The Last Stand: Part One

This is part one of a two part post of an excerpt from my manuscript. This took place last fall. The events described were a damned skippy exemplification of why electronic communication is a poor, awkward, and very confusion way to try to start dating someone. Especially a girl that has the idea that "talking" is kind of a human thing that we do (most girls feel this way).

The Age of Celibacy and Boredom is concept you must be familiar with in order to not be perplexed by this piece. Basis of concept: If a man wouldn’t call me on the phone, he wasn’t getting a date out of me. Also, just because he got a date out of me, didn’t mean I would fuck him (this part was extremely difficult for me to commit to.)

Steven started out as a very frustrating online interaction. His emails were short and hardly contained anything worth reading. Things like, “I’m working, then going to soccer…” He had originally contacted me, via an electronic emoticon “wink” on Salon.com. I reciprocated with said emoticon “wink” because his profile lent me to believe he could be quite cute in person and he appeared to have a stout sense of humor. At around the third or fourth short and boring email, I asked him, “so what are you hoping to find on here?” Generally this is a question reserved for first date face-to-face interactions, if in fact there is no phone call to precede a face-to-face interaction. But I was getting antsy as hell, with no resolution or determination of exactly what the fuck this communication was supposed to generate for either Steve, or myself. He replied, after about a two day hiatus, “Oh I don’t know, just friends I guess.”

He was being all hipster and wearing funny and ironic, or just straight up funny, shirts in all his photos. His profile contained movie quotes, as did mine. It was also very clear from his profile that he spent a lot of time in the gym or otherwise perfecting his physique. This was reassuring and a welcome change of pace from my past relationship.

I hate to let anything go without a fight. Though I fight smart and with my wits, not hard and with brute force or demands. I was clearly sensing a major disconnect via Salon.com email. I could not discern why Steven didn’t want to give out much, or any, information of any conversational or trivial use to me via email. After all, that’s kind of the strategic idea. You get all the small talk out of the way so that you can get to larger ideologies and issues and feeling out each other’s personalities (I later realized that this is total shit.) So I went for a last ditch suggestion to salvage this online interaction: “Would you like to entertain me whilst at work and talk on instant messenger?”

By George, for some reason that was just the ticket. Steven’s volume of communication seemed to flourish like blackberry plants in pig shit. All of a sudden we were instant messaging all day, nearly every day, at work. His online disposition didn’t enamor me, as I had experienced with a few individuals in the past. Though this was mostly in the days of MakeOutClub.com, when there wasn’t such an intense presumption of a romantic relationship. People, with strong communication skills and a sense of self, do have the ability to express their personality online. This is a very small subset of the American populous, which by and large is practically unable to read with deep comprehension (at an eight grade level) let alone write with deep comprehension and analytical ability. Additionally, we aren’t acutely aware of ourselves, ever. We miss certain nuances that the neurons in the brains of those around us to discern and compute into an ending description and compartmentalization of who we each are. Even if personality can be expressed, a great deal if who we each are is still missed: appearance, body language, facial expressions, touch and eye contact.

So I continued talking to Steven on a regular basis. A basic tenet of the Age of Celibacy and Boredom is that I would not ask a boy out. He was required to ask me out, or there wouldn’t be any outing at all, whatsoever. This had so far panned out with Andy and Chris, producing disappointing results. Nevertheless, I didn’t believe that I had yet garnered enough participants in this experiment, so I persevered with Steve. Not asking a snippet about going out anywhere or speaking with any other communication device other than instant messenger and the occasional text.

This was around the time that I was to depart for beloved literary motherland, England. Steven was aware of this trip and he had also visited many of the sites that I was to visit approximately three years earlier. He had loads of advice for me, which I appreciated. I also appreciated the fact that the trip to England was such a convenient and intriguing conversation starter.

One day whilst eating lunch with my boss, Renee, we were discussing this book concept. I happened to be speaking of the utter discontent I was feeling with the online dating process, but primarily the method of communication that seemed to ensue by default. She encouraged me to start writing about it, as it would obviously be therapeutic, and she always was aware of how socially analytical I am. Social analysis, being our jobs as marketers, was one of our chief conversation points at most events and meetings. Renee said to me, “you know, the real irony of your whole situation is that you’re never going to find a man you want by the way you’re going about it. You’ll only find one you want as a result of writing this book.” She was, and will continue to be, entirely correct. She’s my Nostradamus.

While devouring my BBQ chicken salad in a Manhattan Beach chain restaurant, I received a text from Steve. He enquired:

“Would you get an Chelsea FC scarf for me while you are in England? I’ll pay you back.”

I got all animated with my hand motions, as I often do when I am frustrated or otherwise intrigued and ready to jump into a fit of sarcasm and ranting and said, “You are not gonna believe this! That guy just texted me to ask me to buy him a scarf in England.”

Renee replied, “you should tell him he can buy his own on this thing called the internet.”

I did. Renee’s always right. Plus her jab at the fact that this guy is too damned familiar at the internet was fucking hilarious.

Steven replied to my quip with, “I know, but I’d rather get it from someone awesome.”
I relayed this to Renee. Ending the quotation with, “He doesn’t know that I am awesome. How can he know that? He’s never met me.”

Renee said, “Well, he gets a few points I guess.”

I see his point, it was kind of adorable in a way too shy and completely not assertive kind of way. Renee and I were both pretty lukewarm on the whole thing, solely because it was via text. To ask a favor such as that, a phone call would have been appropriate and appreciated. Especially since I had never spoken to the fellow on the phone before.

I bought Steven the damn scarf under the Westminster Bridge in London. I went on a Thames River boat tour that day. It was colder than a witch’s tit. I wore the scarf all day. I needed it in the brisk London hurricane force winds. Though once in the Tube, I probably perspired all over it. It gets quite balmy down there.

When I returned to Los Angeles from England, I was still enduring this purgatory of instant messenger conversations with Steven, as well as allowing a few other email conversations generated from “winks” on Salon.com to percolate. No conversations of much substance ever occurred on instant messenger with Steven. I already had it in my brain that he was just going to be one of those names without a real face that would just exist in my instant messenger buddy list. I’d never meet the person, they’d just exist for periodic entertainment and distraction from whatever I was doing. Be it work, being drunk, being generally morose, whatever. He would just be a name, because the stage was set for absolutely no expectations and a platonic relationship. I wondered how many times men regarded me as “just a name”.