First, to close the loop on something I brought up the other day. With some intelligent and unbiased help from a few readers here, I vetted the objectionable he-man phrases in my online personality profiles. Talk about giving the wrong impression. Any writer can benefit from a good editor, and I'm grateful to discover I have them in my "audience" here. Makes it somewhat worthwhile for me to air these pieces of my dirty laundry for your perusal.

The experience reminded me of the best piece of dating advice I've yet to hear... "would you go out with yourself?" If I'd simply remembered that when I wrote the first draft, I'd never have gone online with it.

And the revisions seemed to help. I've gotten immediately improved responses, and two of them look like they might actually turn into face-to-face meetings. Interesting.

I'm not a big fan of anonymous, unwieldy "meet markets" to begin with, but I finally started listing on a few because I'm not getting very far conventionally. And when I say "very far," I consider that I'm a second-shift worker living in a city where I don't know many people, that I don't go out and sit on barstools as a means of socialization, and that my confidence in being around people I don't know, while improving, isn't quite conducive to leaving good first impressions.

As I alluded in yesterday's entry, my online presence with this here bloggy journal (or is it a journally blog?) has led, unexpectedly, to some meaningful friendships in the real world. It was the vehicle that got me in touch with people I'd never have met otherwise, and all I've done here is rented some bandwidth and sporadically blathered within it. But I realize this blather is just me being myself, with few pretentions beyond my naturally long winded and rhetorical vocabulary (and as I've said here before... can't help that... I love words).

So with insights thus gained from positive experiences here, I decided to overcome my natural aversion to online social networking, and to all the horror stories I've heard about txt spk and wanna cyber? and people skillfully pretending to be something they're not (20 year olds playing 35, men playing women, nutcase stalkers, etc). I made an experiment out of it, keeping my mind open and not expecting much.

Though the Ralph Kramden-like Alice! Where's my dinner! image I was unintentionally projecting has undoubtedly played a role in the quality of my experience thus far, I have to say I'm really learning a lot.

What I'm learning, primarily, lent itself to the title of this post.

The online jungle is no place for anyone with heart on sleeve. Nor is it wise to engage anyone, in any way, for any reason, if your first impression isn't a good one. I made the mistake of answering every ping on my profile, no matter who was sending it. Most of these women had profiles that screamed to me how little we had in common, but I wanted to be kind and friendly and perhaps encouraging to anyone who took the initiative to contact me first.

Ooo, I shouldn't have done that. I now, unhappily, need to disentangle myself from a few of these poorly-premised, badly-executed, fully contrived connections. For the first one, I wrote a well-considered reply, laying out why the situation was making me uncomfortable, acknowledging I understood how hard it is to convey the nuances of a personality in cyberspace, but it, erm, might be best if we picked ourselves up and moved forward.

The response to that was extremely unforgiving, quite presumptive and used a lot of words familiar to me from my Marine Corps service. And they kept coming, and coming, until I finally hit the "block and delete" button, grateful for its presence.

In my mind, nothing in this situation had assembled itself to a point where it could even remotely be considered a "rejection." Acknowledging a bad fit, perhaps, nothing more.

Now for the wuss part. I have several more like this, that need to be dealt with, and my heart's not in it now. But I came here for an argument! Oh, I'm sorry, this is abuse! You want room 12A next door. What I'm doing is something for which I feel I should be despised, and that's suddenly ignoring people, without any explanation, hoping they'll take the hint and go away. A shitty thing to do, and an experience I haven't enjoyed on the receiving end, but I'm literally fearful of doing anything else.

I'd like to think I have a gift of empathy that allows me to gently guide people along, perhaps help them learn something in this great awkward journey of life, for I have no ill will toward anyone, really. But one scorching experience is forcing me to conclude it's not my job to enlighten people who will have none of it from me; who, in fact, will wish a lot of unsavory experiences upon me for the attempt.

When did people become so vicious? Or when did I become so soft? 1:39:18 PM    comment []trackback []