OKCupid update

Well, I must have pushed some magic button on OKCupid. I am now getting profiles – thoughtful, well-composed profiles – of intelligent, spiritual, age-appropriate women. Most seem so energetic and outgoing that I doubt I would ever be able to keep up with them, but even so, it's refreshing to read one quirky, unique profile after another written by fascinating women.

And of course, not a goddamn one of them lives in Oklahoma. No, once I narrow the focus back to home, I get a bunch of doughy-faced, ineptly-tattooed Southern Baptist women looking for a bible-thumping Marlboro Man in a pickup truck, or riding a Harley-Davidson.

It is just bleak out there. Completely fucking bleak.

Maybe I should live in Austin

Here's another interesting QuickMatch phenomenon. Among the profiles to which I gave four or five stars, the overwhelming majority of them turned out to belong to women who live in and around Austin, TX.

I didn't know this as I selected them. The iPhone app doesn't show you users' locations.

I don't think any of them were in my city.

Go out with me or I'll suffocate this chihuahua!

I posted an item here a few days ago regarding my concern that my online dating profile photos were too flattering. I was worried that although they were recent, they made me seem better-looking than I really am.

But I have to tell you, there are some folks out there who could work at making their photos a little more flattering.

OKCupid has a feature called QuickMatch in which the user is presented with another user's profile, lacking a name or contact information, and is asked to rate it from one to five stars. I resisted this for awhile because it seemed too much like rating people as if they were sides of beef.

I finally decided to give it a try tonight. But I didn't give anyone one, two or three stars. If I wasn't impressed with the profile, I simply skipped it. And when I did give stars, it was for quirkiness and/or originality. One profile, for example, got five stars because her favorite authors were people like Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. and Howard Zinn.

But most of the profiles simply got a 'skip'. One that I skipped, for example, was a stunningly attractive woman who was apparently a former NFL cheerleader. Her profile was utterly conventional. There was nothing wrong with it, but it didn't convey even the slightest spark of awareness about anything other than sports and Twilight movies.

But the point I wanted to make was that I saw dozens of truly awful photos. In one, for example, the dominant object was a disembodied elbow in the near foreground that filled about a fourth of the screen. The user who posted the picture was 'way back in the background, out of focus and impossible to make out. A ShopVac and a step stool completed the scene.

Another user posted herself in a sort of flirty/sultry Marlene Dietrich pose, but using her bathroom toilet as a prop instead of a chair.

And yet another posted, as her only picture, a blurred, extreme closeup showing only a chihuahua peeking out of her frankly enormous cleavage.

There were lots and lots of pictures that were out of focus, overexposed, and occasionally underexposed. And a lot of pics in which the user made herself a secondary element of interest, ceding the primary position to an SUV, or a fountain, or some other inanimate object.

I think the bottom line here is that if you're posting pictures of yourself on a dating site, maybe you should get a friend to offer a second opinion on your choices.

The movie that chased me out of the theater

I went to a couple of movies yesterday, and for the first time in my life, I had to get up and walk out of one to avoid getting sick.

The first movie I saw was Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol. It was okay. Meh. The plot was a cold war scenario that could have come from the original series. Go to imdb.com if you want to know more.

But the movie that drove me out into the parking lot was Sherlock Holmes - A Game of Shadows. The bombastic soundtrack and herky-jerky special effects had me staring at the floor and taking slow, deep breaths by about thirty minutes in. I had some earbuds for my iPhone in my pocket, and I put those on to get some relief from the noise. And by the time Holmes and the Cossack assassin were chasing each other around the whore house (that's where they were, right?), I was headed for the exit.

I felt fine once I got to the car, but I had spells of nausea the rest of the evening, and I could feel my stomach churn every time I so much as thought about the movie.

I have seen bigger, noisier movies than this one, but something about it just hit me the wrong way. And I think maybe I've hit some sort of saturation point with big-screen sturm und drang offered as a substitute for story and characterization.

I don't know how this will affect future movie nights with Blogblah! Maybe we'll have to start seeing movies that don't suck.

Oh, speaking of movies that suck... he and soartstar and I went to see The Immortals recently. It's another of those movies with people randomly running back and forth in caves, hacking at each other with swords, but holy shit. It made a similar movie, Conan the Barbarian, look like Citizen Kane.

You don't appreciate a good movie about people randomly running back and forth in caves, hacking at each other with swords, until you see a bad one.

A person I don't seem to like very much

I've noticed that when I start obsessing about relationshiponal phenomena, I turn into a person I don't seem to like very much.

Tuesday morning

The six-foot engineer and I could never seem to coordinate a time and a place for our first meeting. I finally decided she was just trying to extricate herself from the situation without hurting my feelings, so I let it drop.

I have another coffee date Friday with a friend of a friend. We've met once. I sort of half-expect her to cancel, and I guess I'll be OK with that whichever way it goes.

My doctor has increased my daily dosage of amlodipine besylate, a blood pressure medication which, in some users, increases apathy and detachment and reduces libido. Some people consider this an adverse side effect, but I am not one of them.

The Tao

The Tao is so large the universe cannot contain it,
And so small it can fit in the palm of your hand.

The Tao is the veins in a leaf,
And the galaxies expanding outward into space.

The Tao will neither save me nor condemn me,
It will neither reward me nor punish me.

The Tao demands no praise or adoration from me,
And threatens me with nothing if I do not give any.

Peace and calm are returning to my mind. It's good to have them back.

Repeat after me

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

I know it is pointless for me to be annoyed that the morning paper has endorsed Mitt Romney for President.

FUCKING IDIOTS.
FUCKING FUCKING
FUCKING FUCKING
IDIOTS.

Do I believe this is true? I don't know.

Here's an msnbc.com article whose contents somewhat surprised me:

The Hotter the Woman, the Better Men Think Chances Are

The more attractive the woman was to the guy, the more likely he was to overestimate her interest in him, researchers found. And it turns out, the less attractive men (who believed they were better looking than the women rated them) were more likely to think beautiful women were hot for them. But the more attractive guys tended to have a more realistic assessment.

This certainly runs counter to my own thinking. I have always assumed that the more conventionally 'hot' a woman is, the less likely it is she will find me attractive. Even so, I've fooled myself a few times, and ended up making a play for a woman who wasn't the least bit attracted to me.

I'm trying to think of an occasion in which some other basically average-looking guy I knew was persuaded some extremely attractive woman was interested in him. I can't think of any.

Still wired, apparently

At some point I will go back and look through all my hamster wheel posts. It's too early now; I need a little more distance.

Every time this happens, I tell myself 'This is the last time,' but it always seems to happen again. I've unplugged a lot of those wires over the years, but some remain.

What I learned

I live in the Bible Belt. I know, intellectually, that I am out of step with most social and political thought in this community.

But browsing around OKCupid, with its 2000+ question survey, really brought the differences home to me. I was astonished by how many women oppose gay marriage (most). I was astonished at how many would not date someone who wasn't white (almost all). By how many think flag burning is worse than book burning (again, almost all). By how many think evolution should not be taught in school (probably about a fourth, but any at all boggles my mind).

I try to imagine what a relationship would be like with one of these women. I assume their relationships are built mostly around church and the TV set.

An experiment nears its conclusion

I 'reactivated' my OKCupid account in order to email the two women I had sort of stood up for coffee dates.

I ended up meeting with one of them, an attorney. That went OK, but I don't think either of us felt chemistry.

I'm trying to set up a meeting with the other. She seems willing, but it may take a while.

Beyond that, I've about run out of options on OKCupid. Most of the women whose profiles seem interesting to me are between about 41 and 47 years old, and most are cougars (isn't everyone, now?) looking for guys 35 to 40.

Among women my age, which is to say 55 to 60, they're mostly Aunt Bee types or leather-skinned biker mamas. Also a few heavy smokers who look like Keith Richards. And nine out of ten of them are politically and socially far to the right of me.

I emailed a half-dozen or so members; most didn't respond.

So I'm now close to viewing OKCupid as an interesting experiment nearing its conclusion.

That cranked-up libido vibe I was experiencing in August has completely run its course, and I'm frankly about as horny as a damp washcloth. My new stronger hypertension medication is probably contributing to that.

To tell the truth, it's more of a relief than an annoyance. There's something to be said for just not giving a damn.

Eating

I'm not sure if I mentioned this before.

I literally cannot eat like I used to. My appetite has been gradually dwindling for a couple of years now. I eat breakfast every morning, usually consisting of a ground sirloin patty, tomato slices and Egg Beaters and toast or maybe a biscuit.

And that pretty much holds me for the whole day. I may eat some sort of snack later in the day, or a bowl of soup. But I have to be careful what I eat after breakfast, because it's easy for me to feel bloated or weighted down.

I just ate a roast beef sandwich and a medium-sized milkshake, and I feel like I've devoured a whole holiday turkey. I may just lie down and sleep for awhile.

Just two rooms

My central heat went out a few months ago. The heater and the air conditioner work, but the fan that moves the air through the house has stopped (again). I'm sure I'll get someone out to fix it eventually, but in the meantime, I've bought two electric space heaters. One is in the master bedroom and the orher is in the den.

These two rooms are adjacent, and are the only rooms I use daily, anyway. I've got both heaters cranked up pretty high, and I'm keeping those two rooms toasty warm.

I used to like a cool house in the winter, but my knees and fingers don't handle the cold as well as they once did.

i'm guessing that cost-wise, this will work out about the same.

Sorry for the confusion

I decided that at least a couple of people were owed a direct apology, so I got back on to OKCupid long enough to write it:

I dropped out of sight rather abruptly, and I felt that a few people, including you, deserved some kind of explanation.

One thing I've learned from this experience is that a person can write a self-description that is factually correct, entirely accurate, with 90-day-old pictures, and is still in some vague way dishonest.

I did not set out to deliberately deceive anyone. But the first person I fooled was myself, and once that happened, others were bound to be pulled in as well.

The profile I started with here was fairly straightforward and vanilla. Then I tweaked, edited, cut-and-pasted, and finally realized that my profile, while entertaining, was more the man I wish I were than the man I actually am.

I know this is what everyone does. We all want to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative, as the song says. But I feel like I crossed a line along the way.

Anyway, there's a guy out there who sort of resembles this zenidiot person, and that guy is me. But zenidiot himself is probably as much gloss as reality.

Sorry for the confusion.

mcarp
sort of like zenidiot, but not quite

Of course, in the spirit of my continual introspection and second- and third-guessing of myself, I have questions.

I'm happy with what I wrote. I think I hit the right note, being candid without being melodramatic or maudlin.

But I'm not sure what my motives are for doing it. Am I genuinely regretful for misrepresenting myself, or is this in itself yet another misrepresentation? Am I just playing head games with myself again?

Sometimes you just have to stop analyzing and go, and deal with the consequences as they happen.

It's all about me, dammit.

This blog is about me.

Nothing else; just me.

There are plenty of other blogs out there about politics, religion, metaphysics, social sciences and so on. I see no reason to duplicate the efforts of people who write about these things with more clarity and precision than I could offer.

When I wrote frequently about Zen and Taoism, I was writing mostly about my own experience with it. There are a lot of other blogs out there written by ordained Zen and Taoist teachers, priests and monks who are more knowledgeable than I about the general principles.

Since this blog is about me, it is going to be, for the most part, a blog about what I think day-to-day, good or bad. It's always been that. What else would it be?

If you are able to read this blog, you are able to start one of your own. Blogger, Tumblr and Wordpress cost nothing. If you want a blog about international affairs, kundalini energy, volunteerism, frequencies, clouds, motor oil, whatever, feel free to start one.

In the meantime, this blog will continue to probe the fascinating mysteries of the subject I know best, and which intrigues me above all others.

And that's me.

A Coffee Date

Well, I have a coffee date Saturday. I won't offer any details, because it's very premature to speculate. I will say that she's not in my circle of immediate friends, but she does already know a bit about me. And she's met me, so I don't have to be concerned about the "OMG you're huge!" shock that I worried Carol and Olivia would experience.

(There were a few other women, btw, who wanted to meet me, but I never found out their names. It was a very ego-boosting experience, until I realized they were interested in a fictional character, and not the real me.)

The Hamster Wheel

I had dinner with Blogblah! last night (chicken fried steak at Beverly's), and I was trying to explain to him my approach to dating and romance. I hit upon this analogy:

When I meet someone in whom I'm interested, I jump into my hamster wheel. And then I run and run and run and run and run, 'round and 'round, going nowhere, accomplishing nothing but wearing myself out.

Then, when I'm exhausted, I fall out of the wheel and slump to the floor, gasping for breath. And that's the end of it for awhile.

That's pretty much what that whole online dating experience was about.

No, I don't want to date!

From mindovermary's comment in a previous post:

Arggg! Whatever. MCARP, do you WANT to date? I think that is the question.

NO, I don't want to date! Does anybody?!

What I want is to meet someone – at the coffee shop, at a party, somewhere – and hit it off right away. She's very smart and brainy, cute but not glamorous or breathtakingly beautiful, a little eccentric, a little kinky, likes peace and quiet, eastern philosophy, etc. Likes me but isn't suffocatingly devoted to me. Doesn't want to make me over. Isn't offput by my clothes or my Dan Blocker-like physique. That's what I want. I've made some friends that way, but nothing else.

I guess it has worked that way for some people, but not for me. So, I'm back to 'dating', which I consider a piss-poor marketing-driven substitute for my preferred course.

More Tuesday thoughts

When a woman tells me I'm good-looking, or clever, or funny, my immediate instinctive response is that they're just trying to be charitable, and help me boost what they see as my low self-esteem.

On the other hand, when a woman tells me I'm fat, or slow, or addicted to Moon Pies, or a wrinkled mess, or negative, or repulsive (to use a few actual observations), I tend to believe they mean it, because what other motive would a person have for saying things like that? And if they tell me I'm boring, which I've heard more than any other criticism, I'm especially inclined to believe they mean it.

And then I think I have to win them over and earn their affection. It didn't work with my mother, so god knows why I think it would work with anyone else. Too many movies, probably.

I remember one evening a few years ago when a group of us were at dinner at a BBQ place. There was a lull in the conversation, and Ms. HRP, who was sitting across the table from me, suddenly asked, "So why aren't you dating? Why don't you have a girlfriend?"

I opened my mouth to answer. I knew I shouldn't. I knew the best thing to do was deflect the questions with a noncommittal answer, but the words were already spilling out of my mouth even as I was regretting what they were.

It was exactly like those few seconds between the time your car first fishtails out of control on an icy street, and the moment it slams into the light pole twenty feet away. You know what's going to happen, and the wait seems interminable. It feels like you could read 'Atlas Shrugged' in the time it takes for your car to finally slide into the pole and stop with a bone-jarring 'wham!'

I had been through this scenario enough times to know what was next. I would offer my answer, which I was trying to extemporize as even as I was thinking this, and she would reply, "Well, I'll tell you what I think..."

And then she would offer me a list of all the shortcomings and inadequacies she saw in me – for my own good, of course.

Fortunately, someone else jumped in and cut off my answer before I could get it out, and directed the conversation elsewhere. Thank you for nudging my car away from that light pole.

But yes, I have some emotional investment in all these criticisms. Nobody has pointed out my shortcomings more frequently than I have myself. I frequently make jokes about my own image as a lazy, unmotivated slug, just the way Dean Martin used to make jokes about his boozy, carefree image.

A random thought

I don't know what made me remember this:

I was probably in the sixth or seventh grade when I had a conversation with my mother's parents about my reading habits. By this time, I had been reading science fiction for years. I was reading Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Wells, Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Theodore Sturgeon and others.

So there I was, somewhere between eleven and thirteen years old, already reading at an adult level – as I had been for years – and I made the mistake of mentioning science fiction.

And my grandmother fixed me with her frosty, one-Vulcan-eyebrow-raised stare, and said, "You should be reading hard science."

At the time, I didn't think much of it, except that I recognized it as a typical response for her. Looking back on it, I think, 'Hey, your eleven-year-old grandson was already reading at college level. A little encouragement and praise would have been appropriate.'

But the way my grandparents saw it, Mom and Dad fucked up by not having someone standing by in the delivery room at my birth with an SAT prep kit, ready to start drilling me with questions and answers as soon as my head popped out of the birth canal. Nothing I did would ever have been good enough.

God knows what it was like for my mother growing up in their house.

In which I offer a rare comment about my mother

I'll try to address all the recent comments, but let me start with this one, because it was the first posted, and because I want to talk about it.

Of course, I don't know you at all in real life. But my sense from knowing you online for as long as I have -- 15 years? -- is that in earliest, earliest childhood you learned to equate love with neglect, presumably because your mother neglected you. And this means that unless you take the time to retrain yourself psychologically, you're always going to equate the feeling of love with the feeling of being neglected. If there's a chance you won't be neglected, i.e. ignored, then you can't feel attachment.

You know, it IS pretty fun to be part of a team. Intimacy is really a wonderful thing. So I hope this is a conundrum you work through and I also apologize if I'm being presumptuous. You know me -- the angel who rushes in where fools fear to tread, etc.

Patrizia is one of my friends of many years from The Well. I know I've said this before, but it bears repeating: Patrizia, along with Celia, Catie, Donna, Dennis and a few other Well friends, helped keep me from going completely down the drain during the worst months of my adult life in 1998-99. I have never met any of them, but I feel they are as much my friends as anyone I know from the Red Cup. In fact, The Well was my Red Cup for many years.

What Patrizia says is absolutely correct. I know I've discussed this with a lot of you individually, and I've written about it here.

There are few things drearier than a grown man still whinging about his mother, so I'll try to keep this to a minimum. But as you know, Mom and I were never close, and we ended up parting ways when I was a teenager.

And because of the way she dealt with me, as Patrizia notes, I tend to be attracted to women who ignore me, neglect me, or treat me with mild contempt. (And I don't have a whole lot of trouble finding them.)

Patrizia didn't mention this part, but I think it's also true: women who treat me with what most would consider a normal level of affection or interest seem clinging and suffocating to me.

Similarly, large, normal families overwhelm me. I sort of had the notion in the back of my mind that if I ever had a LTR again, it would be with someone whose parents were either dead or lived clear across the country. I've had the experience of having in-laws hovering over me, and once is certainly enough.

That's it for now. More to come.

The pattern

There is a pattern that has emerged with these incidents over the years.

1) I become attracted to someone, but she's not interested. Or in this case, I find women who are interested, but it's in part because I've misrepresented myself.

2) I get feedback from my friends as to what I did wrong, and criticize myself for having repeated the same mistakes. The feedback I get from my friends varies. Men and married women are generally supportive and encourage me to keep trying; unmarried women are usually, but not always, less charitable. They criticize my appearance, personality, spiritual beliefs and hobbies, but not in that order. The single most frequent feedback I get from my unarried female friends is that I'm 'boring'. More recently, I've also heard that I'm 'too old' — even from women my own age.

3) I stress and ponder and self-examine until I'm drained by it. In the end, I know nothing more than I did at the outset. No new facts are revealed or additional wisdom received.

4) Disgusted and embarrassed by my own behavior, I just put the whole thing on a shelf and forget about it for a couple of years.

Insert definition of insanity here.

Early Monday morning

I had been viewing my online dating problem as one of fairly and honestly describing myself. But I think the problem may have been that I put myself in a position where I was required to describe myself at all. At that point, everything became about how tall I am, how much I weigh, what color my eyes and hair are, etc.

What is all that stuff? Is it anything other than trying to come up with a collection of labels to represent the sack of meat that supports the concept of the mind of mcarp — labels whose indicator of accuracy is whether other people agree with them?

Tremendous mental and emotional energy was expended trying to form a concept of myself that somehow reconciles the conflicting concepts others have of me — and in the end it's basically just electrons bouncing around in various persons' skulls.

It was better left alone right from the start.

When I was saner

Just a year and a half ago, my life was much saner than it is now. I was holed up most of the day in my back bedroom, reading Zen poetry while incense burned on a meditation altar.

Ms. HRP had left town and disappeared out of my life.

I was still wistfully remembering Ms. Willowy and Ethereal from time to time, but I wasn't obsessing about dating web site profiles and who answered or didn't answer my winks, bleeps and blips.

I had briefly transcended lust and craving and neediness.

I wish I could rewind to that point, but of course, I can't. There's no going backward, only forward.

The past week's worth of postings reads in large part like the rantings of a disturbed, dysfunctional person. If this OKCupid stuff can evoke this much angst and despair in me, maybe that in itself is sufficient evidence that I ought to stay away from it.

It seems like I was on a much steadier footing when I focused on Zen and Taoism, and left love and romance to the people who know what they're doing.

Profile vs Person redux

Another coinkydink: just moments ago, in the course of trying to find someone else on Facebook, I stumbled across the woman I described in the post Profile vs Person.

We have 31 Facebook friends in common, which sort of reinforces my original notion back in November that although I didn't recognize her, she recognized me, and that's why she didn't answer me.

Try again?

Now that I've had some time to process my crisis of conscience regarding my OKCupid profile, I'm thinking about giving it another try. This is not to say that I'm actually ready to do it, only that I'm trying to make an adult, rational decision about it.

There is a certain challenge to be considered, and that is the challenge of writing a description of myself that is both accurate and honest.

The single biggest hurdle, at least from my perspective, is conveying that while I am not a Michael Moore or John Candy-sized man, I am not slender or hipster-sized or elegantly metrosexual.

I'm thinking that maybe what I will do is include some of those older photos that show me in groups of people, and say, 'Look, these are older pics, but I'm including them because I want you to see exactly how I look in relation to most other people, and not be unpleasantly surprised if you meet me and find I'm not built like DiCaprio or Mick Jagger or whomever.'

I was thinking this evening about Charles Bukowski, a much more gifted writer and intellect than myself, but likewise inhabiting a physically unappealing body. He was, in fact, a lot uglier than I am. Of course, he didn't have to deal with online dating.

Well, I may do this and I may not. I'm undecided.

Growing up crazy

I won't presume to make myself a posthumous spokesperson for dzaster, but I will say this based upon my own experience:

When you grow up in a crazy household, you go out into the world armed with a set of responses to various situations which are themselves crazy. It's like you're taking the field with a playbook completely different from the one the other players have memorized. Of course, you don't know that. All you know is that when you do what you think you're supposed to do, everyone looks at you like you're crazy, and you get into trouble without knowing why.

If you're lucky, a teacher or other adult recognizes this behavior during your childhood and knows how to get you a copy of the correct playbook. If you're not lucky, the grownups respond the same way your classmates do, and you're ostracized at all levels.

By the time you reach adulthood, you feel like you can't trust most people. The only ones you do trust are the ones who are as crazy as your own parents were. You get some short-term comfort, because your bizarre responses to situations don't raise an eyebrow with them, but in the long term, your life remains in chaos because your most trusted friends and confidants are as crazy as you are.

It was mostly luck that I ended up getting into therapy at age 45 and discovering at long last why my life had always been so screwed up. Forty-five is pretty late in the game to start getting help, but it's better than never doing it at all.

The people you know who seem weird and eccentric mostly know, I think, that they are seen as weird and eccentric. But they may not know why. They just keep doing the only things they know to do, which are the things they were taught in childhood to do.

And even when you know, it can be difficult and painful to break the habitual patterns of a lifetime of behavior. Sometimes, the disdain of society seems preferable to the tumult of trying to adapt.

dzaster

Some of you will recall a woman who occasionally commented here under the pseudonym 'dzaster'. She also occasionally posted as 'anonymous' or 'anonymous x'. Among her many comments was her story about her airplane encounter with Stevie Nicks.

As unpleasant as my upbringing may have been, I can tell you that dzaster's was far worse. The fact that she was functional in any way, shape or form was a tribute to her own strength and tenacity. But I knew from our frequent long talks that daily living was an incredible struggle for her, and that she constantly fought the temptation to end it.

She was, in fact, obsessed with death in a way that I have never seen in any other person.

A couple of years ago, she walked away from the job she had held for years as an accountant/majordomo/fixer for a local business tycoon, moved to Arizona, and reinvented herself.

From all accounts it seemed to be a success. She frequently wrote in email about how much happier and saner her life was in the desert.

I learned last night that dzaster died in mid-July, just a few days before her 51st birthday. I don't know any specifics. I hope that she had some inner peace and happiness in those Arizona years.

An afterthought

In the post titled 'Hail, Fredonia' (scroll down a little; I'm too lazy to link), I concluded with the sentence,"There are some things worse than being alone, and [being with her] would definitely be one of them."

Which raises an interesting question: would being with me be worse than being alone?

Profile vs person

When I was doing the online dating thing, the first woman who piqued my interest was a woman who called herself 'Okieleftgirl' or something similar. I wrote something about her here.

Her profile was very close to what I would have written myself, if I could have written a profile for a woman I wanted to meet.

I winked at her, but she didn't respond. I sent her a follow-up email, and she didn't respond. Of course, that made her all the more intriguing, but I let it go after that.

She walked into the coffee shop this morning. I don't think she noticed me there, and I certainly didn't try to talk to her.

But I was struck by how different she seemed in person. In fact, it took me a couple of minutes to make the connection. Her hipsterish son, who appears in one of her profile photos, was with her. If he hadn't been there, I don't think I would have realized she was the same person.

First of all she was quite a bit shorter than I had imagined her. Secondly, she appeared older. I don't think she had deliberately used old photos in her profile; I know from my own experience that even current photos can present a misleading image.

But the main difference was that she seemed so uptight. Her posture and body language were very rigid. She seemed to have her teeth clenched whenever she talked. She looked like someone who has a very hard time relaxing, which means that she and I would have a hard time finding common ground. She looked utterly humorless.

So, I can let that fantasy image go now.

Hail, Fredonia

So when I was having my mildly manic episode and was talking about dating again, at least three different people suggested, "Why don't you ask out/hook up with Fredonia?"

'Fredonia', is, of course, a pseudonym I have employed to avoid embarrassing anyone besides myself.

'Fredonia' is a woman whom I find so obnoxious, so brassy, so self-absorbed, so completely prone to monopolizing conversations that I have actually gotten up and left the room when she has entered.

I can imagine only two reasons why anyone would suggest a mcarp/Fredonia union: either they think we're equally obnoxious, and therefore might cancel each other out or achieve some sort of obnoxiousness synergy; or they think she's so desperate to get laid she might even give a big slab of lard like me a chance.

Either way, it's not going to happen. There are some things worse than being alone, and that would definitely be one of them.

Saturday morning

There sure is a lot of stuff going on that isn't about me.

Meditation music

The meditation music is back on for the first time in four months.

I hope to be back to 'normal' soon.

Serotonin and diarrhea

From the TMI department, I suppose... but I did some Googling this evening, and there is a documented connection between serotonin release and diarrhea. So when you see that little placard that says, "I'm so happy I could just shit..." well, it's true.

Depressed again — thank god

I can look back now at that August morning when I awoke with new clarity, creative drive and libido — not to mention diarrhea — and see that I was experiencing some sort of serotonin spike that temporarily lifted my depression.

As is always the case, the episode ended. In this case, it took more than 100 days, which is unusually long for me. Normally these last one to three weeks, and I recognize them as they are happening.

One thing I will say for my depression: it prevents me from doing impulsive things I later regret. The whole regrettable OKCupid episode is very similar to the kinds of embarrassing behavior — often involving women — I've exhibited during past spells of non-depression.

And the 'zenidiot' persona was sort of a representation of me in my non-depressed state.

Still, some good came of this non-depression episode. I seem to have finally disconnected myself from Ms. Willowy and Ethereal. A couple of other unhealthy, neediness-based relationships ended as well. The online dating fiasco is the only thing that happened that I wish I could undo.

So, all in all, it could have been much worse. I have done some things in previous non-depressed states that had far-reaching consequences.

I used to view depression as being like a black cloud hanging over my head, or a heavy rock pressing down on my chest. Now, it's more like an old comfy blanket from childhood, frayed at the edges and threadbare in spots, but still safe and warm. I can cover my feet, wrap it around my shoulders, pull it up over my head and snuggle up in it. It keeps me out of trouble.

Music

Y'know, I think my emotional state was better when I was lulled into a semi-stupor by the meditation music. I'm going to turn it back on tomorrow.

Ritual self-abuse

I tried to discuss the economy with three fundamentalist Christians today.