Username: metzger86
Why You Should Get To Know Me:
I have firmly convinced myself — against all odds and manners of social conditioning and control — that our culture, society, and “civilization” are not only absurd and illegitimate but also unreal. Yes. Un-real. I am not speaking metaphorically. This is the world of bad dreams, mixed messages, and clever illusions. To quote Moby: “Everything is wrong.” In such a world, it’s easy to conclude (congruently) that “Everything is permitted.” I’m still unsure about that one, but liberated from the weight of any of these ultimately meaningless actions to post a strident cry for accompaniment, for dialogue, for a shared understanding that we live in a world turned upon its head. And perhaps we can even start hashing out the proper Lot 49 massages, rotations, and disguises to set things aright once more.
Basic Information
Age: 27
Gender: Male
Ethnicity: Mixed heritage
Religion: Mixed up
Education: Masters degree
Marital Status: Single
Smoking: Non-smoker
Drinking: Frequently
Lifestyle
Politics: Left Wing
Emphasis of Studies: Combinatorics
Job Description: Cog in the machine
Physical Activity: Active
Children: Might want kids
Income: Will tell you later
Astrological Sign: Gemini
What I’m Looking For:
A la Erich Fromm, I’d rather spend more time preparing myself to accept love/friendship/heckling than searching for Mrs Robinson or what have you.
Ideal Relationship:
Torrid. (Now the rest of the minimum 100 characters, as stipulated by whoever wrote the submit script. Thanks Dater!)
Perfect First Date:
Dinner (I’ll cook). Wine, a walk. Healthy irony about internet dating. Is healthy irony possible?
Username: mynameisnotdolores
Why You Should Get To Know Me:
’cause we could be heroes – just for one day.
why be a hero with me in particular? i’m a citizens-for-boysenberry-jam fan. i was once pulled over at the canadian border for unlawful possession of a rental car. i love aquariums. i have opinions on cardamom vs. turmeric, brooklyn vs. manhattan, memorial day vs. veterans’ day, simon vs. garfunkel and mustard vs. ketchup. if i were a kitchen appliance, i’d be a blender. if a punctuation mark, an ellipsis. if a band name, sweatered monkey.
Basic Information
Age: 25
Gender: Female
Ethnicity: Proverbial white girl
Religion: Not much
Education: Bachelor’s degree
Marital Status: Single
Smoking: Non-smoker
Drinking: Socially
Lifestyle
Politics: Left Wing
Emphasis of Studies: English
Job Description: Depends on the day
Physical Activity: Selected activities
Children: Might want kids
Income: Will tell you later
Astrological Sign: Leo
What I’m Looking For:
someone to ride my wild horses. someone who makes me think, someone who can startle me, someone who makes me laugh. i’ll wax soapbox for a moment: be smart enough and funny enough to appreciate irony, but be sweet enough and serious enough to not feel compelled to live by it.
Ideal Relationship:
i once read a poem where a woman’s eyelash falls on her lover’s shoulder. i like that idea.
Perfect First Date:
there should be food, no doubt. and walking, perhaps. and goodnight-kiss potential.
Dear metzger86,
mynameisnotdolores (member 7611589) from Dater.com has sent you a note.
mynameisnotdolores wrote:
a) what’s the deal with the “watch me swig from a wine bottle” aka “check me out, i’m a hedonist” picture?
b) i don’t think your syllogism works… if everything is wrong, then why does that follow that everything is permitted? you could argue that if everything is wrong, then everything should be permitted — or that it might as well be — but i don’t know if you can build one directly on the other. oops. way to be both pretentious and argumentative in my first email.
c) otherwise, your profile intrigues me. why? i’ll tell you later.
d) email back if you’re similarly intrigued.
Dear Not-Dolores,
Regarding the syllogism that isn’t (neither in form nor content), you’ve pretty much hit on why I’m not totally convinced the grand inquisitor was correct. These days I’m much more of an Aloysha than an Ivan, though my picture tends to belie that.
MLK Day yesterday was a big day. I made it a holiday and spent some time ruminating with Thoreau, Gandhi, and the words of the Reverend Doctor himself, trying to puzzle through the enigma of non-violent resistance, trying to think of Kaliyev (have you read Les Justes?) and Subcommandante Marcos and George Orwell on the Catalonian Front and whether it could ever be worth it, could be justified.
Essentially, the closed system of international wealth requires a great amount of energy (read: repressive force) to maintain the distinctly un-entropic differentials in wealth/poverty, don’t you think?
Mere preface. Let’s break through the mirrors of postmodernity, polysyllables, and dead white (and one black and one Indian) men. Might I call for dinner sometime? A drink? Tea? Knitting?
What I’ve Learned From Past Relationships
(Category: Demeaning/Infuriating/Nauseating)
- When he is twelve, he has a desperate crush on his best friend. She is funny and likes the same books that he does and gave him his first nickname. He spends every period of social studies staring at the back of her head. One day, during lunch, he goes behind the handball wall to retrieve an overly-enthusiastically- bounced ball, and sees her, standing on tiptoes, kissing his friend Andrew.
- When he is eighteen, he is sharing a bottle of rum with a girl he has been crushing on for two months. Suddenly, rum-brave, he turns to her and kisses her. They spend the rest of the night on someone else’s bed, crushing other people’s coats. He grasps a handful of breast, squeezing, and tells her that this is good – them, this, now. She gropes his ass and slurs something in response that sounds affirmative. When he sees her across the dining hall the next day, she smiles distantly but does not come over. When he calls her that night, filled with hopeful expectation, she tells him, embarrassed, that she doesn’t remember most of the party and has no idea what he’s talking about.
- When he is twenty-five, he asks a friend to set him up. The friend arranges a date with a girl from his girlfriend’s graduate program. Conversation limps painfully along. She spends much of the time looking at a point somewhere behind his left ear, so intently that he turns around at one point to see what she is looking at. As he expects, there is a clock. They each pretend to be more intellectual than they are and they argue about history. At one point, he actually hears himself use the words “Kafkaesque morbidity.” There are no follow-up phone calls. A few months later, another friend sets him up with a cousin, who turns out to be the same person.
What I’ve Learned From Past Relationships
(Category: Demeaning/Infuriating/Nauseating)
- When she is twelve, she is at camp. One of the boys in her swimming group tells her that he has a crush on someone and he wants her to guess who it is. This goes on all day. She asks questions, he gives hints. She is utterly flattered that he will talk to her about this. By the end of the day, a crowd surrounds them as she keeps trying to guess. Finally, he turns to her and says, “But… it’s you.” She sits completely still, unfamiliar with this and slow to react. And then the boy and everyone else start to laugh, because they knew it was a joke all along.
- When she is nineteen, she falls in love with her college TA. They talk about kids, about futures, about how many years they want to wait before getting married. They cry and cry when he graduates and leaves to volunteer abroad; they exchange emails with subjects like “Love” and “You.” When he comes back six months later, he gives her a reserved hug, smiles at her condescendingly, tells her that their relationship was a mistake, that she is young and naïve and that he wasn’t thinking clearly. And that he’s sorry.
- When she is twenty-three, she is at a party with a friend she has recently begun sleeping with. They are on drugs and engaged in obnoxious public affection. Pausing for breath, they stop kissing, sit there stroking each other’s arms and faces as she cuddles deeper into his lap, her cheek against his shoulder. She would be embarrassed, but everyone else is on drugs, too. A girl in a bikini top and shorts comes up to them and says to the man, “Hey – you’re so cute.” Then bikini-girl is saying to her, “You don’t mind, do you? That I think he’s cute?” Her mind is the opposite of blank, it is all colors and they are battling each other and she wants this girl to go away but she has no idea what words she would use to express anything right now. Bikini-girl walks away, turning once to smile coyly at them over her shoulder. The man sighs and resettles his arms around her, saying “See? This is why I can’t be your boyfriend.”
dear metzger,
did you just ask me out after using the word “un-entropic”? pretty hot.
“more of an Aloysha than an Ivan”… i seem to keep ending up in email conversations with men who reference The Brothers Karamozov. am repeating patterns. serves me right, though — i did use the word ‘syllogism’ completely and pretentiously incorrectly.
and:
we have made nonviolent revolution virtually impossible through a concentration of resources (wealth therefore influence therefore control) that boggles the mind. at the same time, as the Reverend Doctor said himself, it is always a choice between nonviolence and nonexistence. even when violence leads to important acts of rebirth rebuilding recreation, it is so vital not to fool ourselves into looking past the ugly reality of the act itself. so yes, i agree. and disagree.
knitting, perhaps. i’ve always wanted to learn.
What I’ve Learned From Past Relationships
(Category: Enlightenment/Intimacy/That Which Just Makes Sense)
- When she is sixteen, she thinks she is in love. In love with a boy-man who has a French girlfriend and an attitude and a sheepskin jacket. Most days after school they get into his car (she finds it so exciting that the seatbelts are covered by the tapestries he uses as seat covers) and go to his house, where he reads to her and plays her records while his cat settles into her lap. One night they are working on a school project and it is getting very late. She is nursing a cold. She is typing and he comes over, brings her a mug of tea. She has not asked, he has just done. A gesture of comfort. He may put his hand on her shoulder, but perhaps not.
- When she is twenty-one, she knows that she is in lust and a great deal of affection but does not know if that adds up to love. They lie in bed, it is midday. He is naked; she wears a bright orange shirt that is his. It is unclear what has become of her own clothes. They are talking, it doesn’t matter what about. He looks at her, bright in the orange of his shirt, and says, I didn’t know it was this easy to be happy.
- When she is twenty-four, she is standing on a street corner with a man, paused and waiting for the cars to pass. They are on a third date, and as she often does with new dates, she is having trouble figuring out what he thinks of her or them. But then he reaches, almost absentmindedly it seems, for her hand as they start to cross. Perhaps thinking of old dictums. As their fingers find and seek purchase within the other’s hand, they steal quick glances at each other, giddy with affection. They walk slowly, seeking to prolong this expression of intimacy, walking to a movie and holding hands.
What I’ve Learned From Past Relationships
(Category: Enlightenment/Intimacy/That Which Just Makes Sense)
- When he is sixteen, he is enchanted with a girl who leaves pennies on the ground for others to find. They are sitting one night in his car outside her house, or possibly in her room. He is teasing her about the pennies. She is laughing and explaining her particular view on luck when he is suddenly lost in the dent of her upper lip, brings his face to hers, cuts off both their mid-laugh breath as they curl around each other into a shape approximating a double helix and which means that this, itself, is good.
- When he is twenty-two, he is watching his girlfriend do dishes. He is pretending to wipe down her round wooden table where she has just hosted a small dinner party, but his hand moves in lazy circles over the same spot as he gazes at her in profile, wisps of hair coming out of her ponytail and resting against her neck. Without turning, she asks “Can you push my glasses up?” He walks over, gently pushing her glasses up the bridge of her nose, then puts his arms around her waist and kisses her neck, nuzzling aside the ponytail-escaped strands of hair. She relaxes her weight against him fully, curling her head into his shoulder. They stand there, listening to the water run in the sink.
- When he is twenty-five, he is sitting on a woman’s bed, leaning against the wall. She is sitting up under the covers, wearing her pajamas. He is friends with her roommate, and over the past few months they’ve chatted longer each time whenever she buzzes him up to their apartment. Tonight, though, he sits on her bed with her, positioned perpendicular, intermittently reading Spanish poetry to her. Entre fuegos violentos/ o regresando solo/ alli estaba sin rostro/ y me tocaba. Their bodies make a curved ninety-degree angle. They look at each other steadily, they smile shyly. That is all, for that night, and it is enough.
Dear Not-Dolores,
The one thing I’ve knit in my life (tejer was the verb, to be accurate, I’m not sure it translates exactly to knitting) was a harmonica case that I made during the floods last summer in Chile when we couldn’t go outside except to buy condensed milk for the lemon pies I would make daily for “las onces” (tea time) because it was so goddamned wet and miserable outside. So I would sit near the fire and chat with these four crazy women (Paulina, Blanca Rosa, Luz Divina, Vida Luna) and their assorted kids (no fathers) while they smoked cigarettes and joints and the kids watched TV in their more sedate moments and terrorized everyone otherwise. So I learned this technique with one needle and made myself a harmonica case to accompany Vida Luna’s huge sweater she was making for the return of her husband (which still hasn’t happened) in this weird marriage of Marquez and Homer. And my harmonica case turned out like a condom and/but I liked it anyway and used it successfully (in its original capacity) until last month when my friend came to visit and we left it in an Indian restaurant in (where else) Curry Hill while celebrating the fact that he finally (for gods sake) paid off his student loans.
I had some thoughts recently on the simple/complicated divide, as recently as last night. I was blithering about how human relations should be simpler than they are, in my life especially, and wondering how much had to do with honesty and the desire for honesty and how much had to do with social factors, the inescapable social context within which all of our personal relationships are situated, i.e. late capitalism.
Knowledge, transparency, honesty. I strive to be an open book, and yet to be interesting and enigmatic within those pages.
There’s this protocol in cryptography called subliminal channel crypto, where the message isn’t encrypted but rather signed, so you can verify who sent it, a pretty normal procedure. However, within the weird digital signature there are hidden bits of another secret message that, while not mathematically difficult to decrypt, only the people in the know would think to look for. Transcending the dialectic – as we all must – of cleartext and encrypted, of simple and complicated, of transparent and enigmatic.
I enjoy writing you. And I rest content with it, as a practice, in the way I’d be happy thinking about enlightenment even if I never get there. But all the same, if you wanted to move this into the corporeal realm, involving actual sightings and perhaps even face-to-face conversation, I’d be willing and able.
Things That I Don’t Always Like About Myself:
- He tends towards absorbing other people. She already means something to him, even though she did not exist for him until very recently. And that cannot now be changed. Rather, cannot be lost; it will undoubtedly change time and time again. But it is here, now that he has taken in her somethingness as an aspect of his landscape, a part of his tone of voice and tilt of head. As he takes in the somethingness of all those who amaze him. It is some frightening hybrid of self-absorption and misunderstanding; he has trouble seeing people or things until he intertwines his sense of them with his sense of himself. So then there is this tendency to immerse himself, to take on bits and pieces as if they were found objects rather than someone else’s property that he has, with only the best of intentions, misunderstood and appropriated.
- He knows that is he pretentious, but his bigger concern is that he thinks he might like that. He once self-described himself to a group of people as intense, in one of those label-myself-before-they-label-me type of moves, and has regretted it ever since. The only thing worse than being overly intense is being someone who would call themselves intense.
Things That I Don’t Always Like About Myself:
- She is afraid of pretty much everything.
- She tends towards oversaturation. All sides of life appear compelling to her and she considers and considers them. Certainty is off-putting, nearly arrogant, because there is just so much to consider, so how can anyone be certain about anything? She is confident, as far as confidence goes, but when it comes down to it, she is someone who gets teary for both the villains and the heroes; everyone has a story, you know? She wonders about malleability and passivity, if they are the same. She is thinking, she is thinking, she is thinking. She thinks: verb. She is thinking: passive verb. Or is it? How do action words become passive? She overthinks: statement of fact.
my dear metz,
i must admit that i’m not quite ready to encounter your corporeal form just yet. to be (probably too) honest, i like the delicious maybemaybe and the coziness of writing you from my couch. it is the middle of winter and i feel pessimistically suspect that disappointments wait outside. you and i, despite whatever feats of periodic-table-explosiveness we’re able to achieve onscreen (the small small screen), might find that we fizzle miserably in person, that any previously-bonded ions just scurry in opposite directions and hide under the table. this all has something to do with spark, i suppose, whatever that means.
i know this is maybe foolish, most definitely childish, but hey, i’m young and green and would like to continue to be naïve sometimes.
plus, this: “Postmodernists can’t believe in love. It’s illegal.” – Rachel Kadish
but. maybe you can convince me to abandon these delusions of security. most are, after all, just that. you’re more than welcome to try. i might even find myself grateful for it. who knows?
Here, Not-Dolores, is where you are wrong.
What I mean is, you’re right. Essentially. About the ions and the cold and the what-ifs and the maybemaybemaybe. But you knew all that all along, and it’s been cold for months already, and you still want this anyway and I still want this anyway and that’s why people buy caulk to plug the gaps in their walls.
That last sentence makes sense; that’s not the problem. The problem is this: I want to meet you. And you want to meet me. And we don’t want to wait until spring.
So? What say you?
Cold cheeks pointed towards a better world,
Max
that’s a nice name, max.
you know what, max? you’re right.
so, that said, max, bring it on.
i think i mean that.
arielle
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