Caring is creepy?

So it turns out I'm a big jerk and it took a blog 'experiment' to really elucidate that fact for me. A bunch of time ago (Sept. 10th, if you'll scroll down a couple ticks), I decided to make fun of strangers and, to a lesser extent, my dear friend Flo's audacity in hoping to find some sort of meaningful connection with another human being on this emotionally crippling cement island I have isolated myself upon. That was douche of me. Not because Flo didn't think my idea was smashing good fun, but because I was setting literally everyone else up for failure, and in retrospect that's not all that nice. My bad, strangers. Many apologies, Flo's hopes and aspirations

I set up my profile, which was a nice blend of good-natured sarcasm, free-spiritedness and chutzpah. It also included important personal details like my aversion to wasabi (since remedied), my unnatural appreciation for the movie Independence Day and the standard list of books I provide, when requested, that is meant to impart to my judges a well-rounded literary background without actually communicating my preferences, saving me from scathing critique of the obscurity, low quality, pretentiousness or played-outtedness of my favored texts. (Just because I read Grisham on the subway doesn't mean I'm not a person, you elitist fuck.) (Nor does it imply that I consider it good literature, plebeian.) I then prepared for the grotesque responses that I would hyperbolize for my own purposes.

Who knows why I anticipated such negative fodder for my silly little blog. Perhaps it was the anonymity of the internet that I figured would allow men (or women) to saturate my inbox with messages containing the sort of depravity that would make my grandmothers weep. Maybe it was my assumption that all men (or women!) are shameless sex-fiends with an innate business sense allowing them to capitalize on a search engine capable of locating many of the loneliest of city women, starving for attention and affection, surviving on hope inspired by the matchiness of internet-based personality tests alone. Could be I had had a bad commute, the soul-crushing kind characterized not so much by the observation of human viciousness as by the depraved indifference that 98% of commuters pretend to exhibit in response. In any event, I giddily awaited the responses I would get from the assumed plethora of lecherous hooligans lurking in the tangles of the interweb, counting on the creepiness of people to supply me with ample material at a point when I was otherwise uninspired.

As the old proverb goes, "When you assume, you make an ass out of u and me." I think that's kind of unfair, because I really don't think I made an ass of anybody but myself in this situation. (I will also point out that anybody who would say that phrase in any amount of seriousness would be, for all intents and purposes, an ass.) But good news for humans: I'm an ass! I was surprised to discover that the vast majority of messages I received were... well... really nice. There were a couple chuckle-worthy attempts (dude commented on how hot I was before my picture was up; dude sent me two identical messages a month apart, both in which he professed to have just discovered my profile and to have instantly fallen in love with me), but for the most part the messages were semi-thoughtful (dudes had actually read my profile and asked questions about information found therein) and not even a little creepy (despite my darndest attempts to look at them as such).

This was unfortunate partially because it gave me a stunning lack of blog-spiration, but mostly because it made me realize I'd been being callous and drawing from an "everything sucks and has gone to hell" place, rather than a "lots of things suck, but maybe pointing them out and getting people to think about them can actually improve things" place. So I'm starting to approach, I hope, that second place with my whole comedy/writing/thinking-about-shit thing. So although the experiment failed miserably, it sort of failed super happily in the long run. Yeah, I'm sure many of those bros were just feeding lines to get some, hoping to take advantage of the fragile young thing than I am. But I'm also gonna go out on a limb and hope that some of them weren't. We'll see how that goes.



Oh yeah, and on a clearly related but causationally/correlationally questionable note: gObama!

How creeped out can I get after 4 years in NYC: An Experiment

Fear not, $0.25 for 25 days shall continue on, but another investigation to add to the mix!

Inspired by my friend Flo - who is essentially me (a Euro History major at Barnard, currently a paralegal in Midtown living in Park Slope) but Asian and better at video games - I have created an account on okcupid.com, a terrifying website that attempts to predict everlasting love based on extremely scientific personality tests (ex. the "Superhero Archetype" quiz and the "Which Color M&M Are You?" quiz). Of course, this sort of relevant information in combination with the details available in my carefully constructed profile (favorite books strategically listed to appear intelligent but not too pretentious, activities in which I no longer participate, interests about which I am for the most part dispassionate, etc...) provides a completely accurate picture of myself as a person, how well my suitor and I will get along and how fantastic our sex life will be!

Now, Flo is not the only friend that inspires this blog post/experiment. My roommate, Shira, frequently posts some of the ridiculous/adorable/ hilarious emails her company receives from curious kiddies in her blog. And if we can find humor in the total inability of children to engage in logical follow-through, then it must be possible to find the hilarity in the creepy messages I am bound to receive! Since my profile's completion at 1:00am today (approx. 33 minutes ago), I have already received 3 messages and 1 "five star rating," whatever that means. As of now, the messages have been pretty mundane; but if all goes well, some really terrifying dudes will think I'm pretty and the laughs will roll. As a proud Barnard grad, I am stepping up and Taking Back the Site; I will not fear the terror - the terror will fear me! Or, like, I'll get bored and delete the account.

Confession: I am already a little in love with some dude's profile. The "I thought meeting people in real life was the way to go" romantic in me finds this sad, but I think it will ultimately make for a funny story to tell our grandkids.

Further confession: Incorporating my inspirational friends into my blog post was inspired by my friend, Hibben. Who can now die happy.