Archive for the 'I will die alone eaten by my pets' Category

Oy.

Published at April 25, 2008 in Aging gracefully or not, Get offa my lawn and I will die alone eaten by my pets. 4 Comments

So tonight, I’m walking down First Avenue in the East Village on my way to dinner, and I pass Lanza’s restaurant. “Oh,” I say to myself. “Lanza’s. That’s where I had my first date after I moved to New York.” My date was Bill, whom I met through the Village Voice personals, back when the ads were in print and you either wrote a physical letter* or called a voice mailbox (which I think is what I did). I dated Bill for a while after that, though he turned out to be a Nice Guy™ and put me on a pedestal. He also gaslighted me, which was a lot of fun.

And then I start thinking about Bill, and about how long ago that first date was, and it suddenly hits me: Bill is 53 now.  I dated a man who’s now 53.

Which makes the fact that I’ve rejected several guys from OKCupid out of hand for being over 50 somewhat ironic.  Well, if by “ironic,” I mean, “indicative of not quite coming to terms with my own age.”

____________

* In my first job out of college, I worked at a newspaper in Connecticut.  One guy there had previously worked for the Springfield Advocate, which is not associated with the gay paper, but is part of a chain of alt-weeklies in Southern New England.  He said that one of the traditional things to do at someone’s goodbye lunch was to take the box of unclaimed mail from the personals and make the person read the letters out loud.  I’m kind of glad that technological advances have made this particular ritual obsolete.

And to make myself feel even older, I remembered that the daughter of another one of my coworkers, whom I used to babysit for extra cash, is now old enough to be starting college this year.

Throwing in the towel

Published at February 18, 2008 in I will die alone eaten by my pets. 4 Comments

I think I’m done with OK Cupid. Things haven’t really gotten much better since I first signed on, and I just got favorited by yet ANOTHER “gosh, that “available” status designation probably means you’re married yet you don’t say a damn thing about it in your profile and will undoubtedly get pissy when I call you on it” guy. I’ve had a couple of interesting conversations with a couple of interesting guys, but one of two things happens: either they just stop communicating (even though I can see that they’re on the site and/or looking at my profile), or one of us generates a “WTF report” (which compares your responses to the questions to his, and shows where your answers and the answers you want to see compare to his, and what he wants to see) and have not been pleased with the results. And when I say “I have not been pleased with the results,” I mean that the guy has said that being overweight or gaining weight is a dealbreaker, or he thinks racist jokes are A-OK, or he’d rape someone if he could get away with it. Or he just refuses to cough up a picture, even after several email exchanges.

The first time this happened, I’d had a number of really great emails and chats with the guy, and we were discussing meeting.  Then I did the WTF report, and he had answered just about every weight-related question with a great big “NO FAT CHICKS;” being even slightly overweight was a dealbreaker for him.  From his email to me after I’d gotten the report:

I just scanned the WTF report. For the most part, the differences are all simply great conversation fodder. The area you’re likely to find potentially concerning are my answers to weight and weight gain. I’ve had relationships with women who were not slender like me. And more than a few. The reasons I came out so strongly “anti large” in my profile was to, obviously, increase the match percentage with women closer to my size, not because i cannot be very attracted to a large woman, but because as a cyclist and woods walker, i would love to share “active time” with an intimate friend.

i’m much more concerned with a woman’s openness to my marital situation, her stance on drug use (i’m pretty hard core “no!”,) her sexual openness, and that her IQ being at least a few ticks higher than my own.

don’t know if that clarifies or fogs.

sometimes i find myself answering OKC’s questions knowing that i’m *trying* to manipulate a result.

i wonder if that’s a guy thing.

I dunno about the rest of you, but I consider being told that I’m presumptively disgusting but that someone might deign to fuck me anyway to be the end of a conversation, not a beginning.  And as for the other answers being “great conversation fodder,” this was a guy who answers indicated that he thought no meant yes; that he liked racist jokes; that he thought racism was okay; that he doesn’t vote; and that he believed in creationism.

As soon as I saw the report (and even before I got this email, which crossed with mine), I wrote him and said that if weight was a dealbreaker, he could consider the deal broken.

And that’s happened more often than not when I or the guy generates one of these reports.  If it doesn’t, then the communication just stops.  Or gets weird.

Maybe the universe is trying to tell me something, and that is: having a relationship is Not For Me.

Small world, part deux

Published at February 17, 2008 in I will die alone eaten by my pets. 1 Comment

So I’m out in Park Slope this morning, killing time while my open house is going on, and I’m standing in front of a realtor’s window, looking at the listings, when I hear my name being called.

And I look, and it’s a guy that I dated about four years ago. There was a certain amount of dwama with him, given that he didn’t have a cell, but he didn’t want me to call him at home because his “roommate” might be jealous since she was interested in him, and he was on her lease and could get kicked out, but at the same time he wouldn’t call me from a non-blocked number, even though he knew that I don’t pick up restricted or unavailable calls.

I mean, he was a great guy, but all that business really bothered me. I did enjoy spending time with him (we even wound up in Greenwood Cemetery on one date, when we were out for a walk and just sort of ran into it and decided to go in. It’s actually a really cool place), but the one-way flow of communication was just annoying. So eventually I stopped trying to return his calls.

And I haven’t really thought about him much in all that time, but there he was. We chatted; he mentioned he’d gotten into the pre-med program he’d wanted to get into back then; he mentioned that one of his dogs had died of bloat; he showed me a photo (on his cell phone) of his visit to the riding stables in my neighborhood; he mentioned he’d just been thinking of me.

Which was great, and all, but for the life of me, I can’t remember his name.

Small world

Published at February 10, 2008 in I will die alone eaten by my pets. 6 Comments

I went on a date last night with a guy who, as it turned out, had wrestled against my brother in high school.

Kind of a weird feeling.

Another one!

Published at January 6, 2008 in I will die alone eaten by my pets. 5 Comments

No, seriously. What is up with all the partnered polyamorous guys on OK Cupid?

Is this because of my score on the Slut test?

This is an unexpected development

Published at January 1, 2008 in I will die alone eaten by my pets and Vanity. 11 Comments

Probably fully half of the men who’ve sent me actual emails on OK Cupid (as opposed to woos or adding me to their Favorites list) have been married polyamorous guys.

I’m not opposed to such an arrangement on principle (I certainly think that if you can do the emotional work and be really honest, it’s healthy to acknowledge that you probably shouldn’t be relying on one person for all your needs), but I’m really in the market for a primary relationship. And a guy who’s already married isn’t going to be quite as available as I’d like.

Sigh.

Welcome to the wonderful world of dating!

Published at December 22, 2007 in I will die alone eaten by my pets, Anxious masculinity, Vanity and Dipshittery. 20 Comments

Or, why Zuzu prefers to scratch the itch without getting emotionally involved at this point.

After reading some of the responses to this guest-post by Linnaeus over at Feministe, I decided that I’d give OK Cupid a try. It’s been a while since I’ve done any real online dating-dating, at least not since Nerve went from a buy-credits-to-send-emails model to a per-month-charge model, along with a really ugly site redesign. And since I don’t really get out all that much anymore, I’m not meeting a whole lot of men through activities (yes, I need to change that, for reasons apart from meeting men. I’m working on it). Mostly, I’ve been on, ahem, “alternative” personals sites for the aforementioned itch-scratching, but that’s been hit or miss, too. But at least there are no illusions, and few games, because everyone knows what you’re there for. Not that it keeps some guys from freaking out anyway, but that’s not my problem.

Anyway, for various reasons, I’m looking for a little something more. So in goes the toe.

I signed up Thursday, my profile got approved Friday, and I began filling it out and answering questions this morning. The first email I got was while I was still filling out the profile, and asked me why no picture. Had I known how that one would end up, I’d have ended it right there. But more about him later. Continue reading ‘Welcome to the wonderful world of dating!’

You know…

Published at December 13, 2007 in I will die alone eaten by my pets, Vanity and Dipshittery. 7 Comments

If you put up an ad on an online personals website, and you have an SO, the ethical thing to do is to disclose the fact that you have an SO, either in the ad or during the email exchange prior to the first meeting. 

Not to, you know, drop it casually during the first date and then get huffy about how it shouldn’t really matter because it isn’t really serious even though we live together, and anyway, you never asked.

Also not cool: the “Now that you mention it” disclosure about an SO when a potential date is telling you about the failure of another date to disclose an SO, coupled with the insistence that I said so in my ad! even though the only hint as to the existence of such a person is that ”Prefer not to say” is given as marital status.  Which is the default option.