On good days, I congratulate myself on the footloose and fancy-free lifestyle that allows me to drink Cosmopolitans on a school night and jet off to exotic locations at the drop of a hat.

On bad days, I lament the lack of a warm body beside me in bed, ready to share life’s joys and sorrows and, more prosaically, baby-making ingredients and a mortgage.

Rummaging through a drawer full of old papers, I came across a dog-eared essay, written in pencil, titled, “My life in the year 2000”. The pigtailed, eight-year-old version of myself had written, “I’m going to go to Oxford or Cambridge and study English or Maths and get a degree before I’m 20. In the year 2000, I will be married to a handsome man. We will have two children (a boy and a girl).”

Well, the year 2000 has been and gone and the knight in shining armour has yet to appear. I’ve become one of the thousands of smart and sassy single ladies out there, all slowly losing faith in Cupid’s bow-slinging abilities… I mean, really, what’s a single girl got to do to find a decent man?!

It seems to me, that by the time you reach 35, all the good men have been taken. The slightly dysfunctional ones have been chewed up and spat out again, and are ready to take up with another willing victim. They’re no less dysfunctional than before, except now they come with tons of baggage and a part-time childcare schedule.

Once you discount the too old, the too young, the too embittered, the too intellectually challenged…. well, let’s just say that you’re left with about 1% of the available gene pool. And I’ve already dated half of them.

Of course, I have to ask myself which category I fall into. Presumably, since I’m still hanging around on the shelf, I don’t fall into many men’s, “single, willing and normal” category. I need to find myself a normal, semi-good-looking weirdo, and fast.