I knew when I first saw you on the showroom floor you were made for me
Electric Barberella, indeed.
So I've been wasting vast chunks of my precious youth trolling OK Cupid for the perfect friend/activity partner/long term date/short term date/sex partner within 10 miles of zip code 11103. Because actual human contact frightens and confuses me, I am relieved to have finally rendered obsolete the crude pheremonal imperatives of yesteryear. I can--and do--blow entire weekends vampirically scanning the profiles of complete strangers for cute remarks and relevant statistical characteristics, ultimately to discard them for the most shallow and trivial of reasons. (Did she just say she likes Coldplay? My God, is that a split infinitive?) At least no one's thinking the same things about me.
Like choosing an outfit, creating a profile is an exercise in meticulous self-presentation, in an ideal circumstance of total control: they only see what I want them to see. I have always been fascinated by how people choose to present themselves, because the choices behind one's social image inadvertently reveal the deeper psychology at work. For example, a guy with a mohawk is not just a guy with a mohawk; he is also a guy who wants to be the kind of guy who would have a mohawk. The person inside the "mohawk guy" (for no one can be "essentially" anything) is someone who, for reasons practical or emotional, made a deliberate decision to occupy that role. Therefore, there is so such thing as a truly "superficial" persona, because the persona is an organic ougrowth of a particular set of motives and decisions that are entirely real.
Often the most contrived and affected self-presentation is the most revealing, because there is no buffer zone between the elaborately constructed surface and the nebulous, vulnerable soft-tissue underneath. Such a persona seems artificial because it is static; the more slack and decrepit the muscles, the more botox that needs to be pumped in. (Yeah, I know, I just wanted to use a botox analogy somewhere.) So, you have a 38-year-old woman on OK Cupid calling herself "fallen angel," trying to sell herself on a forlorn adolescent goth image that she has long outgrown. And then there are the countless single women who ostensibly joined the site to find dates, only to insist that they are "completely fulfilled without a life-mate," followed by an inexaustible list of "deal breakers" that, when put together, exclude Y-chromosome-kind in its entirety. So when a single girl joins OK Cupid, only to threaten to gnaw my face off, Hannibal Lecter style, with her vaginal incisors, I know that she is really a fragile, wounded soul who wants someone to love her.
But it's sure as hell not going to be me!
So I've been wasting vast chunks of my precious youth trolling OK Cupid for the perfect friend/activity partner/long term date/short term date/sex partner within 10 miles of zip code 11103. Because actual human contact frightens and confuses me, I am relieved to have finally rendered obsolete the crude pheremonal imperatives of yesteryear. I can--and do--blow entire weekends vampirically scanning the profiles of complete strangers for cute remarks and relevant statistical characteristics, ultimately to discard them for the most shallow and trivial of reasons. (Did she just say she likes Coldplay? My God, is that a split infinitive?) At least no one's thinking the same things about me.
Like choosing an outfit, creating a profile is an exercise in meticulous self-presentation, in an ideal circumstance of total control: they only see what I want them to see. I have always been fascinated by how people choose to present themselves, because the choices behind one's social image inadvertently reveal the deeper psychology at work. For example, a guy with a mohawk is not just a guy with a mohawk; he is also a guy who wants to be the kind of guy who would have a mohawk. The person inside the "mohawk guy" (for no one can be "essentially" anything) is someone who, for reasons practical or emotional, made a deliberate decision to occupy that role. Therefore, there is so such thing as a truly "superficial" persona, because the persona is an organic ougrowth of a particular set of motives and decisions that are entirely real.
Often the most contrived and affected self-presentation is the most revealing, because there is no buffer zone between the elaborately constructed surface and the nebulous, vulnerable soft-tissue underneath. Such a persona seems artificial because it is static; the more slack and decrepit the muscles, the more botox that needs to be pumped in. (Yeah, I know, I just wanted to use a botox analogy somewhere.) So, you have a 38-year-old woman on OK Cupid calling herself "fallen angel," trying to sell herself on a forlorn adolescent goth image that she has long outgrown. And then there are the countless single women who ostensibly joined the site to find dates, only to insist that they are "completely fulfilled without a life-mate," followed by an inexaustible list of "deal breakers" that, when put together, exclude Y-chromosome-kind in its entirety. So when a single girl joins OK Cupid, only to threaten to gnaw my face off, Hannibal Lecter style, with her vaginal incisors, I know that she is really a fragile, wounded soul who wants someone to love her.
But it's sure as hell not going to be me!