Progress Report #2

First phone call with Triathlete:

• Length: 2 minutes, 30 seconds
• Awkward pauses: 3
• Dates arranged: 1

First phone call with Shawshank:

• Length: 1 hour, 25 minutes
• Awkward pauses: 0
• Dates arranged: sort of still working on that, but if things work out, we've settled on at least 7 things we wouldn't mind doing together.
  

First phone call with Military Man:

• Oh, shoot, I need to call him.

Progress Report #1

First, thank you all for your support (vicarious or otherwise) of my online dating experiment. I’ve rounded out Weeks Two and Three with messages from 18 different people in my inbox, and somewhere around 60 profile views.

Of the 18 people I’ve had contact with, most of them approached me, although I did send “Icebreakers” to 6 of them. Here’s how Yahoo works: with a free account, you can set up a profile and photo(s), browse other people’s profiles, and search for matches. What sets you apart from your full-price counterparts, however, is your limitations for contacting people. With a free account, you cannot send emails in your own words. You can send “Icebreakers” and “Quick Replies,” which are prewritten one-liners that can be unintentionally hilarious (“Tell me more about your kids!”), but they’re generally useless unless the other person is a subscriber and can write back in their own words, or provide information on how to contact each other outside of Yahoo.

A couple of the people who contacted me were subscribers, and they were forward-thinking enough to provide me an email address or a messenger ID (cleverly coded, since Yahoo will automatically censor email addresses if the recipient is not a subscriber…touché, Yahoo), but for the most part, my communications were going nowhere. I got especially frustrated when the more promising candidates hit a dead end. After debating with myself about the principle of paying for something like this (and finding a free seven-day trial coupon code on the internet), I decided to go ahead and fork over the fee for one month (plus the free seven days). If nothing comes of it, I’m out 25 bucks, but in the meantime, I think I have a better chance for success if I’m allowed to form my own sentences.

Candidates thus far have been varied and enlightening. I appear to have been laboring under the false impression that most adults can write at a 7th grade level or above. My mistake.

One of the first people I talked to was that guy that told me my profile rendered him “speachless [sic].” You remember, the guy who thought he was Tobey Maguire? Tobey appears to be reasonably cute from his photograph, but if I were the type to make snap judgments based on a single IM conversation, I would place his IQ roughly equal to that of a tetherball. It turns out I am that type.

It was the most boring and stilted IM conversation since the creation of the internet. Aside from the lapses in substance, there was also a conspicuous lack of pronouns and I kept waiting for him to tell me the story of how he lost his shift key. He used some variation of “u” (instead of “you”) at least 8 times in the space of 20 minutes, and that includes the rather creative use of “urs” (in place of “yours”). Somewhere in the world, a grammar teacher cried out in her sleep.

I can look past poor writing skills, though, if the person is interesting or easy to talk to. Sadly for Tobey Maguire, he is neither interesting nor easy to talk to. We had never spoken to each other before, so it caught me off guard when he said, “anything new with you?” Since when? The beginning of time? We’ve never met. I wouldn’t have been so hard on him for this, but he then pulled out that gem TWO MORE TIMES during that same conversation, and I ran out of ways to answer without sounding like I was making fun of him.

At one point, the conversation teetered on interesting, but the poor guy kept inexplicably misplacing his momentum:

Tobey Maguire: “well, lets see born in germany and moved around alot, father was in the army”
Meldraw: “Germany, no kidding! How long were you there?”
TM: “for 2 years then another 6”

[pause]

M: “So…8 years?”
TM: “thats about it”

[pause]

M: “Ah.”

Later, I tried to wrestle the conversation into something—anything—that Tobey Maguire might like to expound on with more than four words:

M: “So what other things do you like?”
TM: “walking, swimming, hanging out with friends – if they ever show up, chatting, walking”
M: “If they ever show up?”
TM: “they say they will come and then never show up”

[pause]

TM: “I know great friends”
M: “I guess!”
TM: “howabout u”
M: “My friends usually come when I ask them.”

Too soon? He seemed to get the joke, but it’s hard to tell with him. If you can imagine. Meanwhile, he really likes walking.

In other news, I know some of you were rooting for Mushroom Guy. Unfortunately, he’s probably not a viable candidate. His mushroom-revolution message was kind, but he is older than I’m looking for and is a widower with three kids. I just…can’t go there right now.

Coal Miner’s Cleaner (another commenter favorite) is also not particularly appealing to me, mostly because his tone was arrogant and abrasive. Also, his profile says (among other things): “Nothing is more relaxing than your friends laughing at you because I know that it will come back on them real quick.” Which, if I can parse that sentence, makes him sound a little like a sociopath.

Then there was Chatspeak Guy. As it turns out, his chatspeak was not intentionally ironic, so when I said he was either really funny or kind of an ass, I was only half right.

His unremarkable email took a dicey turn when it became a rant about women who lie about their weight or post old pictures of themselves on their profiles. He went on to describe in great detail a date he went on where he was surprised to see that the woman who answered the door ended up being 300 pounds and not as cute as her picture. He used the words “sooo gross” and I immediately felt offended. I mean, I hate it too, when people lie on their profiles or are intentionally deceiving, but that didn’t seem like his point. The way he talked about her weight and appearance as if it somehow made her less of a person completely put me off. Plus, who talks about things like that in their FIRST EMAIL EVER? He should know by now that you can’t impress a woman by talking derisively about another woman’s weight. We’re hardwired to cut you when you bring up weight. My favorite line was this: “So me being a nice guy I didn't just run and still took her out.” What a gentleman. Somebody knight this prick.

Finally, after waxing not-so-poetic about people who post old pictures on their profiles? He says, “I'd luv to hear from ya again and since I was complaining about outdated pics...mine on yahoo is a lil old. I've got some recent pics on myspace if you use that. just search for [Chatspeak Guy].” So I did. And according to his picture on mySpace, he is both older and fatter than his picture on Yahoo would lead me to believe. Hypocrisy? Table for one?

He emailed me yesterday (after not hearing from me for five days) and asked if he offended me. I don’t really know what to say.

For all of those poor candidates, though, there are also a few promising ones. I’m speaking to one Military Man, an aeronautics engineer who seems normal enough and is returning from Guam on Monday. There’s also Triathlete, who is both literate and kind, and assures me that his closet is completely empty of skeletons. (I hope I didn’t scare him when, after he told me he’s an electrical applications engineer, I asked what that meant by saying, “Please tell me you build robots.”) Emails to Military Man and Triathlete are still in progress.

My hopes lie with two strong front-runners, though:

A funny, smart, and grammatically pristine guy from Lincoln has wholly caught my interest. He contacted me a couple of days ago, and we’ve already traded witty and impressive emails. His profile sparked my interest (“I'm tired of being used for my massive biceps, endless pocketbook and my seasons one, two, and three DVD box set of the Gilmore Girls. Alright, I was trying to sound too cool. I don't have any of those things”), but when his first email opened with the general agreement that chatspeak should be illegal over the age of 12 (“…no, 10”) and that one of his biggest pet peeves is the use of bad grammar, my heart sang a little.

His first email to me was engrossing and fun and filled with all the right things. He was enthusiastic but not stalker-ish, and he not only appreciated my sense of humor, but shared it. He seemed both interesting and interested. Rock! Then he informed me of his profession: Correctional Officer at the Nebraska State Penitentiary.

I am not even f***ing kidding.

And he loves it. That’s scary, right? He seems totally normal and level-headed about it, though, so I am going to proceed with the benefit of the doubt. And so, I dub him Shawshank.

My other strong candidate, Easily Impressible Guy, contacted me last night for the first time, so I have little to go on at the moment. But he, too, seems funny and smart and writes pretty sentences. He’s playing a clever flattery card: he started his message by saying that I’m the one who inspired him to subscribe, and he was apparently blown away by my “midnight in the park” thing. That bit of sycophancy aside, he does seem to be creative and interesting, so we’ll see what happens there.

I appear to have a full plate. Which…was unexpected.

Getting Personal

I really never thought I’d find myself here.

I blame peer pressure. More specifically, I blame my friend JKeg, and I blame her hard. She managed to wrangle me into something that others have tried and failed to get me into for a long time: online dating.

The idea of online dating is not appealing to me. I guess the concept is an old one, since personal ads have been appearing in newspapers for decades. But my generation grew up watching after-school specials (and later, Lifetime movies) that made it very clear: the interweb is populated entirely with nasty, middle-aged, greasily mulleted, psychopathic men with handlebar mustaches pretending to be young kids so that they can scam their way into an assault charge.

Those ominous warnings about revealing any personal information on the internet have stuck with me; I don’t attach my real name or email to this blog partly because I want to remain a woman of mystery and intrigue, but mostly because I don’t want to be chopped up and put in somebody’s freezer. It’s a superficial sort of wariness, though, because I know perfectly well how easy it is to attain information on the web, and if someone wanted to find me, it would be a rather short distance from A to B.

I’m also aware that the use of the internet is now so widespread and ingrained in our culture that the audience has been diluted: more often than not, people are here for legitimate reasons. Not always, but odds are better than they used to be. (Unless you are Dateline, NBC.) Online communities are huge these days; I’ve met some extremely close friends on the internet (as weird as that still is for me to wrap my head around), and if you’re smart about it, you can usually avoid the sharks in the water.

All of this is to say that I recognize the problems inherent in online dating. There are creeps. There are nerds. There’s potential for murder. More importantly, however, opting to find a date through an online service makes me feel desperate. It makes me look around at my social life and say, “It’s come to this?”

Oddly, while I’m looking around at said social life, I realize with a shock that a lot of my friends are taking the same action, seemingly without a trace of desperation. I didn’t realize how many of my friends’ dates had been arranged through eHarmony or Yahoo! Personals or Match.com. It’s become a legitimate branch of the dating community, like going to a bar or fixing up a friend on a blind date.

It was JKeg that finally pushed me past my hesitation, though. We had gone to the movies for a Girls’ Night, and then stopped at a diner for some dessert and a heart-to-heart. She systematically weakened my resolve with pie and stories of how she met her fiancé on Yahoo Personals, and then when I was at my weakest she demanded that we return to my apartment that very minute and get me signed up for Yahoo. It was free, she said, and would be totally great! She ambushed me.

We did go back to my apartment, and we did set up a shiny new profile. I let JKeg steer me through the questionnaires, looking at her uncertainly every time I had to arbitrarily choose the features of my “ideal match.” This was online shopping at its most surreal. I felt like I was ordering shoes. Does anyone seriously have a preference for their date’s eye color?

When it was done, I had a profile and a picture (which I assume will be printed on my box if I am ever sold as an action figure), and we sat back and looked at each other. JKeg declared her work to be done and went home to her fiancé. I looked at my computer screen and wondered what I was doing. Then I clicked on the tempting little button that said “See Your Matches!” and was rewarded with a Sears-Roebuck catalogue of single people in Omaha smiling back at me. As I flipped through their profiles, I smiled.

Why not?

I’ve decided to shelve my pride and give it a shot. I have a couple of motivations: First, my dating record sucks. I can only go upward. Second, even if things don’t work out, it’s possible I’ll end up with a few extra friends that I wouldn’t have met otherwise. Third, if things really go badly, I’ll have a lot of blog material. This could be my Odyssey. My Journey to the Center of the Earth. My Men Are From Mars.

So, readers, you’re in this with me. You’re my justification for having nothing to lose. I’ll keep you updated if you allow me to fall back on the delusion that I’m a plucky undercover journalist when things don’t go well. Deal?


The Beginning:

The following is from my profile—the part where Yahoo told me to describe “Me and My Ideal Match” in 200 words or less:

Me:
I am a photographer, designer, and sometimes-writer. I train horses and own two cats who both need shrinks. I’m not scared of rats or snakes, but I could do without bees or drive-thru bank tellers. I value humor, intelligence, honesty, and selflessness. My movie tastes are fairly broad: I get a little antsy with war films and I can’t really get behind the Scary Movie franchise, but otherwise I could spend three weeks in a movie theater surviving on nothing but popcorn and Diet Dr Pepper. I am a limited cook and kill plants easily, but otherwise am very competent. I spend a little too much time with my TiVo and not enough time with my paycheck.

You:
You don’t write in “chat speak” or substitute numbers for words. You listen to and appreciate the opinions of others. You don’t mind that I hate mushrooms. You’re clean, and you’re patient, and you haven’t lied on your profile. You think it’s romantic to meet at midnight in the park. (In the classically romantic way, not the Jack The Ripper way.) (Also, not the “bring me $1,000,000 in unmarked bills” way.)

Also, you laugh at my jokes.

It has been posted for a week and Yahoo tells me that it has been viewed by 27 men. I have received 9 messages. Assuming this is an accurate sample, that means that roughly 1/3 of single Omahans would like to buy me dinner, or at least start up a conversation. I have no reason to doubt my math.

I haven’t responded to anybody yet, but I intend to do so tonight or tomorrow. A couple of the messages have been laughable, a couple have been interesting, and a couple I’m on the fence about. At least one is from a widower, and I’d be lying if I said that didn’t freak me out a little. One man declared himself “speachless [sic]” upon reading my profile. Of course, this man also said in his own profile that he has “been called Tobey Maguire a few times,” so he may just be confused. I don’t really see the resemblance in his photo.

One especially intriguing message opened with “I work for a company that cleans burnt coal from power plants,” and proceeded to enlighten me on the company’s busy times of year, the hazards of working with water in subzero climates, and the state of his salary.

One guy with a very nice picture sent me a message filled with chatspeak (“Hi [Meldraw], I thought u were cute so I just thought I’d drop ya a line. I’d luv to get to know ya if ur interested…”). He didn’t appear to have written that way throughout his profile, just in my message, so I can’t tell if he was doing it intentionally as a response to my chatspeak admonition. If he was, then he’s either really funny, or kind of an ass. If he wasn’t, well, he writes in chatspeak.

Two guys who sent messages are weight-lifters (seriously?), another one has “I’ll Tell You Later” listed as his marital status, and one is rejoicing that there is another mushroom-hater in the world. One guy accidentally misinterpreted my profile and thinks I am a yoooge fan of war films and I don’t quite know how to burst his bubble.

So I have a lot of homework. I haven’t decided who I will and won’t respond to, but I need to make a decision soon. I also should probably contact a couple of people of my own accord. For now, though, I’m kind of enjoying being a semi-invisible online shopper.

It’s the follow-through that’s going to be tough.

...and by "guidance," we mean "smackdown."

Apparently, my blog is rated PG (Parental Guidance Suggested). This rating was based on the presence of the word “dead,” appearing exactly one time in the space of whatever writing sample they examined.

Huh.

I’m pretty sure I’ve said worse things on this blog than that. Did I get this rating because lately I’ve started using asterisks (***) in place of real, live swear words, because of that one time my mother totally canned me for using inappropriate language?

Oooooooh. That’s what they mean by “parental guidance.”

Meldraw’s Five Tips for Daily Living

1. Never go to the Humane Society on your lunch break.
No good can come of it. At best, you come away liking the human race a whole lot less. At worst, you wind up falling frantically in love with an irresistible face still filled with fuzzy innocence despite exposure to the worst of humanity. Finding yourself in this heartbreaking position presents you with only two choices: a) look into those sad eyes, pleading at you with diminishing hope from a tiny glass prison, and walk away with a new guilt complex; or b) take him home, cat lady.

Let’s say you just want to donate some stuff. Maybe you have some milk replacement formula for kittens (from when your youngest cat adopted you, still a little bit too young) and an assortment of birdcage equipment (from when you tried desperately to keep your grandmother’s canary alive after your grandmother died, and failed). My advice to you is to just drop these things off at the donations desk and WALK OUT. If you see a few cute kittens in the window and notice that you have a few minutes left to kill on your lunch break, GO THE OTHER WAY.

2. It’s 2007. Speak like it.
The English language is in an admittedly precarious state right now. UrbanDictionary.com informs us that words are being reused, recycled, and repurposed for all sorts of dubious reasons—sometimes we should embrace them, sometimes we should not. (I’m greatly amused by the term “iPerbole,” for example, to describe the inexplicable hype surrounding new Apple products, and I continue to use the term “yoink” to mean “a transference of ownership from one person to another,” even though I know it’s a ridiculous word, because I simply cannot find a more concise way to describe a “delightfully light-hearted theft.”) English is a fairly elastic language; one might effectively create one’s own words or play with grammatical format for comic effect or to simply pinpoint an exact feeling that doesn’t quite have a label yet.

But while vernacular evolution is to be expected and even encouraged, we generally do not pull antiquated turns of phrase back into the mainstream. Retro is one thing—medieval role-playing is another. It’s annoying and unnecessary, and truthfully, a little geeky. The contractions “ ‘Twas” and “ ‘tis” are so over. “Methinks,” while occasionally successful as an ironic aside, should not be used in daily conversation unless you are an Elizabethan playwright or a pirate. A good rule of thumb is: if you can’t speak the phrase aloud in a sentence without the aid of full period dress, find a thesaurus.

3. When lighting a propane grill, start the flame on your lighter before you turn on the gas.
Otherwise, during the five seconds it takes you to realize that your lighter won’t start when it’s being smothered by gas, pull the lighter out, light it, and shove it back in there, a small but kickin’ gas cloud will have collected, which will then become a fireball, which will then remove all of your arm hair.

4. Guys, if you want to buy a girl a drink, make sure the bartender is paying attention.
Bartenders work fast, and it may be that he has already taken her debit card from her. He may be only half-listening when you tell him to put her drink on your tab, and then he may disappear with her debit card, without taking your own. When he comes back with a bill for her, she may find herself paying not only for her own frozen margarita, but also your Bloody Mary with your side of potstickers, and you may find yourself with no cash, and…awkward.

This might, however, be an excellent opportunity for you to offer to take her out later to “make up for it.” My advice to you would be to go ahead and make that offer, instead of leaving her feeling like the First National Bank. A First National Bank without a date.

5. A lab coat does not give a person medical authority.
Witness: the Clinique counter. If you know you are allergic to Benzoil Peroxide, do not let these ladies in white coats tell you otherwise. They work on commission, and they prey on insecurities. They’ve mastered that careful study of your face as they inspect your skin, followed by a perfectly calibrated “huh” that makes three things very clear: a) they think you’re very brave for having walked around with your features all your life, b) they’re trying to be polite about how to break your flaws to you, and c) they know exactly how to fix you, and may they show you some revolutionary new products?

Now, they may actually be able to help you, because Clinique products are pretty good. But you should draw the line at letting them convince you that there is “so little” Benzoil Peroxide in a particular cream that your allergy will magically disappear. It won’t. And you’ll just have spent $36 investing in a way to make yourself miserable the next day, when you’ll want go all Face/Off and leave your skin in the freezer for the afternoon.

Luckily, the lab coats do bring a 100% satisfaction guarantee, so you can return the stuff and get your money back. Just be careful going back to that counter, because they’re going to look very closely at you again.