2/24/2002:

This strip was inspired by 1. the secret crush email I just got and 2. this time sophomore year when I was driving with Sil up the main road of campus and she said, "There's a girl in a Volkswagen up there with an Apple sticker in the window and a Barenaked Ladies bumper sticker!" We tried to catch up to her and get a better look at the girl who was so obviously meant for me to love, but alas, traffic did not smile well on romance that day, and I got blocked into my lane. And then she drove away, never to be seen again.

Similar incidents have happened since then, and tastes have changed slightly (Note the Magnetic Fields poster in the background instead of BNL) but the sentiment is still the same regarding misses. I was at the coffeeshop with Rick and Sheila last quarter and there was a girl at another table using an iBook and taking notes with her left hand. I snuck a surreptitious look at her screen when I went up for a refill and was thinking of telling her of the benefits of OS X or something else to open conversation but in the end, I chickened out, perhaps feeling that the 30 second fantasy of finding love through a scenario cribbed from an 80's movie was too good to lose.

But really, how can you take those secret crush things seriously? I remember the flurry of e-crushes that flew like snowflakes during freshman year. Jason got a few. I only got one, but I didn't check it out then for the same reason that I won't pursue this one. That reason being that this was probably just some girl making her own list to find her own crush. I'd like to think that a girl crushing on me would find a better way of making such feelings known, like I don't know, telling me. I'm pretty sure she's not one of our fans (but I'm cute, really! :-) ) since the email address of the message was my school account and not kip@kipster.org.

Sigh, there's still a part of me that wants to put in a list, just to see if there is a match. But finally, I know that in the end, the girls I usually crush on would not use such indirect methods. Of course, the girls I usually crush on usually break my heart so I guess watch this space to see what I finally decide.

Which leads me into topic 2 for today's blurb: Scrubs readership. Sil was wondering aloud about the gender ratio of our audience. I was still working off the 1995 impression I had of the Internet, so I said, "I think there are way more men than women, but compared to the Internet in general, we have a better ratio." This prompted a search for gender ratios on google (savior of such questions!) and I turned up up to date reports that women have almost caught up to men in numbers.

So then we talked about Scrubs. Most of the fans who've written in have been men (JittaCat, Kiba, you gals are special). We really have no other indicators of who's looking at our work so we just have to draw conclusions (and we do). So that's the question, really. Does Scrubs only cater to slightly melancholy male computer geeks? During the summer, it was definitely a very male work, but even now, I guess it's still biased.

Anyway, thoughts and comments as always are welcome. Send mail to gender@kipster.org.

The main thing, as usual, is to get people reading. So let people know! Spread the Scrubs love.

Thanks.

That is all.

kip