Tuesday, May 20, 2008

I was off key, a little sharp

I decided after three months not to renew my subscription to one of the very popular paid online dating sites (VPPODS). This is my last week there and today I decided to clean house. I took down most of my pictures. Left a little message on my profile and closed communication in its various stages with some dudes.

It might appear to the outside observer and most of my friends that I was not taking the process seriously. And in a sense this is both true and not. I did sincerely try to think about the questions that were asked of me and answer them honestly. I had considered offering up some of my excruciating attempts at serious, sincere, self-expression but I will spare you the nitty details.

I spent hours and hours pressed up against the computer screen looking for something. Looking for a sign of life, of heart, of humor, of vitality, a spark, recognition of singularity. It's my excuse for not blogging. (as if one was needed)

To begin, I answered the question: what are you most passionate about?

"Learning new things, being exposed to new ideas, making connections. The point at which you gain a deep understanding of a person or an idea or a process. Situations and relationships that liberate and empower people and individuals. Live music."


Pretty vague, eh? As I thought about this, I realized that of late, passion and inspiration have been lacking from my day to day. I don't have an all-consuming passion in my life. It seemed somehow dishonest to leave my profile as it was. So I changed it to:

"I am most passionate about lunch. I get an irrepressible yearning for it every day."

Which is true. Everyday, I think about lunch all morning. I don't stop thinking about it until I have it. And the next day the process begins anew.

I explained myself this way:
"Most of the multiple choice boxes don't seem to express anything that I would say to describe myself or anyone else. My job is the thing that takes up most of my time but it is not who I consider myself to be. Who am I? I am a petal in the palm of the universe. Who are you?"

The profiles on VPPODS, my own included, made me think of that line from the Smiths (this reused from my myspace):

"You shut your mouth
How can you say
I've gone about things the wrong way
I am human and I need to be loved
Just like everybody else does"
- The Smiths



We all do. And there's nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with the need to love and be loved. There is nothing wrong with feeling lonely and admitting to that fact. Somedays, New York feels like the loneliest of places. But it can happen anywhere, even in a big crowded room.


Today, I spoke with a fella who believes that sex is like glue. Having it binds to people together emotionally. He thought that you needed to be careful about sex because you might get stuck to the wrong kind of person and when the glue wore off you would be really stuck.

Not always, but yes, sex often does facilitate emotional attachment. There are chemicals in the brain that help facilitate this.

Upon later reflection, the glue analogy strikes a chord with me because for months and months I've felt like I am meeting people but they don't make an impression on me. They don't stick. I have become teflon or rubber and someone else in the room has figured out how to be glue. It goes both ways. I'm pretty sure that I am not inspiring all that much gluey-ness in others. When I meet someone I want to get sticky with they can't get away from me fast enough. (Okay maybe my concept of glue is a bit different from his, but you know what I mean, right? Right?)

Sometimes even sex is not enough to make a connection sticky. And in this city, there are so many forces at work to pull two people apart.

To find someone who sticks, would be amazing. To find someone who could be the cheese to my macaroni. Yeah.

So as part of cleaning house today I put up this:
"The course of true love never did run smooth..."
This little black cloud in a dress is letting her subscription run out this week. For the usual reasons: match never responded to my request for communication, I'm taking a break from dating, I'm just not ready to take the next step, I think the distance between us is too great, I think the difference in our ages is too great, the dog ate my homework, I've fallen and I can't get up, I've got an early squash game, I am allergic to the phone, and the ever popular - Other.

Take care of yourself and good luck in your search.


I'm relieved to be off the site. But also sad. It was a hopeful thing to do. And it was fun to get all that email from the VPPODS and the dudes who hang out there.

But here I am again in the regular world. Itching for a reason the throw my heart out ahead of myself, not knowing if I can beat the throw and run fast enough to catch up to it. But maybe it's not about having a reason. Maybe it's about doing it and coming up with that reason as you try to beat the throw.

Maybe the first step is to seek passion and inspiration.

Sunday, May 18, 2008

sunday girl talk, out of context

A: "Please don't tell me that he has a small uncircumcised penis."

B: "Oh, I don't know. I never asked him."

Friday, May 16, 2008

Love and looks are not enough

Today I ran across an article about animal shelters that are giving cats and humans personality tests to try to determine compatibility before adoption. When looking for a life companion, looks are not the only thing that matters.

What a great idea. I hope it works better in interspecies relations than it does on certain online dating sites.

If it does, I might start carrying a stopwatch and monitoring a man's noises and blink rate as indicators of sociability.

Thursday, May 15, 2008

Meme via MomVee

The instructions: Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a Memoir in Books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a Novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
Frankenstein (Mary Shelley, right?)
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible
1984
Angels & Demons
Inferno
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a Memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-Present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-5
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake
Collapse : How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a True Account of a Multiple Murder and its Consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield

Lessons learned from doing this meme?

I have the attention span of an gnat. How is it that I so rarely finish the books that I pick up to read?

I apparently also have the memory of a goldfish. I have this feel that I have actually read a few of the italicized books ... I just can't remember.

And apparently I went to the kind of schools that never assigned books to be read. *blush*

hypnotized by food

me: Oh man, I want fried chicken soooo bad

CK: yeah? HA!!!!

me: I'm getting the shakes over it. *url for Korean fried chicken shack.* The website is for shit but the food looks like chicken

CK: That's always a good thing to say about food: looks like chicken

Wednesday, May 14, 2008

A Resume Builder

Today, folks at work remarked on the skill with which I uncork champagne bottles.

Remove foil and wire.
Point the bottle away from yourself and other living things.
Grab the cork so that the top of the cork is nestled in the palm of your hand.
Slowly twist it up and out.

It ain't no thang.

Monday, May 12, 2008

What the world needs now

is more synchronized cycling.

May is NYC bike month. Wherever you are, get thee some pedals to push and a helmet and ride ride ride!

Tuesday, May 06, 2008

Starts and Stops - Seis de Mayo Resolutions

Last night was my first Cinco de Mayo outing. For whatever reason this is the first year that I have gotten around to it. And it was instructional.

I woke up today with a throbbing head and a queasy belly and a list of resolutions:

Start carrying more cash.
Stop hugging random strangers who are smoking outside of bars.
Start learning to calculate tip and what people owe while inebriated.
Stop using my "outside and trapped in a well" voice, outside at night in the city.
Start refusing free tequila shots from drink reps.
Stop drinking without food.
Start improving my pitcher pouring skills.
Stop sharing my intimate details with people who know those associated with them (the details that is).
Stop tipping cab drivers more than the fare to Brooklyn.

It was stupid, glorious and more than a little painful. Bad for the body yet somehow good for the soul.

Oh, and it turns out that when I talk to cute dudes while hungover, I don't sweat or blush. Of course, I am in too much pain to flirt, but hey, it's a start.

Friday, May 02, 2008

There's something about you, that makes me sweat

How does that first spark feel, when you meet someone? Is it a tickle? A tingle? What does it sound like? A bell? A gong? A full orchestra with piano? The sound of a building crashing down?

When I was in high school, it was nausea. My stomach would drop. The more nauseous I was, the more I suffered, the more I liked the guy. SM made me super nauseous.

A couple of years ago it was trembling. The feeling of a quiver. With SE it was a total quiver.

During my first Mystechs tour I would light up like a lantern and smile really really big.
When I first really spoke with BE I did much the same.

And now? I heat up. I blush and sweat. Profusely. My glasses fog up. Happened over beers with B, happened the other day while talking to C and this evening it happened when I smiled at a guy on the train.

Online profiles don't make me sweat. This should be ideal. I could get to know someone without the embarassment and the flopsweat. But so far this process is sparkless.

So I might have to start running this spring and summer. That way when I meet hot men at the park it won't matter that I am blushing and sweating while chatting them up. They will think it's the run.