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!

Sunday, May 8, 2011

Chapter 10: Is it hopeless?

So over the previous few weeks, I'd been in contacted by this police officer through Match.com. I had to admit that “Goofy” was doing "the chase" and it was quite flattering. With everything that had gone on with "Tramp" I had been too consumed to invest any time into anyone else, really. But we had kept up some casual email banter, and now he was itching to talk on the phone.

I wondered if my bust of a date with “Dumbo” was indicative of any date I might try to have until I could get “Tramp” out of my head. Would my unconscious "bar" be set to “Tramp?” Would I be able to be interested in someone that I didn't find as intelligent, or sexy, or charming? Regardless, I had to try.

So “Goofy” was certainly working it. He was attentive and funny, and he seemed quite interested in me. After all, he'd been diligently chasing me on email for several weeks at this point and had not seemed turned off that I had kept him at arm's length. I wasn't extremely physically attracted to him from his pictures, but he was kind of adorable in a goofy (pun intended) kind of way. He had great personality, though, and I could tell that he seemed like a genuinely happy person. By amazing coincidence, he served in the same city that I worked in, so a lunch date was the obvious choice. We agreed to meet at a cute little hole in the wall place we both knew of that served really amazing food, as cute little holes in the wall tend to do.

When I arrived at the café, I was pleasantly surprised. He was better looking and even more charming in person. He was no fox, by any stretch of the imagination, but the uniform certainly didn't hurt. We girls like men in uniforms, you know. I found myself smiling and playing with my hair A LOT. I felt a tad in the spotlight while we ate our lunch, as people kept staring at him in his prestigious uniform. What? Do people think that cops don't eat? Or maybe it's because we were at a real restaurant and not a Dunkin' Donuts or a Waffle House?

It was a great lunch. I hated having to leave. But alas, both of our jobs were demanding that we return. He walked me to my car and opened my door for me. I've had my door opened plenty of times when I was getting in the passenger side of my date's car, but no one had ever opened the door of MY car for me to get in and drive away. We shared a very tight hug and agreed to talk soon. As I drove back to my office, it occurred to me that I had not thought about "Tramp" in over an hour... And I liked that.