go:

Am I flirting with her if I send her a link to the blog?
And then is she flirting with me, when she twitters about the blog,
with a link to the post ‘If I Twitter About a Cute Barista?’ and
mentions me in said tweet?

Gentleman Barista, if you are reading this, please let us know how things are going with this mysterious Lady of the Twitters. And yes, you are certainly flirting.

Questions? Stories? Contact amiflirting@gmail.com.

21. To Fend Off My Creditors?

If you’re not, you should be. Even with a black superhero president-elect, we’re in the midst of a global economic crisis. But you have to remember that subtle hints about the possibility of hot, hot sex are virtually recession-proof.

So, the next time that girl from the bank calls to ask in a sensuous voice whether you ever plan on paying your credit card ever again, ever, you might want to be extra-nice to her. If you’ve got a good sob story, tell it. Try to skew toward dignified struggle, and away from pathetic, crying mess. She already knows she’d have to pay to for breakfast if she ever hooked up with your insolvent ass, so be reassuring.

Even if your bank representative won’t remember who you are tomorrow, if you can make his or her day a little bit better, your month will suddenly get a little bit better thanks to a friendly extension on a payment. Don’t think of it as using each other, just think of it as cooperation. Sexy cooperation.

20. If I Voted?

Only if you took your panties off in the voting booth, handed them to the polling clerk with your ballot, and said:

“This is what democracy looks like.”

Also: only if you voted for That One. Because nothing says I wanna fuck you like I wanna fuck you with your reproductive and sexual rights intact. Gobama!

19. If I Train Him To Email Me on Schedule?

“am i flirting if… in the course of four months i have successfully trained him to exchange emails every two days when he said he hated email and only wanted to correspond by post? i mean i think it’s clear but he insists it’s platonic. then i feel bad for maybe flirting. maybe i am wondering if he’s flirting.”

Am I Flirting took this mailbag question to the sharp, the sensitive, and don’t you call her a Tumblrette, meaghano:

The E-mail Flirt is tricky territory, as it is much like Real Flirting, but with backspace. And a paper trail. Strike up a conversation on the train, and it’s over before you can say “Gabriel Garcia Marquez”. Send a flirtatious message via email, and there exists a potential back and forth expressible only by modern day romantic comedies starring Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks.

If you find yourself in an outpouring of the soul, constant-refreshing of the inbox situation, it is best to take your hands out of your pants and consider the following. To interpret flirtation in real life we look at tone, facial expressions, and body language, whereas on the Internet we have other, more blatant, markers. Ask yourself, “What is the approximate incidence of ;) ?” or “How deftly does my correspondent convey a degree of frustration with the limitations of technology to properly express how much he wants to bone me?”

Always remember that when it comes to e-mail flirtation, a refined boldness is the name of the game. Seasoned veterans get things done with an equal ratio of clever wordplay : shameless declarations. So if a man is in two months deep and still hasn’t begged you for a nudie pic, my advice would be to open a Twitter account, grab a book, and go to a coffee shop (in that order), because Honey, he’s not flirting. If he says it’s platonic, it probably is. Unless there’s a winkyface. That would change everything.

18. If She Smiles and Really Listens When I Talk To Her?

For some reason, even the most simple gesture from a girl — a smile, making eye contact, nodding — can seem like flirting. Is it our Attention Starved Culture? Is it boys growing up without getting Love? Is it just that girls are too used to keeping cool distance in order to avoid gape-mouthed leers and catcalls?

And it’s not just with girls. A guy I know complains that other guys think he’s flirting with them, just because he takes time to really pay attention to them, even in small talk. That some men think he’s gay because he treats them like a person worth being nice to, ergo he wants to screw them.

So here’s the harsh take: girls aren’t always flirting with you if they’re smiling, nodding, and really listening to your cocktail banter. But that doesn’t mean they’re just playing you, either. Or that they don’t like you. “But what if she’s just being nice to me!?” When did “nice” become a consolation prize? They’re being nice to you! And nice tends to be a necessary precursor to flirting. Really, enjoy it. Or else you’ll risk becoming some kind of paranoid creep who accidentally dismisses actual-flirtation-smiles because what girl could really like you? I’m smiling as I say this, trust me.

17. If I Put on Lip Gloss Every Time I’m Around Him?

This is another question pulled from our reader mail. If you’d like to see your question answered on Am I Flirting?, please send it to amiflirting@gmail.com.

Ah, the age-old issue of lip gloss, debated by scholars since time immemorial! Or, at the very least, debated since Lil Mama’s 2007 one-hit-wonder “Lip Gloss.” If your lip gloss is constantly poppin’, are you inviting all the boys to engage in jockin’, or even to chase you after school? We actually have a scientific answer for you. Scientifically, hell yes.

According to Yahoo! Answers commenter “A,” “teen girls like shiny lips and like to bring their boyfriends[sic] attention to their lips lol.” If you constantly apply lip gloss around a certain boy, you could be flirtatiously inviting him to take a good look at your shiny, shiny mouth.

Ask yourself this question: does your lip gloss perpetually pop, or do you only put it on when he’s around? If you use it all the time, that’s merely a kind of general flirtation with the world at large. To target one’s lip gloss so that it’s poppin’ at a certain gentleman with laser-like precision, well, that’s flirting.