totally delusional

So it starts with something as simple as she is going to come back right...to gee, I think if I hang out long enough in a hip coffee place someone will actually pay attention to me and that will lead to some conversation, and wow new friend or relationship. Uh, yeah right.

I have spent countless hours in coffee places and my own brand of dinner places working and hanging out hoping that someone might notice me. Fact of the matter is, in the world we live in we are pretty well trained to look down, look away, and not make eye contact with anyone that wants something from us. If you live in a big city it is more a matter of self preservation. You add a pair of sunglasses and some headphones and you can virtually walk around without your invisible wall preventing anyone from getting in.

Problem is now I'm on the outside, desperately hoping that someone will let me in, even if it just for a simple smile or a nod, a hello, something. Hard because that's a lot of survival training to ignore. I started to realize how little I smile at other people. That must be kind of off putting, but I don't even know where to start…I don't know how to just smile at someone? What does my smile even look like at this point.

I decided that it was just silly to think I would meet new friends or someone that I would find interesting sitting in a starbucks or a restaurant, or a bar (at least the kind of bar I would hang out at). That lead to being more active and really trying to put myself out there. Which involved a lot more effort than passively sitting around and hoping that someone will notice me.

I felt like I needed to eat my own dog food which meant the internet would need to be involved. Here is where it all starts to go awry.

So I decided to start lowest common denominator. Craigslist. You can find furniture, a job, a box to move your crap, a car, a motorcycle, so why not someone to hang out with. It seemed really logical as I sat down to creatively craft my ad. I spent a lot of time putting my heart into it.

I posted it, and waited around. I got responses within like 20 minutes. I was shocked. I started opening emails to see what people had thrown back. Thrown back was more than right.

Yeah, there are three kinds of people using craigslist for this purpose:

1). The scammers. They put up a pleasant profile make you think that there is someone normal on craigslist and they might actually have something in common with you. They don't. They are doing one of three things: get you on to a sketch paid dating site, steal your identity so that they can be you and get people to sketch sites or worse, really get you hooked into something and steal your wallet digitally, or last but least sell you sex. If you are down with that cool. It gets frustrating. Now none of this happened to me, but you read about it and I have to say anyone that looked normal was basically someone phishing. I won't be surprised if someone calls me and says that they have seen my ad on craigslist, or at least some phisher with my photo and description out there trying to sucker some poor woman.

2). The freaks. They are just freaky, they are mean, they wantto suck your brain out of your skull. They are coming to get you, and somehow they can track your IP address through a million gateways to your exact location, and they are doing it now, and they are coming. Lock the door, arm yourself. I was utterly frightened by some of the responses I got from the freaks. They were utterly frustrating to me, some of them did have me checking the door before I went to bed.

3). Last but not least, the sad normal people (like me, but they really haven't figured it out, seems like they may have been at this for a while). I don't want to sound snobby, I do feel for these people because generally I was feeling like a sad normal person on craiglist. I certainly was sad, I certainly feel normal. The problem is the normal people have is that they all have been victimized by classes 1 and 2 Every normal person probably gets there about 3 hours with their ad out there. I know there were a lot of people looking at ads, I did it. I certainly wasn’t going to put myself out there and write anything back to them after my experiences with groups 1 and 2. So, if you did see someone that peeked your interest you end up writing a note like this:

"Hi, saw you ad. Wonder if you are real. You probably aren't. I'm not sending you a photo incase you are a scammer. I'm not going to tell you any thing about me, other than I like the fact that you like cats. I'm not saying I have cats, or that I even like cats. I'm just saying I'm glad you like cats. If you are actually real. Well have a good night, and I am not saying in any way that it is night where I am. You probably don't even care because you aren't real."

Really, how are people going to connect on something like that. The first one I got like that I was like WTF???!! What did that even mean? Then after another 20 minutes I started to get it. I tried to respond to one with something like "no, I'm real. I do like cats. It's night here. I hope you have a good night too."

I didn't hear anything ever again from her(?).

Yeah, by the end of the evening I pulled down the ad, stopped looking at other people's ads and went away pissed at myself for even thinking that was a good idea.

One ad said "fk u cl, I'll pay for match." Me too.

So I started thinking about match. I realized that I had already put myself out there with the ad on "cl", I had something to say and I thought it was reasonably clever. More importantly I had sat down to try and encapsulate my extremely 3d personality into something extremely flat and pixilated. Fun.

Yea, okay so here is the next level of delusional thinking I fell into. The people that you think are going to be attracted to you are not. At first you make these blind decisions like "oh she looks nice, and wow we both like animals and she even has a job, and look we both make over 100k a year." yeah. Okay, so, what the hell is she doing on match? Well, what the hell am I doing on match. Okay, sending an email.

Yeah, I received no responses at all to any of my most crafty clever emails. Of course all of these women were thinking to themselves what's the fat, bald, old guy doing pinging me? So I started to think about it. I probably have an over inflated sense of myself being able to attract the women that I thought were "hot". I'm not 30, I don't have an amazingly toned body, and I don't party in SF like I did when I was 25, I just don't. Okay, so reality set in. Stop sending email to 30 year old party girls who are doing a few things: corporate climbing, hiking Mt Tam daily, surfing, skiing on three continents, climbing rocks, and drinking their weight in crappy beer every weekend. I would find that exciting for about 20 minutes. Again, superficially, those were the women that appealed to me, until I realized it would be really painful to actually date any of them. I want to be able to have a reasonable conversation with them, and certainly not trying to chase them up mount tam on my road bike, how are we going to discuss anything?

Oh and a demographic observation: every woman between 28-36 just loves to camp. They even have picture of their camping adventures. Its usually just one, and then you look closely and you see a bathroom and a car in the background. This is just outdoor out of city partying with your favorite crappy beer. I mean come on. Really? No, really? Is camping really considered that hot of an idea? I think guys take women camping because it is a cheap way to keep them captive drinking beer and likely screw outdoors. I don't know, I know I am ranting now, but I was truly amazed and unimpressed. Maybe you have to put camping on your list for market parity. Whatever.

Oh, and I have to admit one other thing; people that seem too much like me, I had to avoid. There was one woman that was like the cute female version of me, but I was almost worried that we would be like brother and sister. There was another woman who seemed really cool and she winked at me, but she was a user experience consultant. I figured we would spend our entire time arguing about user centered design, or user centric design. It just seemed like our "religion" might get in the way.

Now here is where it gets interesting. The women that pinged me. Okay, I was amazed at how many of them started pinging all at the same time. They were all older, they were mainly tall and skinny, a lot of them had children, but they were all EXTREMELY introverted. I'm thinking to myself, hmm, they would probably find me exciting for about 20 minutes. Then it dawned on me... ok, they are doing the same thing I just got done doing. They think that the younger and hopefully more evolved guy is going to be the "boy" that they think they should be able to attract. I just looked at their accomplishments, their well manicured looks, and the background of far and exotic trips, and well designed houses. I realized that I could not be that refined. I didn't have enough game to roll up to their McMansion in Danville in my reasonable priced car with the coffee-can muffler and the flying lizard racing sticker on the back window. I also didn't get the sense that my occasional belch or need to drive fast, and listen to crappy 80's music at top volume was going to be appreciate especially around their 15 year old kids. I might be a potential bad influence.

Then I turned off the computer and sat back and thought about the problem for a while. I also started to realize what an impossible situation this was turning into.

I decided to edit my profile. Be completely honest, just less descriptive, change up the main profile image to something that was a little more fun, and a little less close up. I added a few more one liners and was a bit more snarky.

It immediately dropped my skew to 30-40, still getting the mothers here and there, but I was now shocked at the number of people that have a similar set of interests to me, and oh dear, they are actually normal and a lot of them were really cute, at least to me.

So now here comes the next level of delusional thinking on my part. I decided to lay back a bit see if anyone found me attractive. A few did, enough to "wink" and send emails.

Finally, i get an email with a profile that really fits what I'm looking for, both realistically as well as what I kind of hoped for. A snappy email, saying how cute I am, and how interesting my profile was to them. Now because I am prone to delusions; I'm instantly smitten. Not in love... I mean, for god sakes I know nothing about this person, she could be a serial killer. But it is the first person who has been 1) nice, 2) paid me some complements, and 3) seems attracted to me & is attractive to me.

So we engage in some back and forth and exchange some witty banter, and finally it comes down to: hey, I think we should meet. Her: "yeah, let's meet, when are you available?" I responded.

Nothing.

I sent another email explaining my timing had changed a day later. I thought that was a responsible thing to do. Nothing. It's been three days.

Nothing.

I was crushed. Sad, I admit. Crushed. It was like getting removed from my house all over again. Obviously nowhere near as painful. But again, I had put myself out there and had been crushed. Can we actually trust anyone at this point? Kind of feeling like no...

So, I wrote it off, wrote her off, and shut off all of the email alerts etc. It wasn't a revolt, or a "f this" like cl, but it was something that set me back to reality.

I think my two biggest takeaways from this, one I have written something descriptive about me and put it out there in public, to be reviewed, scrutinized, and on the whole ignored. I did it with little regard for the fact that I was putting myself out there, which I think was a big hurdle. The other thing that I've learned is that everything needs to be approached with reality, and with reality my decisions get a little easier to push forward, it reduces my fear of being out there, and things seem imminently more survivable. All of those skills seem like a necessity for putting yourself out there for dating.

Beyond that, I am trying to put myself in the shoes of the people on the other side and trying to be humane where other's haven't been quite so nice to me. I hoping that somehow that karma pays off for me.