I miss the days when the popular pick-up line was, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?”

Apparently,… I miss the days when the popular pick-up line was, “Hey baby, what’s your sign?”

Apparently, the only line necessary to hit on someone today is an Ethernet line. Instead of picking up girls in Hemingway’s, Pitt men are staying safe in their rooms, winking at prospective girlfriends via one of the seemingly endless number of Internet personals sites.

I’ve never understood the fascination with finding love online. I prefer the old method: Man sees woman; man thinks woman is attractive; man beats around the bush for six or seven weeks until he gets the nerve to approach woman; finally man asks woman out for coffee.

But now there are pokes and notes, profiles and photos.

Online personals gave a new face to dating. Men and women are already gun-shy when it comes to approaching members of the opposite sex, with low self-esteem and fears of rejection running rampant in many of this generation. Giving an impersonal approach to finding someone to spend Saturday night with not only takes away some of the risk of rejection, but also gives us a chance to be whoever we want to be.

Someone flipping through Match.com’s profiles for 20-somethings in the 15213 zip code would never know that “drinks occasionally” and “trying to quit smoking” really means, “I go to Fuel everyday after my 1 p.m. class and have my name on the bar nine times” and “my bed is in the Ashtray.”

That’s another thing online personals have taken away from dating — the genuine experience of getting to know a person for who they really are, not who they want you to think they are. It’s a lot easier to see through a person’s lies in person than through e-mail or an instant message.

How much can you actually learn about someone from one of these profiles? The whole experience is calculated and rather pointless. Does my favorite sex scene in a movie really make a difference in whether you ask me out or not?

Gone are the butterflies in your stomach when you see that cute guy or girl in your introduction to logic class, trying to come up with a way to talk to them. No, instead you just point and click, winking at whoever you think is cute.

Even worse, in some ways, is speed dating. Never heard of it?

You walk into a restaurant or other meeting place, and engage in several five- to 10-minute “dates” where you get acquainted with your partner, then move on to the next one. I imagine one of these speed dates would go something like this:

“Hi, I’m Daveen, nice to meet you. Yeah, dinner sounds good. What? I love you too. No, I don’t think this is going to work out, have a nice life!”

Not nearly as bad as online dating, but it’s still lacking something.

Call me old-fashioned, but I like to have more than five minutes to get to know someone before I say “yes” to a second date.

Marketed as “pre-dating” and “speed dating for professionals,” the idea is to broaden the pool of people in your dating range. Not a completely bad idea, but aren’t there better, less machine-oriented ways to do this?

Whatever happened to chance meetings, blind dates or even just walking up to someone and introducing yourself?

Is meeting people in Oakland really that difficult that we have to sign up online to find someone we might find interesting or spend six minutes with a dozen different people, hoping one is that special someone? There are hundreds of single men and women on campus, most of whom are looking for love in all the wrong places as well — and all in the same two-mile radius. It’s even simpler than logging on to a computer; it just takes more intestinal fortitude.

The problem with today’s dating scene is that our generation is afraid of taking risks and telling a member of the opposite sex how we feel.

How many opportunities at possible love have you let slip by just because you were too afraid to say something? Deal with it. All the cliches are actually true. But I think Mark Twain said it best: “Why not go out on a limb? After all, that’s where the fruit is!”

So Pitt singles, I urge you to go out on that limb. Delete your Yahoo! Personals accounts. Turn off your computers, go out there and meet someone. Take a chance at love, and maybe it will work out. It might crash and burn too, but you never know. At least not until you try.

Daveen isn’t looking for anything serious right now, but feel free to e-mail her your entire life story with pictures at [email protected].