I promised you that if I got to level 30 in FarmVille I would join e-Harmony. The good news is, I only made it to level 26 before losing interest. The bad news is, I now have a very successful cafe in the restaurant-equivalent of FarmVille – CafeWorld. (see below)

It occurred to me that it might be “time” last Friday night when I was home alone watching my 5th straight episode of Entourage, season 1. I was serving up burgers and pot roast and using the revenue to outfit my restaurant with bamboo walls and decorative hibachi grills, when I accidentally let my guacamole go bad. It turned brown and flies started circling it…it was really gross – at least for a Facebook video game. Needless to say, I was genuinely upset. So it was in that moment that I turned off the TV and logged-on to the e-Harmony.

I realize that this move is tad off character, but I told myself the following: I’m being approached by guys that aren’t panning out to be good dating prospects (need I remind you of “chocolate dip?”). Maybe pre-screening is a good idea. On top of that, I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. Worst-case scenario, e-Harmony would likely provide decent blog fodder.

Well…it hasn’t even been a week, and here we are.

For the time being I’ll breeze over the fact that it took me a good 4 hours to finish the personality profile and jump to the do’s and don’ts of e-Harmony dating.

DO  purchase the subscription so you can see the pictures of your matches: At first I thought looking at the pictures would be petty and superficial. But once the pictures were uploaded, I realized that “Derek, 32″ was actually “Derek, 45″ and that I had accidentally checked the “Pacific Islander-only” box.

DON’T assume that you will be able to keep it on the DL that you’ve joined e-Harmony: While it would seem that the chances of being matched up with someone you know is SUPER slim, in my first 48 hours on the site, I was matched up with a work colleague, my cute neighbor, and – the worst of the worst – my x-boyfriend’s friend.

DON’T ever take a boy you’ve met on e-Harmony to a restaurant that doesn’t serve Dr. Pepper: According to the personal profiles of 3 of my matches, it is one of the 5 things they “can’t live without.”

DO be mentally prepared to fill out 3 to 4 Cosmo quizzes a day: When you’re matched up with someone who wants to “begin communication” they send you 5 multiple choice questions, each with room to write your own answer – and of course the pressure is on to showcase your wit in 100 characters or less. Don’t forget, someone else will be reading your answers and judging you. The questions are real casual and easy to answer…for example:

“How do you like to spend a Saturday night?” – no brainer

“How do you feel about premarital sex?” – trickier…

“How do you assess your verbal intimacy skills?” – my what?

“Do you believe in Soul Mates?” – are they really asking this of people playing online dating roulette?

“Do you enjoy being alone?” – yikes.

…I’m going to check on my pot roast.

It started out innocently enough. I was working late on a project at work and a co-worker invited me to be her neighbor on Facebook FarmVille. Little did I know what I was getting into. One minute I’m passing the late-night hours learning how to plow and plant seeds and the next thing you know I’m scheduling my sleeping patterns around a crop of pumpkins, which take 8 hours to grow and will wither and die if I do not harvest them in time.

Then there was the other night when I came home from work, ready to harvest my fresh crop of chili peppers only to find, to my horror, that my home internet was down. “These chili peppers will never make it through the night!!” It was going to be a loss of well over 10,000 fake, farming coins! Luckily, the internet came back on just as I was dialing up the cable company and I bought a pink tractor with the chili-pepper profit.

Well, I was carrying on to one of my friends about collecting truffles from my pig and my plans to expand my farm, and to my disappointment, her facial expression turned more and more concerned, instead of more and more interested. She interrupted me by saying, “we have got to get you a date.”

It’s then when I realized how long it had actually been since I’d been on a date…and even more upsetting, how long it had been since I had something blog-worthy to write about. She was most definitely right. My farm was receiving far too much attention because was receiving none. Later that week, the hits just kept on coming when I was mistaken by a boy at a bar as the “butch half” in a lipstick-lesbian relationship. Clearly I need to turn this dry-spell around.

Now, I’m not ready to say goodbye to my aspirations for the plantation just yet – or the ability to grow grapes once I achieve level 19 status – but I did accept two date invitations for this week. Maybe if it starts raining men, my farm will experience its first dust bowl.

P.S. – If I make it to level 30 farming status (like my neighbor’s farm shown below), I’m signing up for e-Harmony.