I Love You, Let’s Meet

and do we think Rebel is a man or a woman?

What a fascinating corner of the blogosphere!

(I can thusly slur because I am one) Re this Bavarian pol’s modest proposal, don’t people kind of do this anyway?

Here’s some science we all kinda knew. The last sentence is a succinct, sad-but-true way of putting it.

On the other hand, I do think online dating, as opposed to speed dating, can shift all this a bit. My book def. had cases of writing-attractions at least adding to if not superseding physical attraction.

Online psychotherapy seems even more booby-trapped than online dating. If people embellish, preen, obfuscate, etc. at the keyboard anyway, what possible chance does a shrink have of breaking down our most entrenched defenses while typing back and forth?

This made me laugh: “…e-mail was particularly useful for clients with “disorders of self” whose feelings fluctuate between abandonment and intrusiveness in relationships.”

I’d say that describes pretty much everyone on nerve.com (fastcupid)!

I am shocked (for real, not ironically “shocked, shocked”) by this study, esp. this bit

While the women who were surveyed went to great lengths to screen online acquaintances before meeting them, nearly a third reported having sex on the first date and three-quarters of those said they did not use condoms

WTF? First of all, who are these people having unsafe sex with strangers? Dopes, that’s who! Second of all, real life just seems better suited to an impulsive (but still condom-using!) fling than online dating. The first F2F date seems to me like a continuation of the screening process that’s begun online; it’s not set up to be a sex date generally. (Unless of course it is, which the study should have been clearer about — if “let’s fuck now” craigslist ad posters are mixed in with the cautious True.com types they’re describing, then the study doesn’t tell us anything.) Whereas if you meet someone out in the world, the spark or chemistry or whatever more defines what’s going to happen. Or so it seems to me.

nothing too unexpected in Pepper’s saga. I wonder if anyone thought she was Pepa from Salt-N-Pepa.

I heard Joan Osborne online dated, that Joan Rivers had a profile on match.com, and that Alec Baldwin was thinking about it. I think Baldwin would be better off with women who weren’t online and hadn’t heard that phone call to his kid.

is a fun site that mentions my video in this piece and is worth checking out further.

Marie was funny but harsh about the David Foster Wallace book video; I thought the prose was well-suited to the simultaneous type and voiceover. It’s not embarrassing.

Then again I don’t oscillate at DFW’s frequencies of self-consciousness, so maybe he is embarrassed.

Marie is one of a handful of brainy women I know who’ve gotten violently sexual crushes on Wallace. What is that about, do we think? And I do mean we; my awe for his writing has manifested kind of Tiger Beat, I admit it, and I don’t usually do that. What IS that about, beyond him being a towering intellect, long single, and an age peer, I wonder? He doesn’t seem fun or sexy (oh god I am Tiger Beat); the self-interrogation seems like it’d be crippling.

He is married now, and it IS cute how he likes saying “my wife” at readings.

pretty reasonable tips overall, but do we really want profile advice from Ronald Reagan? The guy was borderline incoherent; calling him the Great Communicator was like calling Nixon likable or Bush II an intellectual.

And I guess it makes sense to “test your picture on hotornot” but what if you’re not hot? Airbrush? Use someone else’s picture?

I also like that they say to avoid cliches “like the plague.”

Enough bitchiness for the day. TTFN

I was on the since-cancelled Dr. Keith Ablow show a few months back, for about 30 seconds. My mom watched and a friend taped it, but I had the sense that otherwise it made not a ripple in the universe, so nice to hear these bloggers saw it and even mentioned me, rather than the onstage experts who got more time and seemed more positive (they both found their husbands online) and results-oriented.

I’m usually in the get-out-and-meet-in-real-life camp, but I could see more people falling in love through cyber-karaoke than in a karaoke bar, judging from the comments.