There’s an old truism that, as soon as a guy starts seeing someone, the guy somehow becomes instantly more attractive to women, who apparently telepathically divine his newly taken status. Girls come up to him at bars, exes send friendly emails out of the blue.

I have, however, now taken that theory to its logical conclusion. Minutes ago, I received an email that began:

ABC Television’s hit reality television show, The Bachelor, is searching for its next star. After viewing your profile on LinkedIn, the casting producer has selected you as a potential candidate.

Um, no.

About seven years back, I was in CNNfn’s green room, waiting to go on-air for an interview. A woman walked into the room with a clipboard, said, “Joshua Newman”, and looked around.

I stood up. So did another guy. We looked at each other. Then at her. As it turns out, there were two Joshua Newmans in line to be interviewed, one of us right after the other – he about a new wireless technology IPO, I about some startups in the financial services space.

After our respective interviews, we headed to a neighboring Au Bon Pain for mid-winter chicken soup, only to discover that, not only did we have the same name, and not only did we work in the same industry, but we had both graduated from Yale, he four years before me.

After falling out of touch in the intervening years, that Joshua Newman emailed me again today to say he’d recently moved out to LA, to become Director of Digital Media for Twentieth Century Fox.

It seems the secret cabal of Joshua Newmans has now moved, en masse, from the world of high tech into the world of film. Movie people, look out.

People often ask me whether writing so publicly about my alcoholic adventures and dating debauchery ever causes problems. My answer: of course.

Observe, for example, this rather gracious email I received last night, in reference to a segment of the inaugural F. Scott & Friends Bourbon and Brylcreem Hour podcast, from a friend of my younger brother whom Sarah and I had discussed on-air the likelihood of my drunkenly sleeping with:

Um, dare I say ìwell done?î I listened long enough to hear the bit about my dimple and how I am apparently going to get angry after we drunkenly sleep together. OH, josh. Weíll blame it on the bourbon (not us sleeping together ó your podcast). Its no wonder Dave insisted I check it out.

For the record, I know what the hell a pod cast [sic] is, too.

Hope all is well. We all need to go drink/sing/not fuck real soon.

[name redacted]

My bar-napkin masterpiece, “Naked Lady / Moose”:

[photo courtesy H. Hunter and four glasses of Maker’s Mark]

This afternoon, I discovered that, with the din of blow-dryers in the background, “just a trim, please, I’m trying to grow my hair out a bit” apparently sounds exactly like “please whip out the buzz-clippers and sheer off most of my hair.”

Tomorrow evening, I head out to Brooklyn to reprise my earlier recitation of the Laura Friedman Saga from my teenage digital diary, at Cringe’s one year anniversary – a Best Of reading that’s bringing back in the cream of the crop. Plus, you know, me.

A description of Cringe from organizer Sarah Brown:

Funny people reading from their old diaries, letters, songs, poems, and other general representations of the crushing misery of their humiliating adolescence, but it’s okay because they’re totally cool and well-adjusted and super attractive now:

Cringe Reading Night
Wednesday, April 5, 8:30 pm
Freddy’s Bar & Backroom
Dean & 6th Ave.
2/3 to Bergen, any train to Atlantic/Flatbush
More directions here
Cost: free dollars

Though, for the record, I was just as “super attractice” at the time of writing; for proof thereof, I include the Bar Mitzvah photo below, taken at age 13 (as is my collection of journal entries).

Such a shana punim.

[Also in this week’s New York Magazine.]

A few evenings back, my brother and I made our way through four or five Times Square-adjacent bars, happily and successfully flirting with several tables of women at each stop.

At the very last bar, however, on the way out the door and back to my apartment, I tossed out a bit of – what at least seemed to me – witty banter for the hostess. She, apparently, found it far less amusing, a point she rather cuttingly made clear.

And as I look back, even as I recognize that the evening was, percentage-wise, one of the best I’ve ever had, I’m plagued by that one brutal crash-and-burn far more than I’m pleased by the blur of preceding successes.

Sure, life is a numbers game. And I know that I can’t bat a thousand. But, to stretch the metaphor, it seems I still haven’t mastered the fine art of striking out without feeling like I got hit in the head by the pitch.

As in most years of recent memory, I awoke this first morning of 2006 convinced that I could have saved a lot of time on New Year’s Eve by not going out, but rather slamming myself a few times in the head with a hammer.

Either way, I’d have felt about the same this morning. The year’s off to a good start.