This is getting personal.
More news from the internet personals front, eharmony not Match. Today I. (aforementioned 5'7" eharmony girl) sent me some questions to answer. (Note the period after "I" indicating the abbreviation of a name when referring to this girl. It may become important to be able to distinguish between I., the eharmony girl, and I, the me.) Let me elaborate upon the eharmony way. Step 1. Person fills out really long personality form. Step 2. Eharmony provides certain prospective matches based on the arcane logic of some psychologist/programmers. Step 3. Person reviews matches and decides whom he wishes to contact. Step 4. Person and match use form surveys provided by eharmony to communicate, in order: (a) premade multiple-choice questions,(b) lists of requirements in a prospective partner, (c) premade open-ended questions, then (d) open-ended questions written by each other. Only after all of this can one (or two in this case) reach Step 5, emailing each other whatever you want.
So I. wins the prize for best original open-ended questions. 1. How did you become a Proofreader? 2. Why are you currently single? 3. What do you enjoy about reading?
My answers (not exactly the same, but the same general gist):
Well, I've always been a grammar and spelling perfectionist (read pedant), so when I saw an opening for the job, I thought, "Hey, I can do that." And I can.
I am currently single because break-up with Ex was hard, mostly because of the depression I had during a good deal of our relationship (see previous entries). By the time I was on my feet again, I was working as a proofreader. For the gentle readers who are unaware, I am a graveyard-shift proofreader, and I work from 11pm to 7am. So since then it's been very difficult to meet people to date. To simply go to a movie requires advance planning and a slight shift of my sleeping schedule. Getting up to casually drop by a coffeehouse to see if there might possibly be someone cute there just seems unworth the effort. So I am hoping that the internet personals will work.
But the last question struck me oddly. Once I was asked, "How did you feel when you heard about the earthquake in Northridge, California." It was part of an exercise to demonstrate that most people, when asked how they felt about a topic, would instead tell what they thought about a topic. Of course, what this teacher didn't know was that I happened to be only a few miles away from Northridge that day.
The question was so completely foreign to me. Northridge '94 was a big earthquake, 6.something on the Richter. That morning I walked around to see the effects in my neighborhood. An entire side of a local multi-story department store had fallen off, leaving it exposed like a doll house. At the local 7-11, a yuppie couple was trying to bribe the proprietor to give them more water than the ration they were allowing each person to buy. Everywhere, people sat on their lawns afraid to go back into their houses because--whoops, there's another aftershock.
Thus, to be asked a question that seemed to assume that this quake was something that I had heard about on the news, was jarring. In LA, everyone knew, to an extent, how everyone else felt, because everyone else felt it at the same time. So nobody had to ask these questions, we'd just skip ahead to "How many things broke in your house" and "Did you wake up before, during or after?" I imagine this would be the same type of thing, today, as asking how someone felt when he heard the World Trade Center was hit, then discovering that the person being asked was on the 50th floor of the first tower. It's not something you hear about, or think about, or feel, it's just something you know.
The question "What do you enjoy about reading" struck me like that. For me, reading is so basic, so fundamental, that a question like this is completely unanswerable. It's like asking someone which is his favorite part of a simple machine. "My favorite part of a wheel? Well, I'd have to say the...um...round...part...I guess."
Of course, I did answer, and in less space, because eharmony truncates responses without telling anyone. I said that what I enjoy about reading was the idea that a persons thoughts, emotions, and knowledge can be codified into arbitrary symbols which can evoke the thoughts, emotions, and knowledge even across a wide span of time and space. Which is true, I suppose, but it hardly comes close to how I feel.
But I guess that will have to wait until "Open Communication." Screw you, eharmony.
(P.S. Yes, "unworth" is a word. Yes, I used it correctly.)
So I. wins the prize for best original open-ended questions. 1. How did you become a Proofreader? 2. Why are you currently single? 3. What do you enjoy about reading?
My answers (not exactly the same, but the same general gist):
Well, I've always been a grammar and spelling perfectionist (read pedant), so when I saw an opening for the job, I thought, "Hey, I can do that." And I can.
I am currently single because break-up with Ex was hard, mostly because of the depression I had during a good deal of our relationship (see previous entries). By the time I was on my feet again, I was working as a proofreader. For the gentle readers who are unaware, I am a graveyard-shift proofreader, and I work from 11pm to 7am. So since then it's been very difficult to meet people to date. To simply go to a movie requires advance planning and a slight shift of my sleeping schedule. Getting up to casually drop by a coffeehouse to see if there might possibly be someone cute there just seems unworth the effort. So I am hoping that the internet personals will work.
But the last question struck me oddly. Once I was asked, "How did you feel when you heard about the earthquake in Northridge, California." It was part of an exercise to demonstrate that most people, when asked how they felt about a topic, would instead tell what they thought about a topic. Of course, what this teacher didn't know was that I happened to be only a few miles away from Northridge that day.
The question was so completely foreign to me. Northridge '94 was a big earthquake, 6.something on the Richter. That morning I walked around to see the effects in my neighborhood. An entire side of a local multi-story department store had fallen off, leaving it exposed like a doll house. At the local 7-11, a yuppie couple was trying to bribe the proprietor to give them more water than the ration they were allowing each person to buy. Everywhere, people sat on their lawns afraid to go back into their houses because--whoops, there's another aftershock.
Thus, to be asked a question that seemed to assume that this quake was something that I had heard about on the news, was jarring. In LA, everyone knew, to an extent, how everyone else felt, because everyone else felt it at the same time. So nobody had to ask these questions, we'd just skip ahead to "How many things broke in your house" and "Did you wake up before, during or after?" I imagine this would be the same type of thing, today, as asking how someone felt when he heard the World Trade Center was hit, then discovering that the person being asked was on the 50th floor of the first tower. It's not something you hear about, or think about, or feel, it's just something you know.
The question "What do you enjoy about reading" struck me like that. For me, reading is so basic, so fundamental, that a question like this is completely unanswerable. It's like asking someone which is his favorite part of a simple machine. "My favorite part of a wheel? Well, I'd have to say the...um...round...part...I guess."
Of course, I did answer, and in less space, because eharmony truncates responses without telling anyone. I said that what I enjoy about reading was the idea that a persons thoughts, emotions, and knowledge can be codified into arbitrary symbols which can evoke the thoughts, emotions, and knowledge even across a wide span of time and space. Which is true, I suppose, but it hardly comes close to how I feel.
But I guess that will have to wait until "Open Communication." Screw you, eharmony.
(P.S. Yes, "unworth" is a word. Yes, I used it correctly.)