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This Time, It's Personal

May 27, 2003 - 10:17 p.m.

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Last Five Entries:
The Party's Over
July 11, 2004
The Next Day
2004-03-31
My Nervous Breakdown
2004-03-30
True Confessions: My Life as a Female Impersonator
March 15, 2004
Bite Me
February 29, 2004

Contact:

athermosforyou
(at)
yahoo.com

Have you missed me?

Sometimes the brain works, and sometimes it doesn't. I actually have two partially completed diary entries that I haven't finished. But when the brain isn't working, I think it's best not to post. You may or may not gain the benefit of my thoughts on what Jayson Blair means to diversity, and my spin on nice guy rage. Those topics are tabled at the moment.

So what have I been doing? Almost nothing. Mainly being a vegetable. Off-time is bad for me. I have three unstructured months in which I could be flexing my intellectual muscle to solve world crises, and instead I've been sleeping late and watching television. I've made an occasional attempt to further two short stories on which I have been working, but the imagination just hasn't been there.

Speaking of lack of imagination, I decided to do this online personal ad thing again. My old ad managed to remain posted despite my lack of activity in the matchmaking service (the wonders of automatic charges to the credit card). One person actually responded to my ad about eight months ago, and I just read the response. And I replied. What the heck? An eight-month reply lag is a conversation starter.

My old ad is awful. My sense of humor must have changed over the eighteen months since I posted it. My picture is bad too. It's a five-year-old picture from when I went to the Grand Canyon. I liked it when I posted it, because the shot was taken from far enough away that you can see me well enough to determine that I have no obvious physical deformities, but you can't determine how truly physically unattractive I am. But looking at it now, it just looks vague, as if I'm trying to hide something. Posting my driver's license picture would have been more helpful. Okay, you get to see the lousy personal ad picture below (since I'm told that web logs without pictures are uncool, and at least my name isn't associated with it).

Personal Ad Picture

So far I responded to two ads, and I have received one reply. The reply is impressive in the sense that it has perfect grammar and good vocabulary. To me, that is the most impressive thing that can happen in the online personal ad banter. Online personal ads are such an unnatural way of starting any interaction that I think it's useless to over-analyze content. She and I do share two things in common, in that we both write short stories, and we are both getting continuing education for a career change. Having things in common is always a positive. She also worked in an accent mark with the word "clich�." She's a pro.

On the other hand, the question becomes, if she's smart and good-looking (her picture would indicate that latter), why is she single? That is the burning question.

Now I have to reply to her reply. I'm under pressure to be witty, of course. I hate that kind of pressure. What I would really like to write is this:

Listen, you and I both obviously have nothing better to do if we are posting personal ads. Instead of continuing the unnatural online banter, why don't we just meet in a public place for an hour and determine whether we like real interaction? The worst than can happen is that each of us will waste an hour that was probably already wasted for us anyway.

Of course, I know the polite thing to do is to avoid the topic of what drives us to use online personal ads in the first place. (And if you ever ask someone why they are using online personal ads, the usual response is: I'm not into the bar scene.)

I'll keep you up-to-date, because I know you care.

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