taxonomies III

This has been written gradually over the course of more than a week. Consider it sort of time-lapse writing.

To recap the OkCupidians:

• "too nice": No change.
• "can't decide whether he'll tell the truth or not": His name shall be known throughout the land as 'Warehouse'. (The Cat has christened him thus.) The reason? Date number, uh three, I think?, was sketchily planned to occur at a warehouse. [wevs] At least she also admitted that she thinks he's "too cute".
• "in love"/disappeared: No change.
• flaky boy: He shall be known simply as 'Rugby'. This should make it easier for us all to remember their names, yes? Not like it matters.


• 'The Bothersome One, Midwest U.S. version': Update: No change.
• "The Losers": Update: R.D. (the short "tool") has been blissfully silent. K.O. (the big doofy weirdo) has sent 3 more "woo"s and tried to IM me at least twice, missing me each time. The medical breakfast food IM'd me one night when my resistance was down, but I was so unbelievably rude to him that I thought he might just get the hint. Instead...he broke into a flurry of babbling, during which he recounted the story of his recent triumph: he'd lost his virginity! Let's all gag together.
• B, a.k.a. The Poor Unfortunate: Update: He "woo"ed me, for what must have been the 57th overall time. And I'm just so damned polite that I cannot let it go unanswered, given that we've spent hours emailing. So I responded. And his message back was just so fucking funny. So I wrote back, and I was so ungodly insulting, and... ugh. He's hilarious. And totally not my type. I'm finding myself telling him the most atrocious stories - I mean, the absolute worst stuff I can think of, from college! - in an effort to freak him out, and it's just not working. Eventually he'll get the picture. For now, though, it at least means I'm amused while I'm knee-deep in messages from the rest of these frootloops.
• The Married Guy: Update: He has become a friend. We have not met in person, and likely will not.
• The oldest E: Update: No change.


• One night, very late, I was perusing my matches. I'd narrowed the list to local (i.e. within 50 miles of the zip code I use as my location, which is not my actual zip code or location), straight (as in, who like only women) guys between the ages of maybe 30 and 38. (I don't remember exactly, but this seems likely.) Oh, and the list was only supposed to include guys who had a photo posted.
     It can be a fairly boring experience, to tell the truth. The same gang tends to show up regardless of what the parameters are for a search. And lately something's gone wrong with the search matrix, so the same person will appear multiple times on the same list, which is particularly frustrating.
     Nevertheless, I paged through the list of hopefuls, such as they were, scanning photos and match-friend-enemy ratios and whichever canned blurb appeared next to them for something that would put them over the edge into the Hmmm category.
     Finally, one caught my eye. It was the picture that I noticed first, of course--he looked almost exactly like my college roommate, Dickhead. It only got better from there. He was a complete and total smartass. He took everything in the little canned profile setup and turned it on its side to make it utterly hilarious, and to reveal it for what it really is: a pathetic attempt to pigeonhole people into categories, just like the numbers, just like the tests, just like everything else that people do to themselves. It was perfect, and I wish I'd kept a copy of it. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
     Very unlike me, I made the first move. There was one more thing about his profile that I haven't mentioned: his status was "Available," not "Single." That means he is involved with someone but interested in seeking something elsewhere. Still, (and I'm sorry for this) I was intrigued enough to send a message. There is a section in the standard profile for "You should message me if...", and he'd filled in, "...you've had all your shots." My message said this, and nothing more:
  My meds are up to date.
  Let me know if your status changes.   He wrote back no more than 5 minutes later - having checked out my profile in the interim. His response: "It's nothing serious; just something to keep the crazies away."
     We continued in this vaguely flirty but still casual vein for a while--maybe 2 or 3 weeks?--before it started to heat up. He wanted to meet, "for coffee." I asked point blank what the deal was with the person he was involved with. He said it was "really nothing."
     Then he requested a WTF report. We weren't all that compatible, but it wasn't the worst match ever. Definitely worth the time to see whether it was a fluke, anyway, that we hit it off so well by email. Again, as with The Bothersome One/Midwest, the report came as something of a surprise. Many of the responses that I had given were outlandishly incorrect and had clearly been given in order to reassure me, at the time that I'd answered the questions, that I was in fact dating my "ideal match." Ahem. So I did change a few answers, and our match points went up accordingly.
     Then came the big surprise, in the form of one question about halfway through the report:
  Would you ideally like to be married within the next 3 years?   The possible answers are Yes, No, Possibly, or I'm Already Married. I'll give you a hint: his answer was not Yes. Nor was it No. And it also was not Possibly.
     Here's the kicker: his profile name seemed to be first initial-middle initial-last name (e.g. WJClinton). And if he was not using an assumed location, then he is from a very small town. And I know something about online research. So....
     I used the online White Pages for his current location, entered his [presumed] last name and first initial, and voila!: the assfucker's name popped up. Along with his wife's, and their ages, and their address and phone number. He's married to a woman who's a lot younger than him (and he's a bit younger than me). They have a little girl. (That much I knew from his profile, but it's a bit different when I know that they're married than when I thought he was a single father of an adorable 4-y-o, isn't it?)
     I never confronted him, but neither did I seek him out again. At some point, he realized that I knew, because he didn't look me up again, either. And since I found out his very dirty little secret, he has disappeared from OkC completely. First our WTF report disappeared, and then the messages that I'd received, and then, one day, so did his profile.
     Poof.
     Gone. Thank goodness.
• There was another, other married guy. CJ. We have insanely high match scores (80-something friend, 80-something match, and maybe 15 enemy). His profile picture is with his cat. His profile is just totally charming, flat-out honest and silly: he's separated from his wife and doesn't know what that really means; he talks to his cats; he likes to drink beer and do "guy stuff" even though he looks like a prissy metrosexual; and his favorite vacation destination is Disneyworld. He also lives way the hell across the country, so I wasn't looking for a match when I wrote to him. Yes, I made the first move again.
     He wrote back. It was cool. He's erudite and funny. He lives in a city that's a lot like the place I lived before I moved here - the "if you have to ask, you can't afford it" land of students and, well, it's an identity all to itself, beyond the people who live there, most of whom are transient (not in the "homeless" sense but in the "temporary" sense).
     The story is longer than the communication itself. We wrote a few times, and I liked it, and he lost interest before I did. That's the end of that story.
• One Friday at work I was very bored, flipping through journals, working but not working hard. I checked my OkC email, and there was a message from a guy I'd never met before, a 26-y-o from out west. My experience with the Beehive State has not been entirely positive, especially with 20-something blond men. Russ, the college boyfriend who was the first to abandon me, was from West Jordan. I even mentioned that during that first flurry of messages with the Nice Guy, ver. II. He laughed it off and simply asked that I not hold the misdeeds of one bad local against the rest of them.
     That sums him up. He's a bright, sunny guy. Very positive. Very happy. Very...ugh. Unlike me.
     And he's 26. I don't know why, but he seems so much younger than me. Far younger than Warehouse, or even Rugby. Maybe that's because both of them seem older than they are - not because they're intellectually mature (well, Warehouse is) but because they've both lived some beyond their chronological ages. Mr. Happy seems to have spent the majority of his life isolated in that state (population: 2.5 million. If you're curious, the large city to my right has a population of 2.9 million) or the state immediately north of that, where he was born. (Oh, good gravy, the population of his home state is 1,393,262.) (Sheesh: the population of the major urban area in my state of origin, made up of two conjoined cities, is 2,367,204.) Yeah, he's not a cosmopolitan guy.
     No, I don't think he's Mormon. For one thing, he was very mellow when I told him about the divorce. And I think the age difference would probably be a Big Deal if he was a member of that group.
     Regardless - and it is regardless - I am not interested in him that way. I thought I was. I mean, I thought I could be. This is all so speculative. Trying to see if perhaps there's enough of an interest to bother fanning it, so that if there's a spark, it'll catch.... It's just fucking tiresome, you know?
     He's a nice guy. He's fucking happy. Delirious. He wanted to meet when he came to The Big City for a work thing. Thank God he had work people with him at all times, so I was saved from needing to make excuses to get out of that. I was so not ready to maneuver around that.
     The way it stands at the moment is that I suggested that we write actual letters, by hand. He doesn't have a computer at home (???) and being limited to communicating by email or IM while at work is too sporadic and disjointed to feel like actual communication after a while. He agreed in theory but has yet to actually come through. He doesn't realize it (why am I like this?!) but it's a test. If he doesn't write, he's out of luck. Failure to recognize the importance of writing - real writing - to me is too big a deal for me to get over.
• One of the recent ones that's popped up is The Navy Man. He sent me a message a few weeks ago. I wrote back.
     He's a nice guy. Sweet and gentle. A little older than me. Shy. Respectful. A White Sox fan - kiss of death. Lives on the South Side. Divorced (no kids), but won't tell the story because he "doesn't come out well in it" (which makes me wonder how much story there is to tell, beyond only that?).
     I'm not telling him everything about me, either. I don't think that, given his responses to things like my vague hints about school and my allegiance to the Cubs, he's got even the slightest leftward lean. We're just not a very good match. It seems like we're both just wasting some time until something better comes along.
• I shouldn't even bother mentioning this one, but he just bugs me. He lives in the place that I claim as my current location. His name is the same as a former blog nemesis - and more - of mine. He's also an attorney.
     And a writer.
     And he's absolutely gorgeous.
     And he stalks my profile just about as often as I stalk his, which is about half as often as I'd like to.
     But. Is he interested? I'd say No. He's a profoundly opinionated person, very outgoing and loquacious. If he wanted something, it seems (from everything that I can see - his profile, his test scores, the tests he's written, and his prolific journal) that he would simply reach out for it. And he's not done that toward me.
• Finally, around the same time that I found CJ, I was scanning my matches and discovered someone completely different from all the rest. Different, how?
  
  • He's my best overall match.
  • His profile is long. Scary, stupidly, insanely long. And he refers to its length, refers to trying to edit it down and ending up with it even longer yet.
  • Our initials are the same - I think? I've never known anyone with his first name before, except my first boyfriend's father (hee hee).
  • His photos are wonderful. They're not studio portraits. They're not pointlessly Photoshopped to death-artistic-color reversed-craptastic-what the hell do you look like anyway?. They're not closeups of his crotch. They're just pictures. And they're a group that he changes periodically, around 10 in all (you're limited to 5 at a time), of him in various places doing various things. Cute and funny and impressive and full of personality.
  • He's deep. Really, spectacularly deep. Like a lake, when you're in a boat and you just float out for a while without paddling, and without thinking about it look over the side and then realize that you're in the middle of the lake and that you can see all the way to the bottom - and that the bottom is 20 or 50 or 100 feet deep? He's that kind of deep. You don't see it at first, but it's there all along. Clear and cool and shimmering, revelatory of more than you might want to see, but there's no option but to look at what's there, now that it's right before your eyes.
  • He's hilarious. I know that anybody can seem that way in writing. Hell, I seem that way in writing. But his profile made me snort Coke out my nose (the fluid!), and his messages were even worse.
  • He lives in Canada. Only 12 hours north....
  • He's spiritual, and not even remotely bashful about it. Well, not at all overwhelming about it, either. He's just on a different plane than anyone else I've ever known.
  • There's just something about him. He draws me. Honestly, the last time I felt anything like this? Johnnie.
       I sent a message. He replied. I wrote back right away. He wrote again, after a couple of days. I wrote again. After a few days, he wrote again. This continued. The frequency of the messages increased somewhat, and the quality of the messages - the intensity, and the seriousness - had been high from the beginning.
       I wanted him. I don't mean that in the surface sense; I was serious. I don't know how I knew, but I knew. It was not immediate, but it happened pretty early. I was not going to push it, though. I was going to do it "right," and let it happen.
       It didn't happen. I wrote on September 29. He looked at my profile a few times that weekend, and not again since then.
       I wish I could be the sort of Assertive Woman to seek an answer. Broken email fingers? Had been dating someone else all along? Unexpected opportunity to go back to the Amazon? Never as interested as I was, and only belatedly decided not to encourage me any further? Selective amnesia? Lost my profile address?
       I'm just not that sort of assertive. Because, really, what does it matter? Whatever answer comes at this point, it's only so much more of what I don't want. Unless it comes spontaneously, it's not a real apology, so do I really want to ask for one? No. I don't.
       This is the one that hurt. Mr. Canadian Indifference.

    And that - that last one - is the reason, when I've got the rest of these ducks lined up and moving elsewhere, that I'm out of the OkC dating pool. It's obviously not worth the fucking bother. The experience has gotten me far too many demeaning offers from married guys, too many pathetic offers from baby 'men' who need a few years under their belts (yes, I mean that in all ways) before they should be seeking someone like me, and too many headaches. It's not worth it.
    And I've learned something about myself: despite my best efforts and all hope, I'm not ready for this sort of thing.