Somebody else will have to go out there

Sometimes, to amuse myself, I pick up Trout Fishing in America and flip to a random chapter. Tonight I flipped to the perfect chapter. It is called “Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity” and in it Brautigan describes a trout fishing diary he found that was written by a boy who died of a strange ailment in his youth. The last page of the diary had an epitaph, which Brautigan paraphrased this way:

“I’ve had it.

I’ve gone fishing now for seven years

and I haven’t caught a single trout.

I’ve lost every trout I ever hooked.

They either jump off

or twist off.

or squirm off

or break my leader

or flop off

or fuck off.

I have never even gotten my hands on a

trout.

For all its frustration,

I believe it was an interesting experiment

in total loss

but next year somebody else

will have to go trout fishing.

Somebody else will have to go

out there.”

It’s rare that I find something simultaneously hilarious and poignant, but this did it. I’ve re-read it many times.

“Mrs. Right could be inside this email.”

I’m just about ready to quit online dating.

I used to enjoy waking up to see what little gifts have been left for me in my inbox, but now every morning I wake up to see what disasters eHarmony has wrought.

To give you a taste of what I mean, here is a sampling of recent subject lines:

Meet Kristin: She could be what you've been looking for.
Meet Ashley and see what a difference compatibility can make.
Meet Aubrey and see if you find a spark.
Meet Laura: We've matched you on the important areas of life.
Meet Heather: Someone as unique as you are.
Mrs. Right could be inside this email - here is today's match!

To you, that may seem like a little harmless cheesiness, but to me it represents everything that is despicable about online dating.

They’re right, of course: Mrs. Right’s smiling face *could* be inside this electronic message, since, after all, we match on up to 29 proven dimensions of compatibility. You see, eHarmony has done the hard work for us. They’ve used Science! and Data! and Personality Profiles! to rigorously determine whether the two of y’all got a snowball’s chance. That’s the service you’re paying for, they say.

But what if I don’t want Mrs. Right to appear in my inbox? What if I’m just looking for an available girl to have a cup of coffee with, or maybe to take our dogs for a walk? What if Mrs. Right can’t be found even with 29 proven dimensions of compatibility? What if Mrs. Right can’t even be “found”?

It’s too much pressure. If having a cup of coffee feels like interviewing wife candidates, then my coffee is going to taste like shit. The conversation likewise.

I can understand why eHarmony takes this approach, because, in a way, they are trying to solve the biggest problem we cats in developed countries face. To see what I mean, consider this question:

If you could have one of these and only one of these, which would you choose?:

Live to 170 years old, die peacefully in your sleep, have a good, rewarding job, and have a salary of $1,000,000 a month.

OR

Have a spouse whom you love and who loves you in return.

If you even had to think about that, then you must really want some good spouse action. I smell a business opportunity. And so did eHarmony.

I imagine some suburban white kids sitting in a conference room, drawing on their white boards with excitement. We can solve this problem! We’ll set up an online marketplace! Singles can mingle from the comfort of their keyboards! And we’ll add a Matching Algorithm® to filter out the likeliest Mrs. Rights!

Really, though, guys, I just want coffee.

In fairness, not all dating sites are this way. OkCupid is much less bad in this regard, but OkCupid has its own set of problems. In the end, I don’t think it’s a problem of site design as much as it is a problem with the theory of online dating, and I’ve barely begun to complain about all the things that bother me.

Offline dating is hard enough. The hardest thing, I think, is being emotionally detached enough that you are able to maintain some level of mental stability while at the same time being emotionally involved enough that you have genuine interest in this person and make yourself vulnerable in order to show it.

But that’s a topic for another day.

"The error of all advertising and most culture"

Contrary to received wisdom, there is no escape from the dismal condition of boredom via further stimulation of desire.

-- Mark Kingwell in the introduction to The Idler's Glossary.

Later in the same paragraph he writes this:

Boredom is desire stalled, the "paradoxical wish for a desire" as Adam Phillips has phrased it; the stall is a signal that something has gone wrong with desire, perhaps something big that we need to confront but which under current conditions we cannot.

Some visuals to accompany the last post

Hopefully this annotated photo (from October 2009) helps explain the events from the last post:



That's the before shot. Here are the after shots:

Irene scores a near miss

So this morning I’m just standing here, minding my business, playing my slow jams, recovering from a wild night of watching videos about sentient meat, when I hear popping noises outside my window.

They weren’t terribly loud. I didn’t think much of it. Just a few branches shaken loose by Irene’s modest gusts, I figured.

I started getting concerned when I noticed that the power lines running into my house were making Sin waves.

My first thought, honest to Buddha, was “oh shit, the power is going to go out and I’m going to lose my slow jams.”

I didn’t stop to consider what might have been making the power lines dance, because there was no time for that. The tree was already mid-tumble. Coming into view beyond the power lines was the giant green mess free-falling in the direction of my hopeless sedan.

The sedan at this point is parked under a rusty old carport that has the appearance of having barely survived the 70’s. As the tree makes impact, the back half of the carport’s old metal roof is peeled like an upsidedown sardine can. Unlike the lightning bolt event from a couple of days ago, this was not a spiritual experience. I didn’t feel stunned or frightened; just confused. And a little amused.

Full stop: It’s important to understand that I am in no way classifiable as a morning person. If a life-threating event requiring a quick response occurs before, say, 11:30 AM, then… well… I’m probably a goner. Likewise, when a giant tree topples over a stone’s throw from where I’m standing, narrowly missing the power lines, the house, and, it follows, Me!, my morning persona did not know what else to do but to remain standing there in my undies and to softly chuckle about the shit that just went down.

It wasn’t until the neighbor came over and rang the doorbell that I put on a shirt and went outside. From my vantage inside the house, I couldn’t tell whether my little Civic had been totaled or not. There was a gnarled carport roof and lots of greenery obscuring my view. The neighbor and I navigated the maze of braches and eventually arrived at the spot where my car had been parked. Amazingly, except for a couple of white blemishes on the back of the trunk, all was perfectly fine. The Civic had survived and was no worse for the wear. The rustic carport saved the day.

As I write this at 3:28 PM, roughly 6 hours after the event, I still haven’t taken a shower and I’m starting to smell like it. I am grateful for the small army of chainsaw-wielding men that have made quick business of the fallen wood. I am grateful for my neighbors who all came out to check on my mental health status, and, least of all, I am grateful for my slow jams. And I am sad for the loss of an interesting tree.

In hindsight, I probably should’ve known this was coming. A couple of years ago, about 12 feet off the ground, this tree sprouted three cantaloupe-sized fungus-looking things. This probably was not the markings of the healthiest of trees, which was even more evident this morning when we saw the sad state of the tree’s internal affairs. These cantaloupe thingies were always the first thing I noticed when I pulled into the driveway. At first they were a brilliant orange, but like everything else, eventually became a rotten brown. The squirrels used to sit on these fungus balls to enjoy their afternoon snack. I always thought that’d be a comfortable place to sit, if I were a squirrel.

I don’t know why I’m telling you all this, except that it seems like a nice metaphor for something. I haven’t figure out what yet.

Sentient Meat

I have watched this video no fewer than six times since Xan shared it yesterday (originally from the Measure of Doubt blog):

“Love is just another name for what never gets old”

Here are, I think, the main points from Jonah Lehrer’s recent post called “Love is the Opposite of Underwear”:

Dreams do come true. But first we need to pick the right one.

One of the most deep seated features of the human mind is that it quickly takes things for granted, becoming numb to the predictable perceptions and pleasures of the world. Our brain is designed to be ungrateful, every pleasure a fleeting thing.

The only dreams worth pursuing are those that don’t bore us, even after we put in 10,000 hours of practice. They contain the kind of subtle thrills that don’t get old, that we don’t adapt to, that keep us motivated and interested for years and years at a time. Because that’s what it takes to succeed, to accomplish something interesting.

Don’t apologize for your obsession. Just be grateful you are obsessed with something, that you’ve found a goal worth getting gritty over. Because if your goals ever feel tedious, then you’re never going to put in the necessary work. Grit requires passion. Grit requires love. And love is just another name for what never gets old.

I’m a big fan of Jonah Lehrer, and Buddha knows I’m sympathetic to any arguments about pursuing interestingness, but this particular argument strikes me as dangerous.

I agree with this much:

1) You’ll be more successful with some projects than others.
2) Success requires sustained grit.
3) Sustained grit requires sustained interest.
4) The brain is an easily bored, ungrateful bitch.
5) There might be one or a few special projects that do not bore your brain over time.
Therefore, you’ll be more successful with those rare projects that do not bore your brain over time.

But with my mind currently being heavily occupied with online dating, I of course wanted to translate this to romantic relationships, which isn’t hard to do:

1) You’ll be more successful with some partners than others.
2) Success requires sustained grit.
3) Sustained grit requires sustained interest.
4) The brain is an easily bored, ungrateful bitch.
5) There might be one or a few special partners that do not bore your brain over time.
Therefore, you’ll be more successful with those rare partners that do not bore your brain over time.

The implication is that if your partner gets less interesting or less attractive over time, you probably chose the wrong partner, so you better start looking around for the “right” one.

It took me awhile to identify what I think is the problem with this, but once I found it, it seemed pretty obvious:

Successful relationships and probably even successful projects require more than sustained interest; more importantly, they require a commitment to work through all the myriad petty little unsexy things that constitute a typical day. They require that you not jump ship at the first signs of tedium or normality. They require a recognition that not even the rarest of projects or partners is interesting all the time, or even most of the time, and neither are you.

The obsessive brand of interest that characterizes being “in love” rarely or never lasts. If you expect it to, you are in trouble.

Obsessive interest is just a feeling. Feelings can be manifestations of love, and they can accompany it, but they are not what love is. At least not the important type.

C.S. Lewis said that the important kind of love – the kind of love experienced by two people who have been together for decades – is not merely a feeling but is "a deep unity, maintained by the will and deliberately strengthened by habit."

I’ll paraphrase David Foster Wallace again: “The really important kind of love involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about the other person and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.”

I’d change Jonah’s conclusion to this:

In looking for a partner (or project), one important consideration is whether they seem likely to remain interesting over time. But then, crucially, you’ve got to commit to them in all their human-ness and yours, recognizing that neither of you are likely to remain obsessively interesting to the other.

Logic that is actually funny

1) Babies are illogical.
2) Nobody is despised who can manage a crocodile.
3) Illogical persons are despised.
Therefore, babies cannot manage crocodiles.

And:

1) No interesting poems are unpopular among people of real taste.
2) No modern poetry is free from affection.
3) All your poems are on the subject of soap bubbles.
4) No affected poetry is popular among people of taste.
5) Only a modern poem would be on the subject of soap bubbles.
Therefore, all your poems are uninteresting.

Both of these were pulled from Steve Martin’s Born Standing Up. (Fun fact: Steve Martin majored in philosophy.) Reminds me of this quote:

The construction and payoff of jokes and the construction and payoff of philosophical concepts are made out of the same stuff. They tease the mind in similar ways. That’s because philosophy and jokes proceed from the same impulse: to confound our sense of the way things are, to flip our worlds upside down, and to ferret out hidden, often uncomfortable, truths about life. What the philosopher calls an insight, the gagster calls a zinger.

I wouldn’t be opposed to reading a book, or at least a Tumblr, full of such logical funnies. In fact, I may start writing some myself.

I’m also reminded of this joke that Steven Landsburg and Xan shared:

Three logicians walk into a bar.

The bartender says: “Would any of you guys like a drink?”

The first logician says: “I don’t know.”

The second logician says: “I don’t know.”

The third logician says: “No.”

###

Other things from Steve Martin that made me laugh: His personal thank you note and his business card.

---

In the book, Martin said that this line, which he stole from a friend, saved his job on The Smothers Brothers:

It has been proven that more Americans watch television than any other appliance.

---

The thing that gave me the biggest laugh the past couple of days was this question that came up on OkCupid:

Under the right circumstances, would you allow a partner to lick your anus?

There’s something about prefacing this question with “under the right circumstances” that made this hilariously hard to answer.

The twin engines of human behavior

It’s scary once you start to scrutinize it. Probably 90 percent of our life decisions are powered by the twin engines of inertia and laziness.

-- A.J. Jacobs in The Guinea Pig Diaries.

When the power goes out

I had a spiritual experience last night. A magnificent feeling of awe swept over my soul and left me in a state of profound wonderment at the oneness of The Universe. I considered, for a moment, dropping my earthly possessions and enrolling in a monastery. And then I got back on OkCupid.

You see, the power went out. A thunderstorm was to blame. I didn’t realize it at first, but this was a once-a-year type of thunderstorm. One where the term “severe” is actually deserved.

I have never said this publicly because it’s so damn cheesy, but my very favorite existential pastime (right ahead of staring blankly out an airplane window) is sitting on the porch with my pup during a thunderstorm. With the power out and nothing else to do, this was of course where we’d be.

All was proceeding normally at first. Khan assumed his position in the corner, with his nose, as usual, sticking through the steel railing. 5 minutes or so pass, and while the rain and thunder are still pretty mild, Khan starts to behave unusually. He starts leaning against me and then standing behind me. Being dim, my reaction was, “aww, he wants to cuddle.”

He didn’t want to cuddle.

The rain started picking up and, with it, the thunder. It wasn’t long before the big one came. This mother was so loud that I wasn’t sure whether it was thunder or a thousand oak trees cracking at once. It was so close that you felt pretty sure that the bolt was going to come down right on top of you.

It did.

I didn’t catch where it landed. I just remember it being really, really bright.

The thunder and lightning combination was pretty spiritual stuff, but what really got me was Khan’s reaction. This being a dog who is intimidated by little girls and puddles, I might have expected him to shake uncontrollably and start frantically scratching at the door. But he did none of those things. Instead, his reaction at that moment was awe. I think that’s the best way to describe it.

Me, I was shaking uncontrollably and frantically scratching at the door. There was probably a little panting in there, too. I ripped open the door and made it half-way in before realizing that I had forgotten the pupster. I look back and see him still sitting there by the chair, gently sniffing the air, transfixed. I run over and grab him by the collar and pull him inside.

We share a brotherly moment from the safety of the couch. We huddle together and look at each other and then around the house and then out the window. Khan’s ears are perked and he’s sitting up tall. He looks worried, but curious.

As I write about this, I still feel remnants of butterflies. This was probably the scariest thing that has happened to Khan and me in our 4 years together, and yet his reaction was just so... perfect.

I don’t mean to give the impression that Khan was one cool customer. He wasn’t. He was visibly nervous. But you would be too if you just got lighteninged upon. Me, I was freaked the fuck out.

What hit me was his combination of nervousness and curiosity. It was like, “yeah, that was scary as shit, but really interesting, too.” I find this profound because I tend to think of fear as an emotion whose purpose is to make us cower away from scary stuff. Well, it did, sort of. There was definitely some propulsion to escape to a safe place. But his curiosity, rather than being superseded by fear, was magnified.

I’ll try to keep that in mind next time I’m fretting over health care reform.

***

The funny thing about the power going out is the mixture of reactions. When the lights first go out, my reaction is anger at the fact that my electronic comforts have just been unfairly taken from me. But by the end, when the lights come back on and all the clocks blink at me telling me to change them, I feel something that might be described as regret or sadness or disappointment. I’m not sure I’m ready to be back in the world of electronic comforts just yet.

Of course, any economist will tell you that you always have the *option* to turn off the lights any time you want, so don’t feel so down, bro. The primitive life awaits; all you need to do is stop paying the power bill.

But it’s not that I long for the primitive life, I don’t think. I’m more than happy to play my slow jams and to log back into OkCupid and see if that girl responded yet. I can find pleasure and stimulation and anticipation in abundance in the digital world. But sometimes there’s something kind of nice about having all of that good stuff unfairly taken from you.

Mark Foster and his peeps

I like music and all, but this one band keeps effing with my brain. I’m considering quitting.

I do not care to tell you how much I have listened to Foster the People the past few weeks. I’ll just say that Foster the People has spent more time penetrating my ear holes than all real life humans combined. And they only have one CD.

I will make no arguments for their awesomeness, because even I am unconvinced of their awesomeness. But I am convinced that they have wedged themselves thickly into some dopamine-producing part of my brain.

I can’t put my finger on anything that makes them different from any other band—but that’s precisely the problem! In Wikipedia, they are listed under the genres of neo-psychedelia(!), indie pop, indie rock, indie electronic, and indie dance. (Related hilarity: The most indie rocker of our time.) I’ve listened to their Pandora station for hours upon hours, and I have perused YouTube at wee hours when I should have been asleep, all in hopes of finding some more of that good stuff. And yet there is no other band I have found that more than vaguely resembles their sound. It’s like they are a gateway drug in a universe where no other drugs produce a high.

I’ve been obsessed with trying to figure out what it is that keeps me coming back. My current hypothesis is that it has to do with the drums, because nothing else about their music seems terribly interesting. The riffs are pretty simple, the vocals are unextraordinary, and the lyrics are, in places, juvenile. But there must be some pretty serious brain-teasing rhythmic violations embedded throughout, because otherwise I’d’ve been back listening to NPR by now. The drums are the likeliest perps because they are often quite intricate: in some songs it sounds like they might have two or even three drumsets going. (Being indie electronica, it’s mostly digital percussion, though.)

I can’t imagine that this obsessiveness will go on much longer, but if it does, then I need to start seriously considering whether music is deleterious to my health. If addiction is a disease, and if the rule of thumb for whether something has become an “addiction” is if you continue the behavior not for the pleasure but rather to avoid pain or discomfort, then I might soon have a disease.

I’ve.got.a.disease.of.music.y’all.

If you want a taste (or should I say, “wanna hit, mann”?), check out the song Life on the Nickel. It’s the best song with the worst chorus I’ve ever heard. (Just please don’t listen to it with computer speakers because that’s lame.)

You could say I’m an evil person for sharing this addictive substance with you, but I don’t believe it works that way. Preferences are highly personal. That’s not to say that there is no objective standard of “quality” – some music truly does suck – it’s just that the extent to which we enjoy a song or book or movie or person depends so disturbingly highly on context that if you become addicted to Foster the Peeps, then it’s probably your environment (and, to an extent, your genes) that is to blame, not me.

Or I could be wrong and therefore an evil-doing evil-doer. If so, you should be thankful that I haven’t even mentioned Van Morrison because hoo boy has that man got a hold of my heart.

We'll see how this one does...

Ambition and online dating

OkCupid’s match score has been surprisingly effective in filtering out the type of girls I might be interested in. The top matches, in terms of measurable attributes, seem quite good. But there’s just one little nagging thing that keeps bothering me.

Although I have no checklist of qualities I want in a lady, the femmes that turn up as highly matched almost invariably represent this profile: A graduate student who reads a lot, is unreligious, values family, enjoys the funnies, is less kinky than average, and is painfully ambitious.

It’s the painfully ambitious part that bothers me. I’ll explain in a second. First, some context is needed.

OkCupid also has what they call an enemy score, which shows you the people who are likely to be the worst matches for you. Again, although I have no checklist of qualities to avoid in a lady, the femmes that turn up as the worst matches almost invariably represent this profile: A girl whose ideal day is spent on the beach with ample cheap beer and whose ideal night has something to do with “crunk.” Her profile demonstrates a lack of interest in either capitalization or punctuation and not uncommonly her photo was taken with a cell phone camera in front of a mirror, often with a neck tilted and/or a suggestive purse-ing of lips. I’m not being judgy; just giving you the visual.

It seems that OkCupid has ordered my matches on a continuum from painfully pleasure-seeking to painfully ambitious, and it thinks my niche is on the ambitious end.

My problem/question is this: Why is there a continuum?

I have a theory that the most interesting and most likeable people are serious about both their work and their fun—but as joint, not separate, things. My parents were recently telling me about their favorite teacher in high school. Everyone agreed that his physics class was both the most difficult and the most enjoyable class they ever had. The teacher expected his students to learn a lot and in a short amount of time, but at the same time he expected them to have a hoot doing it. Why is this so rare and so hard to pull off? That’s probably one of the most important questions you can ask yourself.

But that was just a sidebar because I’m actually going in a different direction with this. Although people who emphasize both work and fun are rare and interesting people, I have a theory that the perfect match for me would be even rarer: someone who values neither.

Values probably isn’t the right word because my ideal match would value (or at least care about) both work and pleasure, but would keep both in what I would call a “healthy” perspective since, being perfect, they would of course regularly ask themselves questions like “what is there to be meaningfully ambitious about?” and “what’s the point of pleasure?”

What I really want (I think) is to see these words in a lady’s profile:

Life – including all my goals and all my feelings – is meaningless. But it’s interesting. Rather than pursuing achievements or feelings or godliness, I just want to be present in this mess. Not passively; actively. I’m not trying to make things better because I don’t know what “better” means. I just want to explore it and live in it while I’m still here. I want to experience happiness and wisdom and generosity and kindness, but not for their own sake. I want to experience them because, like depression and stupidity and anger and cruelty, they are part of the unruly tangle of life.

So, OkCupid, work on that.

In the meantime, some poor, ambitious girl may have to end up settling for me.

###

Postscript

Maybe I should marry Joan Didion:

I’m not telling you to make the world better, because I don’t think that progress is necessarily part of the package, I’m just telling you to live in it. Not just to endure it, not just to suffer it, not just to pass through it, but to live in it. To look at it. To try to get the picture. To live recklessly. To take chances. To make your own work and take pride in it. To seize the moment. And if you ask me why you should bother to do that, I could tell you that the grave’s a fine and private place, but none I think do there embrace. Nor do they sing there, or write, or argue, or see the tidal bore on the Amazon, or touch their children. And that’s what there is to do and get it while you can and good luck at it.

In what sense is death a bad thing?

I lost my biggest fan last week.

If anyone has loved me more than her (and if love is the sort of thing that can be measured and compared), then I haven’t felt it. Despite my rather impressive – or oppressive – collection of imperfections, this woman adored me. All it took was a semi-coherent noise in the area of my lips or even just a slightly expressive movement and she’d be aglow with interest. But I’ll never experience that again because now she’s under a pile of mud. With worms. Well, her shell of a body is. She is not really anywhere except in deteriorating memories and the invisible traits of her friends, children, and grandchildren.

To say that it hasn’t been easy would be an understatement. I learned, though, that my grief is mostly or entirely a product of how it’s framed. The more it’s framed in terms of things *I* lost – the adoration, the attention, the apple sauce and chocolate mousse pies, the Christmas Eves, the summers at the lake, the chance of her meeting my wife or children, her laugh, the things I could have and should have said – the more likely I am to lose it if a semi-melodic song comes anywhere near my ears.

But there is another and I would say better way of looking at it: What did *she* lose?

The answer is, I think, not much. Here’s Mark Rowlands:

In what sense is death a bad thing? Not for other people, but for the person who dies? In what sense would your death be a bad thing for you? Death, whatever else it is, is not something that occurs in a life. Death is the limit of a life; and the limit of a life is not something that can occur in that life any more than the limit of a visual field is something you see: you are aware of it precisely because of what you don’t see.

You could say that she lost her future, a future that included her granddaughter’s wedding next month, as well as many less exciting things like feeding tubes and morphine patches and hospice care.

I haven’t been actively trying to avoid grief – in fact, I’m openly skeptical of this “celebration of life” approach to death, thinking it awkward and fake – but since I’ve been monitoring my emotions at an almost unhealthy level this week, that’s sort of what has happened. I feel a twinge of sadness and I immediately start examining its foundations.

I’d let myself be a lot sadder if I could just come up with a good, unselfish reason to be so.

The antithesis of hope

What I learned was, in effect, the antithesis of religion. Religion always deals in hope. If you are a Christian or a Muslim, it is the hope that you will be worthy of heaven. If you are a Buddhist, it is the hope that you will attain release from the great wheel of life and death and so find nirvana. In the Judaeo-Christian religions, hope is even elevated into the primary virtue and renamed faith.

Hope is the used-car salesman of human existence; so friendly, so plausible. But you cannot rely on him. Time will take everything from us in the end. Everything we have acquired through talent, industry, and luck will be taken from us. Time takes our strength, our desires, our goals, our projects, our future, our happiness, and even our hope.

What is most important in your life is the you that remains when your hope runs out.

--Mark Rowlands again

Remembering

Episodic memory is just the flapping of wings. It is not particularly reliable at the best of times, and is the first to fade as our brains begin their long but inexorable descent into indolence. But there is another, deeper and more important way of remembering: a form of memory that no one ever thought to dignify with a name. This is the memory of a past that has written itself on you, in your character and in the life on which you bring that character to bear. You are not, at least not typically, aware of these memories; often they are not even the sorts of things of which you can be conscious. But they, more than anything else, make you what you are. These memories are exhibited in the decisions you make, the actions you take and the life you thereby live.

It is in our lives and not, fundamentally, in our conscious experiences that we find the memories of those who are gone. Our consciousness is fickle and not worthy of the task of remembering. The most important way of remembering someone is by being the person they made us – at least in part – and living the life they have helped shape.

-Mark Rowlands in The Philosopher and the Wolf

No posts this week.

Compete to win my $42

I started a contest on prizes.org daring people to pen an interesting and surprising metaphor.

It's going to be tough to win. Someone already posted this:

Messy, isn’t it?

I’m not good at naming favorites, except when it comes to books. That’s because my favorite book by a pretty wide margin is a psychedelic surrealist novella called Trout Fishing in America. It won my heart the moment I saw its cover, and it hasn’t let go since. I love it so much that I refuse to read anything else by Richard Brautigan because I want to believe that everything he writes is golden.

I am overhyping the book. It’s not that great. It’s not a masterpiece of writing or anything close to it. Chances are, if you picked it up, your reaction would be a big WTF. That’s understandable. To unromanticize it, the book is pretty much a drug-induced play on language by a California hippie.

But the play on language is so delicious. A couch likened to baby food? My heart just thumped.

Brautigan wrote one little line that has made me think more than any other, and it wasn’t from Trout Fishing in America. It was from his suicide note. The note simply said:

“Messy, isn’t it?”

I don’t know if there is such a thing as a great suicide note, but I can hardly imagine a better one than that.

At risk of over-analyzing, if it had instead been “Death is messy, isn’t it?”, that would have royally sucked. It would have been a sadistic finale to his shitty life. But I think Brautigan’s omission of a subject was intentional, and not just to save space.

I don’t like to use the word “life” because it includes everything from swimming around your mother’s uterus to being ejected with a filth of shit and fluids to spittle on adults’ shoulders as bacteria ride a mucus trail to your gut to pubic hair and parasites and cupcakes and first loves and ejaculate and karaoke and alcohol and puppies and cancer.

To sum that all up in one word, though, “messy” is pure genius.

What it’s like to be a woman

Regrettably, I decided to try online dating.

I’ve non-jokingly likened dating sites to Hell before, and I still feel that way, but sometimes I get these clever little ideas wedged in my brain that whisper things like, “Justin, there is a whole world of ridiculously smart and interesting girls out there who would love to be nerdy with you if you’d just meet them on the interweb!” And then there’s the more sinister, “Sure, I’ll bet there are plenty of ladies out there who’d love to discuss things like awareness of death and evolutionary psychology and the meaning of Trout Fishing in America if you just check Duke’s Philosophy Department!”

There are some partial truths in there, I learned. In fact, the past 24 hours have taught me a lot of things. For example:

-- Ridiculously smart and interesting girls *do* advertise their singleness on the interweb!
-- Some of them might even prefer or at least not object to nerdy (or even philosophical) guys!
-- But the clincher is that any display of male interest is likely to be received by them about as loudly as the fluttering of a moth’s wings.

It boils down to one basic truth: Oh my goodness is the dating game lopsided in favor of female-folk.

I know this because after devoting an embarrassing amount of effort to making my profile short but not terse, original but not weird, clever but not goofy, smart but not pretentious, attractive but not showy, romantic but not cliché, and serious but not desperate, my stats looked something like this:

30 hours elapsed.
15 profile views.
1 person secretly rated my profile a 4 or 5.
2 unsolicited messages! (Both from cat ladies – I won’t make a judgment about whether or not they are the crazy type.)
5 messages sent. 2 returned. 1 kind of went somewhere.
6 profiles saved. 0 reciprocated.

I have no idea how these stats compare to average, but me being pretty average, I imagine it’s not far off.

Naturally, I had to see what it’s like on the other side of the gender divide, so I fabricated a female account. I put zero effort into filling out a profile. Not a single word was typed. All I did was answer a few survey questions and upload one picture of a vaguely attractive but not stunning girl operating a remote controlled car. Her face can hardly be seen because it’s tilted downward and shot from a distance. Stats?:

30 minutes elapsed.
55 profile views.
1 person secretly rated my profile as a 4 or 5.
4 unsolicited messages literally within two minutes of the photo being uploaded. Here they are:

1. Hey there sexy ;)
2. Oh :) hello there
3. Strictly based on the picture, you look pretty snazzy. Hopefully, the remote controlled car is yours?
4. Nice car. You don't have anything written about you, but we seem to match. I'd like to learn more about you, feel free to send a message my way.

Some others came in a bit later:

5. Hey, what's up? Just checked your profile out and you seem like a fun and cool person to hang out with. So if you're interested, I'd like to talk some more. Hope to hear from you soon! [Name and phone number omitted]
6. Hi there. How are you doing?? Did u have a good monday?? I'm randy by the way ans new to the area. I wouild love to talk sometime.

It seems that being a woman is kind of like an endless walk through a perfume shop where all the guys are more than eager to unload their perfume over every square inch of naked skin. The first spray from the first guy might be pleasant. He thinks I’m lovely and deserving of the finest French aromas! But pretty soon you start to smell like an unsavory collection of male eurostink.

Even if you manage to keep the happy delusion that these guys really think you’re great, I have to believe most women enter a sort of male attention coma. It took only about 15 minutes of me being a woman for me to decide to filter the messages so they stopped showing up as new in my inbox. All the praise very quickly became inane. “You just want my vagina,” I thought. It’s amazing how quickly I became jaded, not even having a vagina.

If most women are, as I suspect, jaded and in a male attention coma walking through a metaphorical perfume shop, then probably every message they receive, no matter how clever the delivery or sincere the intent, looks like just another desperate grab for poontang. This leaves me with a couple of conclusions and a question:

-- The women most likely to respond to your dating site solicitations are probably excessively bored and/or horny, and not terribly impressed by your cleverness.
-- The problem with dating sites is not that the matching algorithms aren’t good enough but that given the almost unfilterable level of online male attention, women are forced to pick out eligible males in the field, where the guys are not at first trying to win their affection but are nonetheless demonstrating a certain intellectual or social or athletic prowess. Only then, once deemed eligible by the female and her friends, is the male safe to move in. (I feel like I’m narrating a Nat Geo episode.)
-- Finally, the question: Why do women put words in their profiles?

I’m going to give this online dating thing at least 5 more days, and if it ends miserably as I suspect, then I have back-up options: (1) graduate school (that’s what all the tuition is for, right?), (2) mail order, or (3) another dog.