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!

Friday, April 29, 2011

Chapter 6: Could It Be?

Told ya I'd come back to the story :-D

I was still on a high three days later from my perfect phone call. But after three days and not hearing from him, I began to question my actions. Remember a time when we girls used to worry about whether or not we would get a bad reputation from letting a guy go to second base? Was it possible that I still needed to play these kind of games even in my 30's? Was there really no difference in being an adult compared to being a teenager? Hadn't “Tramp” initiated the frisky phone call? Hadn't “Tramp” been the one to advocate the idea that you should just be who you are, in the raw, and not try to hide anything, or dance around anything? Was he really turned off by the fact that we'd taken a phone call to that level and seriously wasn't even interested in trying out the real thing?

After four days of torture, checking my email obsessively, and making sure my voicemail wasn't "accidentally" not notifying me that I had a message waiting, I finally heard from him. Out of town, he claimed. Maybe he was, maybe he wasn't. Who cares? He was on the phone now, and it was just as awesome as the first time. We talked, we laughed, we took shots at each other at every opportunity and laughed our asses off at each one. Every moment I spent talking to this man, just proved to me more and more that he was everything I'd ever looked for. I was just waiting to find out that the picture I'd seen wasn't really of him, and he looked like a troll or something... So it was another two-hour marathon phone call with the same finale. Even better. I believe at this point I was so turned on by this guy that he could have turned out to be as pathetic in reality as the last one, and it still would be incredible. We made plans to finally meet the following night and I started counting down the minutes.

The plan was that I would call him when I became available in the afternoon, even though he wouldn't be available yet, and then he would call me back when he was available and we'd meet somewhere. So, as planned, I called him, and then found myself banging my head into the wall because I had unwittingly put myself in a position to have to wait around for him. And wait, I did. I finally heard from him when it was too late to meet. And then I proceeded to listen to the LAST thing I expected to hear.

For the next three hours, I listened to “Tramp” tell me how he wasn't over his ex-girlfriend. This was a woman who had NOTHING to offer him, 10 years younger, uneducated, and, from the way he made it sound, a complete gold-digging player. But he was hooked and had spoken to her earlier and gotten into a fight with her. WHY was I listening to this? For THREE hours, no less? However, after this marathon bitch-session, he said he felt a lot better, and thanked me for talking him down. And, after feeling so connected to me, decided to try to get frisky again. I couldn't do it. I just couldn't go from "Tell me about your ex-girlfriend" and downshift to "Let's get sexy" that quick. He actually pitched a little fit over it, but realized that it wasn't the right time, and we bade each other good night and promised to attempt to meet again the next night.

Believe me, I am not a fool, regardless of how much I sound like one at the moment, and, truth be known, I felt like one at that moment. EVERYTHING about this guy told me to RUN! And run AS FAST AS I CAN. I certainly did not need to get tangled up with some guy who was obsessing over his little twit of a girlfriend. But I couldn't deny it, I was mentally, emotionally, intellectually, and physically hooked on this man, and I just had to see it play out.

Lesson Number Four: Pay attention to the red flags. They are red for a reason.

Status: Nowhere NEAR learning that one.