and especially how not to get a date…

Be like the following guy, and send people you just meet who you’ve searched for on facebook and then only done a cursory look at their blogs the following:

Subject: Wow…
you really are troubled and angry over your fate as a small adoptee aren’t you? Why?

Yes.  Small adoptees unite together and take up arms!!!

Then this guy tells me my pain makes me attractive.  Then he offers about three long unsolicited paragraphs about his personal pain here, followed by:

and i have now arrived at a place in life from which I firmly believe I can be of use to other people, that I can help.

then he tells me something OBVIOUS:

Consider please, the possibility perhaps your birth family might have been abusive and bad too.

and continues on with his own heroic story of saving someone

…Over time i have realized I have a talent for intervention.

hope his intervention isn’t as successful as his talent for offending people is…

In your case,

I am pleading with you to seek peace with this obsession of your’s.

this obsession of mine…

i hope I am not out of line by saying this. We barely know each other,

that’s right, you condescending, patronizing, assuming, prick – you don’t know me at all.

but I’m the kind of guy who just doesn’t dick around with pleasantries when it’s painfully obvious that things are anything but pleasant.
Let me know what you think, and take care.

Here’s what I think.  I think you haven’t a clue what heroic is and maybe if you dicked around with pleasantries a little more you wouldn’t be eating lunch by yourself.

I told him yes, he was out of line, and that he’s a piece of work.

How is he a piece of work?  (aside from the obvious, above)  Well, maybe reading Fast Food Nation and talking about how you’re thinking about becoming a vegetarian and how guilty you feel, all the while stuffing meat into your mouth is one way.  Or maybe confronting me after I go to sit near him at lunch and accusing me of being mean the previous day (a not so inside joke between myself and a friend that he read wrong and OF COURSE assumed was about him) and then spending the rest of the lunch time talking about himself and his neurosis and how he is feeling is another several ways.

Others I’ve sent this to have called him a tool.

We can start a contest on what to call this guy.  Go ahead.  Have fun with it.