Am I the only one who finds the summer Olympics incredibly boring compared to the winter games? (Luge! Curling! Ice Dancing! That event where you ski with a rifle and then shoot at targets! Swoon.) I think it’s because I have always found races that are just about speed boring - swim meets, track events, they just don’t hold my interest. I don’t hate the gymnastic events, and diving is pretty amazing, but the things I think I’d really like are skill-based events like archery and shooting and fencing, and we just don’t get much of that on the primetime feed. I should look up how to watch this stuff live, but also I have a job where I have to be in meetings a lot, and interact with people in my office, so…
All that is to say that I was home sick today and tried to watch Olympic coverage, and was bored to tears by the NBC coverage. Now it’s dudes running. Back to my fantasy channel of HGTV, where people with normal jobs can actually buy real estate. (Being a New Yorker really sucks sometimes.)
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In things relevant to this blog, I am both proud and also terrified to announce that I have put the OKCupid app on my phone. This is a terrible idea. But I also actually began a few conversations with people who seem not-crazy, and don’t want to run away from them? Man, this is so hard.
I wonder if I just need start every OKC conversation with “hey, I’m wicked bad at this part, but pretty good in person - can we just skim each other’s profiles and then decide if we want to have coffee?” But at the same time, I want to be able to have enough back and forth to know that I’m interacting with a person who can be non-crazy and also not try to sext with me. (This is the worst. Sexting is THE WORST. I mean, maybe it’s fine if you’re dating someone, but just the IDEA of sexting with strangers gives me such secondhand embarrassment that I have to lay down.)
Also, I have to figure out how to screen people on two basic criteria for 2016: Are you voting for Hillary Clinton in this election (even if you’re not thrilled to)? And have you ever used the phrase “All Lives Matter”? Wrong answers on either of those are a dealbreaker for me, but I don’t want to be the humorless bitch who opens with political questions. (And embedding them in my profile is useless since many people just… don’t… read it.)
Fuck! Why is dating now based on texting people!? I am literally the worst at texting people! I have many people who will attest to this fact!
Navigating this is like Goldilocks and the Three Bears: you don’t want to spend so much time talking that the whole thing goes cold. But you don’t want to not spend enough time talking and get burned on a coffee date with a racist Bernie-bro sexter. There is this "just right" sweet spot that I am having a hard time finding. Aziz Ansari’s Modern Romance is a great sociological read about dating in the world of cell phones and apps, and it’s also scary as hell. Because apparetly no one enjoys this. No one. And no one knows the right way to do it. After much study, there is no magic formula. Aziz himself, who is way better at texting than I am, is currently dating a nice girl he met through friends, at a party, like a dude from the 1950s would have. So, sorry Aziz, but your advice rings a little hollow on the internet dating front.
All that said, I am still stumped and not above polling the internet. Anyone have any advice on how to start a conversation, find out if a person is sane, non-racist, and not sexually creepy, and then END a conversation and move to the coffee ‘I probably will decide I don’t want to date this person anyway’ phase before one of us gets bored and wanders off?
