You Can't Make This Stuff Up: Chapter 31: This is getting addictive

The Truth is Stranger Than Fiction - An Introduction

Truth is Stranger Than Fiction - An Introduction

My first foray into the Social Networking world was some years ago, in 2005 I believe, with Yahoo. They had a site called Yahoo 360° that was their own attempt at MySpace, which, at the time, was all the rage. I hadn't been bitten by the MySpace bug yet, but I was already an active member of Yahoo, so to get my feet wet, I set up a Yahoo 360° profile.

Blogging was an extremely attractive prospect to me. I love to write, I love to give myself that type of "outlet" to my problems, fears, joys, and experiences. I've kept diaries and journals off and on over the years and they've always been therapeutic when I took the time to keep them up. But this... a public diary? How do I approach such a thing? How much do I divulge? And what, praytel, do I write about that would actually entice people to read it?

Browsing thru existing blogs, one thing was an absolute MUST: I could not, would not, write about mundane things that no one but myself would care about. I needed an angle-- Something that I could write passionately about. Something that people, in general, have an interest in. Something that would grab the attention of the public. And something that had a "theme." I found that, to me personally, a blog that jumped around all over the place was difficult to read. A theme would keep me in check, and allow me to focus, rather than a stream of conscious that I was sure would bore to death anyone who came across my page.

The idea came to me fairly quickly. I was newly divorced and discovering the delights and annoyances of being single and dating in my 30's. It was perfect! Love, sex, relationships, dating... The overall general interaction between men and women has always been a fascination and a sure-fire hit to our society, if not our entire species! I had my topic, I was ready to roll...

Yahoo has since shut down their 360° forum, and the experience I had there was both rewarding and therapeutic. So I am going to retell my adventures in a retro-active tale here, and see if I can gather the same, if not bigger, audience I did there. Maybe I can even get inspired enough to bring the whole thing up to date and wrap it all up into a happy ending? We shall see...

So, here we go! Hello, my name is Jennifer. I am 37 years old and I've been divorced just over 6 years now. Fasten your seat belts, boys and girls, it's gonna be one hell of a ride!

Tuesday, June 28, 2011

Chapter 31: This is getting addictive

"Timon" didn't call on my drive up, but he did start sending me text messages the next day. He was sweet and flirtatious, knowing that I was spending time with my extended family for our annual reunion. I thought it was rather charming the way he was keeping in contact, not wanting to intrude, but letting me know that he was thinking about me. We ended up on the phone a few times, and I discovered that his job was going to have him traveling during the week for the next three weeks, but he would be home on the weekends. Unfortunately, I was traveling on the weekends. It looked as if we'd have to just chat on the phone for about the next two weeks or so before we'd actually be in the same city at the same time.

And then I discovered that I had a free high-speed internet connection at my hotel. I couldn't stay away. When the day was done and it was time to drift off to bed, out came the laptop, and I logged onto Match.com to see who'd been looking at me, winking at me, or if I had any messages. And, wouldn't you know? A hot white-collared guy sent me a message. "Kawena" was a clean-cut, all-American white boy in real estate, and wanted to see what I was about. Hmmmm... OKAY!

And there was a second message, from "Basil": A tall, blue-collared business owner with smashing blue eyes. And writing them both back didn't seem wrong. After all, you don't just send your resume to one company at a time, right? You sent out several dozen and wait to see who calls back. "Kawena" and I graduated immediately to instant messenger, while "Basil" and I stayed on email. "Kawena" knew I was in Pennsylvania, and he promised to call me on Monday to keep me company on my long drive home.

I felt pretty popular on my ride home. I got calls from "Timon", "Kawena" and even heard from "Aladdin". I was only going to be home for three days and I had dates lined up almost back to back! I was meeting "Basil" for lunch on Tuesday, "Kawena" for dinner on Wednesday, and "Timon" was coming into the airport on Friday about an hour before my flight out to Chicago. We planned to rendezvous at the airport.

What was I doing? All of a sudden I had four different men contacting me. And you know what? I was going to have fun with it.