I watched Dating In The Dark last night, a new show on ABC, and found the premise intriguing. Three girls, three guys meeting each other “in the dark” and choosing their potential partners based on an old-fashioned tradition called “conversation.”  Not e-mailing, not cell phoning, not text messaging, and not face booking, just plain old face-to-face conversation, but without actually seeing the other person’s face.

The big reveals come near the end of the show, when the girls and guys walk out from the shadows and finally get to see each other. Then they decide whether they want to go on a real date.

Physical chemistry is complicated.  When I met Edgar on a flight in 1988 I was attracted to him at first sight and sound. He had snow-white hair, sparkling blue eyes and a hypnotizing Southern drawl.  If I had spent two hours in the dark with him before seeing him, I might have seen a bit of his inner darkness. His looks captivated me for a long time, too long.

I didn’t find David especially attractive when I saw him waiting for me in the diner vestibule in 2002.  We “met” on match.com, talked for at least an hour on the phone and then made the date (I guess you could say we “met” in the dark.) I liked him before we came face to face, so I gave it a chance.  We’re still together and I find him quite attractive.

My case rests.

Diana Nyad, at sixty, looks like a million

David is a fanatical swimmer (six days a week, 75 minutes a day), so he was fascinated to hear that FOF Diana Nyad plans to swim 103 miles from the shores of Cuba to Key West, FL. this month.

A long-distance swimmer, Diana swam around Manhattan in 7 hours and 57 seconds when she was 26, setting a world record. She tried swimming the Cuba-Key West route when she was 29, but was pulled from the hostile seas after swimming for almost two days.

She stopped swimming a year later. Completely stopped. But last summer, right before turning sixty, she went to a little pool and swam for a bit, she said in an interview with The New York Times. Subsequently, she started weight training and doing six-hour “crazy” swims.  She even went to Mexico for a six-and-a-half-hour swim, her first in an ocean. “It was a raging day.  It was cold,” Diana said.

When the reporter asked her why the Cuba swim and why now, Diana answered: “Last summer, I was turning sixty and I was thinking, I don’t want to be sixty. Sixty is old! What happened to my life? What have I done?  Who am I? What have I become? I started thinking I have to be graceful with it, and one of the lessons I’ve never learned well is you can’t undo your past. You’ve just got to learn some lessons from it all and embrace today and move forward.

“Ironically, at the same time I was giving myself this life lesson, I thought to myself, but wait a second. There’s actually something I could go back and do.  I didn’t make it to from Cuba to Florida when I was 29 years old. Could this possibly be in me?”

Although Diana wants to be “the only person to do it,” she says there’s something else. “It’s about showing that sixty is not old. I refuse to be irrelevant at this age.”

You said it, Diana.  We’ll be rooting for you every stroke of the way.

My 83-year-old aunt was diagnosed with Stage IV colorectal cancer almost three years ago and she’s done exceedingly well. Radiation and chemotherapy, not to mention a genius oncologist, helped keep the cancer from taking charge.

Now it appears the cancer is becoming boss. My aunt needs to take strong painkillers all day long, which pretty much knock her out. She stays in bed most of the day. She’s losing weight she can hardly afford to lose. She’s losing blood. She has no appetite. Her blood pressure was 80/40 today.

There’s nothing else that can be done. A blood transfusion would give her some more energy, but it would be temporary.

This is no way to live, as far as I’m concerned, but my aunt has a great will to live. Frankly, I’m pretty sure I’d want to say adieu at this point, but who is really to know unless you are going through such a crisis yourself?

I completely understand why Dr. Kevorkian wanted to help put people out of their misery. I know someone whose father was near death a couple of years ago. Unlike my aunt, this man (he was 96), wanted to die. He even asked his son to help, and his son thought seriously about it. Thankfully, the dad died naturally.

Sickness stinks, no matter how old we are. Sickness without hope is beyond comprehension. But sickness is part of most of our lives and we must, with all our might, not let it devastate us.

She needs to drink more cocoa

Daughter Simone and I had lunch today in Barney’s restaurant and we saw a woman so anorexic that she got tongues wagging at the next table. Her legs were so thin it was hard to believe they could hold up her body, frail as it was. The woman was OF (I’m going to leave off the F in this case.) When we passed her table to leave, she was pecking at her bread, just like a bird.

When I look at my body today, I know that it’s a bit chunky. When I lose a few pounds, I know it’s less chunky. When our stick figure woman looks at her body, she thinks she’s fat. I understand anorexia is a disease but I wonder whether the people who love this woman tell her she looks frightening and try to get her help.

One of my FOF friends is borderline anorexic (remember, I sometimes act like a doctor). She isn’t as dramatically emaciated as the woman I saw today, but still she’s ridiculously thin. I once mentioned to her that she hardly eats and looks anorexic, but she fabricated some excuse, so I knew I was wasting my time–and hers. She’s a pretty woman, but the glow left her face long ago.  She’s pale and drawn. It’s not attractive.

I wish my thighs were thinner and I had a bit less flab around my middle. But I’ll take the way I look over the anorexia any day of the week. It’s not the actual look itself that disturbs me. It’s the mental state behind it.