Uncanny is human existence and still without a meaning

Well, it's not a terribly interesting admission on the face of it, but I went on a date. Not as uninteresting as it sounds though, when I say I actually wanted to, and still less so when I say I blew it quite roundly.

I talked a bunch of crap, for starters. I don't know what crap, or I'd tell you, but I was so nervous that I ran on at the mouth about anything that came up. Well, not anything, as I at least had very little to say about Fibonacci spirals or stochastic finite-state machines, but don't let that stop you from thinking I'm an idiot.

Additionally, and this shocks me, I drank too much. I don't know how pronounced the visible effects were, but it was no more enjoyable for me during or after than I imagine it was for my companion while I went on about whatever it was I was going on about. I suspect I know why I drank: nerves. And I know why I got loaded from it: I weigh ninety pounds or under and normally don't consume any alcohol, I had nothing in my stomach prior, and there is a reason drunks go for fish and chips and burgers and fries rather than sautéed clams when the bar closes... That is, if they hope to find their way home.

So that was unfortunate. It was more unfortunate the day after, when the physiological effects of alcohol withdrawal commingled torturously with regret, embarrassment, and after-the-fact recalculations of what I might better have said when ____. Adrenaline, clams, and unassuming French reds are a bad, bad combination.

And if it is surprising that I had anxiety or nerves about this rather than merely my usual dread and stalwart pessimism, it was because I thought there was Potential. Which never happens usually so I should have known. But known what? If you have optimism, you don't know anything. That's the point, the beautiful, delicate, feather-soft, unpointy point of it, of looking up at the billowy clouds and the V of geese flying in for the summer and the budding branches softly waving in the sifted sunlight rather than straight ahead at the flaccid, factual mundanity of things. Hope doesn't spring eternal, at least not after the first time a daunting third-grader steals your favorite doll and puts her head in the toilet, but we do at least hold out some expectation that it will visit us from time to time and allow us the fleeting luxury of seeing what we wish to see.

We hope for hope, we have faith in hope, and, as Unamuno asserts, we believe what we hope for. The ingratiating Spaniard also admits that, beauty being the goal of hope, hope is perhaps in its essence irrational (_Tragic Sense_ cheap Dover English Ed., p.205). And, indeed, hope regarding the mundane world does amount at some level to a rejection of reality, or at least a refusal to read the small print on parts of reality from the correct perspective or distance. It is a failure of exegesis, a problem with literacy: if we had our thinking caps on instead of the baseball ones and the correct prescription for our invisible-line bifocals, we'd accept that it's broken, all of it -- and move on.

But we don't, of course. We're stuck here, presbyopia, lisps, stutters, and all. There is nothing to read and nothing to say in this dissolving, insubstantial pageant. And we're big, strong Derrideans or Lacanians or situationists or even deviously retro hardcore structuralists, so we can do what Unamuno couldn't, and eschew eschatology and with it the only real reason for hope, and stare once again from our poorly-upholstered fold-up chair at the proscenium arch in the half-light, crank the pot to 10 on our collective ingenuousness and convince ourselves that we're dying to know if that Ariel gets set free in the end.

Which has very little to do with my date, really, since there were no pretend-shipwrecked actors pretending to be actors in a pretend shipwreck. It was just my date and me, with little distraction from the 'pressure' (what pressure? it was a bloody date, girl, not the Kyoto negotiations!) other than my adrenaline-fueled, disordered thoughts -- and the wine.

But that pressure, I suppose, was the problem. If I could see no potential whatsoever beforehand, I wouldn't go out with someone, so there is no pressure in that case. And if at some point on a first or subsequent date it becomes clear I wouldn't wish to spend another hour with him ever, let alone the rest of my life, involitionally I pull back a bit, relax, and it feels like I'm talking to a friend of my brother's visiting from elsewhere: no risk, no investment, no stress... It doesn't matter, then, that he spends the remainder of our time together droning on about how early he got Microsoft stock or with how many wives he had to suffer inside before he came into his own, listened to himself, trusted himself and his inner voice, and finally accepted his heart's true desire for a Ferrari.

And most men in my purported demographic seem these days to have some kind of 'Ferrari' lurking around. They wear oddly casual clothes either always or at unexpected moments; they decided at the midcentury mark to grow their hair; all presets on their car stereo are rock stations of varying descriptions; they have convertibles, jukeboxes, $5,000 beer dispensers, leopard print, baseball cards, 'flip-flops' beneath their chinos at dinner in restaurants, bubble gum, sports caps for sunscreen, labels, vintages, iPods with Avril Lavigne and Nickleback and Matchbox 20, 'Tuscan' toilets, knockoff watches that can't tell time but do what they're meant to, season tickets, McMansions and McBungalows, plastic and MDF 'craftsman' everything, and soul-sucking careers...

So it should not be surprising or unforgivable if I feel a frisson when someone diverges. When I encounter someone who has read a book from other than the self-help section. Who doesn't once reference the Food Network, the next big arena show he's going to, what he's currently 'listening to' 'inside himself,' how early he got in on Google ( Really, IPO? Wow. You must be ____ --- what, able to listen to the radio, numbskull???) , 'soft jazz,' books about wine, magazines about wine, food intolerances, any business located in a strip mall, and why he doesn't stay at the Sheraton anymore when he is in Paris.

Those whom God wishes to destroy, He first makes angry.

Which naturally brings me to the vast and at times soul-eating downside of Internet dating. True, I don't need to spend four hours with you, or even two seconds with your profile, if what you said in your introductory letter was so insipid as to put me off even oatmeal and soda water for a week. And I stand by the handy listing of facts in many ways: I think seeing 'does not want children ever' in literal black and white makes it seem a bit realer, even (or so I baselessly hope) to the sort of people who seem always to aspire to change their loved ones in significant ways. If one has the sort of goal which ostensibly can only be met by dating, those things about this type of dating are good.

But there is so much more that is unsettling, disturbing, maddening, and wrong. Take stalking, for example. I have been stalked in real life, and I admit that some chucklehead writing me desperate notes wondering if I'm okay because I wrote to him twice before and now haven't returned his letters in over two days! absolutely pales. I am in no danger, for one, which is a big difference, if there ever were one. It is irritation rather than terror, and even I am not cynical or misanthropic -- or passionate -- enough to prefer the latter. But it is extreme irritation, and I am not paying in hopes of receiving even a low-grade variety.

I think at some level perhaps many people unknowingly feel that each email in some way constitutes the equivalent of a discrete conversation in real life. So, if I have written you two, and you have written me nineteen, then we are, or could reasonably be supposed to be, as close as we would be had we met twenty-one times in the physical plane.

Which is patently not so. But email engenders an interpersonal comfort and fluidity that talking to a stranger while waiting for a cab does not. It as well inspires people to reveal things or be more candid (again, even without an in-person meeting) than they would while hitting on chicks in the wine bar. You think we have something we do not. That's scary. Really. Because someone who actually lives on my block and fancies himself to be engaged in a relationship with me of which I am unaware would be considered crazy. Were he to act on it, he would quickly be considered locked up.

Not so online. Not only due to the well-documented and seemingly inherent characteristics of email as a medium, but for other reasons, as well. One is the simple fact, generally ignored, that I and my interlocutor do not, in fact, know each other. You read my words, sure (and that this itself is a charitable assumption I can attest from personal experience), but you give them your own meaning. I am a newfresh electronic tabula rasa, the more rasa the prettier I appear. By even responding with thanks for a compliment I run the risk of 'proving' to you I want to meet you. By my not responding, you become by turns pleading, petulant, accusatory, and apologetic.

And I still don't know you.

But, you want to plead, we've shared so much! In many cases not realizing that it was really you doing the sharing and me the one refusing even to open any more missives from that address. Of course you can't see that, since you're not at my house, as you've never been to my house, since we have never met...

Voted Most Popular

Another aspect that is a definite downside for me and yet I suspect not so much so for others is having a bunch of random people think they like me. In my case, the only people I want to 'like' me are people whom I know and respect and whom I like in return. However, my profile accurately states that I am not overweight and have no children. This, I think, makes me very, very likable.

However, it also accurately says a bunch of other things which one would quite reasonably imagine would scare off nine-tenths of the male dating population -- but no matter, as I also have a picture up, and I'm not ugly, and a picture of an unugly girl trumps all concerns about religion, politics, personal finance, decor schemes, reading choices, musical tastes, medical problems and food allergies. Translated into action, this means you don't have to read my profile then: you just have to know I'm pretty. "'Yes, you've entered my bloodstream, the room, the whole springtime is filled with you'" at that point. Not to mention the lack of 'baggage' represented by the lack of both children and excess weight. You can't bear not to write.

Of course Rilke also said that Beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, but don't let that concern you. It's not Beauty you are after, anyway; it's 'pretty.' It's 'reasonable,' and 'good enough,' and 'companionship' -- not to mention the candlelight, walks on the beach, and 'good times.' And because I am a pretty blank slate, I am the pretty blank slate of your deepest, most deeply prosaic, dreams.

Do not spoil what you have by desiring what you have not.

So Internet dating. It is worse. It is different. The latter is less amusing than the first, so I'll start there.

It is, I admit, different in some ways that do not markedly suck. One convenient aspect is that we both are at least openly owning our desire to find someone. Maybe you just want to 'date,' while I am looking for something heady and deep -- but at least we both know the other is looking for something. This shared knowledge makes first steps far less awkward -- and far more likely to succeed -- than finally acting after months of worshipping from anear the hot blonde in the next office, about whose romantic life you may still know nothing. That part I think is handy.

So, too, do I think the upfrontness of other aspects of it is convenient. If I breed dogs and you hate them, I don't even need to 'talk' to you: I can just read it on your profile page and move on, before being wounded by this damning knowledge long after we've bared our electronic souls. Almost every reasonable 'fact' gets out there, up front, disclosed. Of course there might be lies, but let's assume there aren't: I know you have six kids, you know I am a millwright, you subscribe to Boating World and I make wine. It can sometimes be the details, the minutiae, of everyday life that kills or sustains things in that real life, so having some vague idea from the start as to how this person lives his or her days is not to be dismissed.

But.

On the other hand, we are all so terribly complex. Data don't make a person. And you certainly don't need to share the same, say, reading resume or hobby list, to fall deeplymadlypassionately. Moreover, I can read you off some version of my biography and you still will have no idea of who or what I am. Obviously, culture has its profound effects, but it is not the whole story of what constitutes an individual.

Still, though, I think this deliberateness and candor can act as a helpful filter, and sometimes people who meet first in person do not bother with enough factual information but rather rely on emotional information, which is arguably better turned to later in the relationship, when there is more to go on and a baseline has been set. If there really are things I don't want, such as your six kids, better to know that now than discovering it after I've been smitten with your raffish charm and muzzle-loader collection.

As well, too.

Additionally, it's different because it is cheap and low risk. This is not wholly in the positive column, but there are benefits. It is cheap because you don't even have to pay for a cup of coffee before hard-dropping someone after a series of emails that took a strange or scary turn, and it's low risk because you don't actually know any of these people (well, not usually, and I would hate that). So, if you can manage it, you can cultivate a different set of ethics that doesn't force you to humor fools or spend time with dullards out of a too-expansive sense of politesse. Unlike with acquaintances, friends, or lovers, you can set the exact second of the end of contact. For real, not just in vain hope of it remaining so. (Unless you happen to meet in real life after pushing 'block,' and I would hate that even more.)

It is also cheap because these people really adore coffee shops! Maybe they are all really just alcoholics, and scared that one glass of wine will lead to nine, at which point they will be once more sobbing in the arms of a stranger about the cat and couch they lost in their last ill-starred amour, but more likely it is because it is much easier to figure out how to divide the cost of one Darjeeling and one Oolong than it is a Delmonico, some scallops, an appetizer, a salad, an aperitif, a digestif, and an uneven distribution of glasses of wine. Plus, coffee shops are better lit than romantic restaurants, and the means of egress thus more easy to hold in one's sights.

Silence, Exile, and Cunning

I have aborted many posts and left several others unfinished. This situation is not unlike having a (semiliterate) monkey sitting on my shoulder and intermittently offering up his idiosyncratic editorial suggestions by means of shrieks, cackles, head-batting, and hair-pulling. It is of course absurd, as it is all in my head. Or at least the concern about the monkey is in my head; he is really there. It is simply a matter, therefore, of figuring out how not to notice the shrieks and jabs, and of getting on with a proper rant if that is what I wish to do - whether I fear an articulation of my frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes will be taken not as frustration with domestic distributors of tonka bean absolutes but rather Existential Angst, or not.

Here, then, ladies and gentlemen (and those of you who fall wildly outside the bounds of either category), in an attempt to rid myself its spell, is an explanation of the basis for my recent silence:

You all no doubt remember the exboyfriend: he of the pitying emails; the (misinformedly, but no matter) disparaging or condescending remarks; the absurd nostalgic reminiscences; the inapt, sesquipedalian, purported compliments gleaned through a reckless and foolhardy combination of thesaurus, ignorance, and overconfidence. If you don't, I do, so fret not.

As stated in an earlier post, he brought it to my attention that not only was he in his reading imbuing my posts with a grave, tragic, and positively Dickensian tone or subtext or metatext that they in no way had while still in my cute little brain or on my even cuter little screen, but also scrutinizing the timestamps of the posts for Clues as to my (grave, tragic) state of mind! Now, I admit to getting a cheap kick out of every flight under the radar I can manage, and the cheaper the flight, the headier the kick, so I had already earned some Skybus miles by changing the timestamp to that of various locales when the fancy struck.

But, dear friends, allow me to say that I really hadn't thought anyone would ever look at that. Really. Sure, there was some amount of 'ambiguation' in there, but that was more than balanced by the sheer girlish fun of being able to click on 'Vanuatu.' Not to mention 'Moosejaw.' When is it not fun to click on Moosejaw? And when, in addition, was the last time you, or anyone in your circle, anyone you can think of, noticed the time a posting was posted on any blog? I have read thousands upon thousands of blog entries on topics from politics to perfume to push-up bras to peacock husbandry, and never once did I notice at what time of day the writer lambasted Bush or Clinton or the dumbed-down Shalimar.

So, we have that problem: the Internet isn't private, so I don't care if the exboyfriend or my mother or former husband reads it. What troubles me is that there is an ex-something giving it a close, and erroneous, reading. Now, I don't write this in any way like a diary. I may be short on editing, which is a similarity between the two, but if I had a diary, I would never write about either Brigitte Bardot or John Calvin in it. Really. You can trust me on that, as well. That being the case, I don't feel ill that someone out of the past is getting an uninvited and unwelcome view into the depths of my psyche -- because the depths of my psyche are never on here, if I even have any depths in that psyche at all.

It is, rather, that everyone else can read it and 'get' it somehow: laugh along with me, or snort knowingly and superciliously, disagree, and then write me a vitriol-laden missive declaring the merits of lobster-buggering, muscle shirts, and Chinese knockoffs of 'Tuscan' furniture -- all the while knowing quite well that I was drying my fingernail polish, not slitting my wrists, while writing my half of the preposterous argument. The only person who doesn't is, regrettably, someone whom I regret dating. I was speaking with a friend at length last night about this, because it is making me angry that I am able to be angered by it, and from that conversation I think that last sentence is the crux of it. Perhaps.

Why? Because I got over it. I was sad, cried a bit, felt a loss, missed the endearing text messages for a while -- and then didn't. That, gentle reader, should be the end of the story. It was the end of the story, for heaven's sake. Normally, with whatever sort of loss, you feel it, you embrace it, you experience it for as long as it takes, and then you do something else: the Reckoning. Logic steps in and you evaluate everything. You get dispassionate, objective, and forward-looking.

Let's say you just got fired from a great job. The pay was super, you loved the people you worked with, and it was a not-terrible commute. Obviously, that's quite a loss. But after the late-night crying jags, or the whiskey- or pound-cake binges, or whatever serves the purpose in your case, have done their job, you realize you always hated the lighting, that you were never truly challenged, that the color scheme kept you on edge all day, that you are well-rid of Paul and his incessant nose-clearing, and that the benefits package was dismal at best.

And I think once a sane person gets to that stage, not only can he no longer find the former object of affection as charming as before, but he can, moreover, muster only a modicum of interest in the comings and goings and overall emotional state of the ex. A consequence of this reality in my case was that I had no feelings whatsoever about the exboyfriend reading the blog, except the same vague hope as with anyone else that he might find bits of it amusing.

Then came the emails after the gloriously apathetic hiatus. And then came my terse responses. And then came proof of their lack of efficacy.

All of that was enough to make me regret yet more having been involved with this person. That regret was pushed to at least the third power by the tooth-grittingly noxious email iteration of purportedly flattering attributes gleaned from abusing a thesaurus. Then, my dears, after the late-night Scrabble dig (again, erroneous, but, as is the case with so much, the things we don't know about are often freakishly coextensive with the things we don't know about), came one more accursed Benediction. And that, although I did write a direct, clear, terse, and explicit email in response, shut me up and shut me down, as far as the blog was concerned.

But why? Because, look (alright, fine, I will get personal), we broke up because he is in some substantive ways disturbingly immature. Somewhere past the point at which I stopped thinking of him and being capable of wishing him either ill or well, he gave birth to a new self that felt the need to wish Peace upon me at every turn. I am well aware that peace is a good thing, and I have friends who close utterly everything with 'peace,' but they are typing it while wearing Birkenstocks and/or a black tab-collar shirt. In other words, they wish everybody peace, and they simply cannot help themselves. There are many more problems with his use of the word in this context than I can go into in an already-too-long blog entry, but another one involves an equally unnerving religious association, and that is that when I read it, I cannot help thinking, not of a normal guy offering normal well-wishes, but of a whole congregation of Methodists or Presbyterians shaking hands at the end of service while in unison reciting 'Peace be with you,' 'And also with you.' It is appropriate then, most particularly so if heartfelt, but the idea of shaking hands with a boyfriend, lover, or husband, before going to sleep, or upon meeting for a date, or as we leave for work, and uttering that -- well, it makes me grimace every time. And I cannot wrest this image from my mind.


Gratuituous Pretty Thing, because this is tooooo long:

(MMMMM, sparkly...)

(Yet filled with REAL HUMAN HAIR!)

Nor can I forget the condescending tone in which he first began to wish me Peace. The later versions may have been less wordy and less patently offensive, but they are still no less incongruous nor less unnecessary, unwarranted, or unwanted. For there are two problems: one is the very easy 'We Were Done and I Was Done with the Getting-Done Part so I Am Done with Difficult Feelings about You and thus Well-Stocked on Peace, Thanks All the Same' and the other is that, for all my overblown rhetoric and ability to conjure verbal storms over a chipped nail or newly-wobbly heel, I simply have had a sufficient number of sufficiently harrowing experiences to have vast, vast reserves of equanimity upon which to draw: I do not need anyone, even if he is not an exboyfriend, munificently to bestow it upon me in order to dwell in it, because I have seen things that are serious, and therefore I can tell when things are not.

However, it does get a bit more prickly once we consider the fact that he is an exboyfriend. And he is an exboyfriend whom I am no longer with for various reasons, none of which reflect well on him. And, as stated earlier, I was many months ago past the point where rekindling glowy feelings was possible: I remain in the 'objective' phase that, once having been attained, sticks with one forever. Things, therefore, that might have seemed nice at the time cannot help but be tinged with the overall regret about the whole thing. For lack of a better word, the whole thing seems decidedly icky (apologies to everyone), and knowing what I know of him now I cannot but see that him doing the things that the 'old' him I cared for was doing at the time.

And that him, and my difficult feelings about that him, was the reason I said No and left. And for that him unctuously to wish me 'peace' as though he were my priest, or as though such a damaged psyche had any to spare to be tossing around to others, is offensive in the extreme. Additionally, as you already know, I have a position or two as regards decorum, and such an act is indecorous as could be. If you willfully and deliberately hurt someone, apologies can sometimes be great, can make a difference under the right circumstances. Some things, such as murder, are patently too horrific for an apology to serve any purpose, but for many other things they can be welcome and utile. But to disrupt someone's peace by being a cad, and then, months after she has regained her usual tranquil state to wish her 'peace' once again repeatedly and condescendingly, is rude, base, puerile, and noxious.

So, I do hope I did this with enough lack of detail not to be horrible myself, but at the same time with enough vigour to have it serve as the necessary-and-sufficient catharsis that will allow me to begin once again prating on about inane and insubstantial things with a level of ardour, passion, and confidence equalling that of Margaret Thatcher's hairdressers for the last forty years.