You've got some explaining to do!
Sometime back I decided it was time to try mountain biking. One of my coworkers was hardcore, but he really enjoyed taking the newbies out to get muddy. I invited my friend Tom, and off we went. We had a terrific time. I took one on the chin but managed to keep all my teeth. We got muddy, bruised, exhausted, and just a tiny bit drunk at the bar afterwards. While we were unloading the bikes back at my place, Tom's cell phone rang. He was mighty late to meet his girlfriend. "I've got some explaining to do," he said. I laughed. But now I find myself in that same position.
Tom was just late. I've REALLY got some explaining to do. You see, I've been dating. On the Internet. And I'm very happily married. No, I mean it. Stick with me, I think I can make it all okay.
How I got in to this mess
Good projects have been a bit thin this year. A few weeks back my production gig, which I took because I really needed the money, just dried up. They sent me home. There were complex budgeting issues and a general sense of lethargy about the importance of the project. I interviewed for a job, was offered it, and 12 hours later, had the offer rescinded. In desparation, I filed for unemployment only to be rejected because I haven't worked enough qualified hours this year. My bank account has been home to just enough money to make one mortgage payment and get some vegetables to go with the rice. I've been eying the long term savings. I registered as a temp with one of those agencies that sends you out to law firms to do filing but they had no work for me. I snapped photos of a bunch of my paintings and tried to sell them online. I finally got signed up for a new project, but it was delayed. The entire month of October has been a bust.
There's a guy that I've been carpooling with on and off for years. On and off for years he's been trying to get me work. He's an editor for a big fat website, I'm a writer with lots of technology experience, it should be easy, no? No. Most of the projects he's pitched me just haven't come through. But my luck was due to change. My editor friend called and asked me what I was up to. "Nothing. Nothing at all. I'm waiting for my next gig to start and trying to find money under the couch. Why, whaddaya got?"
He commissioned me to write three articles for the site he'd been managing. The first two were about digital music. Media players, portables, MP3s, that kind of stuff. Fun. The third? Internet dating.
Married female seeks
Now I am the kind of person that enters fully in to the spirit of things. I opened up a Match.com account. Yup. I signed up for online dating. I wrote a profile and posted a photo and signed myself up for a 7 day free trial. I get nothing, no responses. Apparently I'm not that desirable. No one wants a mouthy Jewish girl. I'll never get a man. Oh, woe is me!
So in desperation, because my 12 hour experiment with online dating was such a bust, I went to check out the dating chat rooms. I gave myself a very girly name and signed in. Right away it was flies to honey. And almost immediately, some guy wants to get me in a private room. He asks me where I am and if I'm married. I say yeah, I'm married, so he asks if the husband is home and I say no, he's not here, he's traveling. And he asks me what I look like. And I'm thinking, who CARES what I look like? I mean, hell, I could say anything, right? Because right now, I'm not me. So I ask him if he really wants to know what I look like, or could I just make something up? And the silence is kind of long.
Finally he says LOL (laughing out loud) as though I'm joking, but I'm NOT really. I figure I'm trying to see how this works, right, so I type. "I'm kinda short and have short black hair and even though I work out there's no way I'd ever be called skinny." And he says that sounds nice. I'm thinking, Jaysus, this is the biggest joke Then he tells me he's 6 feet and change and very fit and 7.5 inches and asks me if I'm alone. I'm thinking, WOW, straight to the details!
I'm sitting on my couch cracking up. ER is on the television in the background and I type, "I'm not really alone, it's me and the cast of ER." But he's given up. It turns out that I'm breaking the rules by trying to have a real conversation where as he is just looking for virtual nooky. So he's gone. I'm dumped at the virtual bar crying in to my virtual beer because some hottie has tried to get it on with me and all I could say was, "Can we talk first?"
Hobots and housewives
Well, I am not to be deterred from my task as investigative reporter. No sir. I try another service. I log in to a "30 something" chat server. And it turns out there's some conversation going on in there. People say hi and ask questions and I chat with a hardware engineer in India. There's a mom online from Australia and she's looking for a little conversation while her kids are off at school. It's pretty anonymous, but it's okay. It's more what I'd imagined chat room dating would be like. I spend a little time chatting with two people, one a man, one a woman, both from the south. It's all very civil.
But there's a whole other thing going on in the background. Circle_of_Stone introduces me to the term "hobot" a hybrid between whore and robot. It seems there are these automated programs that log in and out of chat rooms. They're disguised as real people but, as Rain_on_the_Roof told me, they're not interactive. If you try to contact them, they tell you no time, go check out my profile. The profile is a cheesecake photo and a bunch of links to porn sites.
Along with the hobots coming and going, there's this sort of static that adds a frat party flair to the whole experience. People are logging in and out, typing things like "Woo hoo! Who's here to party!!!!" "Any cuties in Kansas City out there wanna hook up?!" "I'm cute but I'm lonely, anyone want to chat with a girl from Cali?"
I had a pretty hard time sleeping after that. I kept thinking about all those people out there, furiously typing away, trying to make some kind of connection but too scared to do it in the real world. The guys I chatted with directly seemed kind of cynical and bitter, like they'd had one too many broken hearts and were just tired of real women. The women sounded isolated, like their lives had taken them away from their friends and their social contacts. And there were all those virtual partiers looking for a virtual good time. It was weird.
Find something real. Avoid something real. You decide.
Meanwhile, back at Match, my luck had started to change. I was getting responses. I'd filled out my profile incorrectly and said that I was looking for someone in the 18-35 age range. I got a nice email from a guy asking me if that was really true and I thanked him for saving me from an onslaught of languid teenagers seeking a postmodern Mrs. Robinson. I got another mail from a nice Jewish boy with a whopping great vocabulary. Hey, I'd date that guy. I had an odd little chat with a guy that's much too young for but plays the accordion and is learning to play the bagpipes.
I wrote the article in just a couple of hours. I was so overwhelmed by information that I had to hammer the whole thing out just to clear my head. Now I have to pull that profile down by but honestly, I'll kind of miss the mail. And I'm not sure I couldn't work up a crazy chat room addiction. It's like people watching at a train station. There are all these characters coming and going and some of them are more real than others, but because it's all in cyberspace, there's no physical aspect to it. And your imagination runs wild. Here's a guy who's just moved to an empty apartment. He's hooked up his Internet but hasn't unpacked his dishes. Here's a girl who can't pay for college so she's running her web cam for cash. Here's a woman who has four kids and feels lost when they're gone during the day. Here's a guy who's given up on finding a real love and has dissolved his body in to the world of the Web.
The husband and I, as many of you know, don't live together all the time, but I'm no Lonely_Housewife3423. We hook up online almost every day via Messenger or NetMeeting if we're both at home. We're totally web dependent when we're apart.
When I logged on yesterday, he asked me what I'd been up to in the last 24 hours. I did not know where to begin. I told him the whole story and pointed him to my profile. He asked me what I was looking for. I said that a nice Austrian who lives in a beautiful small town that he likes to get the hell out of from time to time would be a good match. He asked me what I looked like. We both started to laugh.
