Simultaneously Sentimental & Skeptical

Aperitif: a light follow-up on the palindrome post.

Entree: Desperate times call for desperate measures. Like, when you’re short on materials and you need to make a scarf, you use your “desperate measuring tape” to make you feel like it will be long enough, when actually it’s neither thick, long, nor wide enough (remember, we’re talking about a scarf here). So I posted a personal ad on craigslist – which you can read here for another couples weeks if you like – which I’d like to think is less desperate than it is modern. I am a man of the times. Here is my internet personal ad, hear me roar. It’s a good ad. I put a lot of thought into it. I’m a decent writer. It contains a lot of who I am, and if you get my sense of humor, it’s even pretty funny. I sat back and waited for the replies to roll in. Soon, I knew, I’d be fighting girls off with a stick, and Keira would be calling me to have coffee with her while she was in town for some red-carpet event or another.

Well, so far it hasn’t gone quite as planned. I have gotten multiple responses. By multiple, I mean two. I understand that the tone of my ad is fairly intellectual, so I immediately scared away all the vacuous rain-bunnies that the soggy northwest has to offer. Still, are there only two girls out there who read Craigslist, have an odd sense of humor, and are looking for a nice guy? The funny thing is, both responses I received were in response to my speaking French. I’d pretty much ruled out my French skills as a way to meet girls since, oh, High School when I met Helena Teddergreen in French class my freshman year but was entirely too flustered (and too much of a dork) to talk to her. Besides which, she was like two grades ahead of me and in High School that’s a super-big deal. That and the fact that during my stay in France there were no French girls who fell immediately for my moody and sophisticated American demeanor pretty much ruled out French as a valid method of seduction. Maybe I shouldn’t have crossed it off my list so soon.

One of the respondent lives in Tacoma, and did nothing more than invite me to the TacomaCityFrenchUp! picnic on July 20th. Not with her, just in general. I emailed her back, but she hasn’t yet responded. The other respondent lives in Seattle, and so far has been mostly restrained and reticent in our correspondence. It’s hard to get excited about meeting someone when getting them to tell you about themselves is like pulling teeth. Granted, we are strangers, but there’s a certain social contract involved with placing personal ads, and with answering them, that implies a level of voluntary information sharing. Perhaps La Francaise from Tacoma will email me again, and I’ll go to that picnic. Perhaps I’ll drive to Seattle and meet Ms. Taciturn. In either case, my expectation for true love via internet personal ad is greatly diminished.

Though I’m still waiting for Keira to call.

Digestif: In the meantime, I went to the swing dance last night after playing swing hookie for a couple weeks. My friend Lee was in town DJing, and I had a blast dancing and chatting with people. I did meet someone new, who seems very nice. We even exchanged phone numbers. It just goes to show that the best way to meet people is, and probably always will be, to go out and do things you enjoy. The rest will follow.