Am I doing this right? I went to look at some old PHP code w/ MySQL and I've managed to get it to work, however I'm wondering if there's a much "cleaner" and "faster" way of accomplishing this.

First I would need to get the total number of "documents"

$total_documents = $collection->find(array("tags" => $tag, 
        "seeking" => $this->session->userdata('gender'), 
        "gender" => $this->session->userdata('seeking')))->count();

$skip = (int)($docs_per_page * ($page - 1));
$limit = $docs_per_page;
$total_pages = ceil($total_documents / $limit);

// Query to populate array so I can display with pagination

$data['result'] = $collection->find(array("tags" => $tag, 
        "seeking" => $this->session->userdata('gender'), 
        "gender" => $this->session->userdata('seeking')))->limit($limit)->skip($skip)->sort(array("_id" => -1));

My question is, can I run the query in one shot? I'm basically running the same query twice, except the second time I'm passing the value to skip between records.