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 7, 2011

Chapter 22: Oh Yeah, SERIOUS Dé Ja Vu

So "Goofy" did not call the next day (Thursday). I thought that was a bit tacky. After all, the "day after" phone call really ought to be a requirement, regardless of where the relationship, or lack thereof, is or isn't going. It's just a sign of respect, I think. But I didn't fret over it too terribly much. After all, we had the date planned for the next day, so maybe he thought that the "day after" phone call was null-and-void in this situation.

The plan was that he was going to call and give me directions to his place so I could come over straight from the office, and we would go out to dinner. I waited all day at work, obsessing over why the phone had not yet rung. I gave in at 4:00 and called him to get directions. I got his voice mail and left a cutesy message asking if I needed to telepathically figure out where he lived. I wonder, of course, if the message came across as breezy as I intended it to, because inside I was fuming. At 6:00, I tried again, and again got his voice mail. I didn't leave a message that time, because I knew I couldn't even fake not being pissed off. To add insult to injury, I could see that he had been signed into Match.com several times that day, so I knew he was around.

At 6:30, I was furious. So I sent him a nasty email expressing exactly how uncool it was for him to do this. Aren't we supposed to be adults? If he didn't want to go out, why couldn't he have AT LEAST sent me an email to cancel? Why stand me up like that? I drove home, completely amazed that men still do this well into their 30's.

When I got home, there was, in fact, a message waiting for me on my home voice mail from him. He had called that afternoon to tell me that he threw his back out and had to cancel. My first reaction was that I had reacted too quickly. But, no, wait - He KNEW that I was coming from work. Why make me drive all the way home before I find this out? He had my work number, my cell number, and my email. There was no reason for him to call my house and leave a message there. In short, the only reason for him to do that is because he wanted to avoid talking to me.

I went to the computer and saw that he had, in fact, received my email already AND responded to it. He accused me of not caring that he was in a lot of pain, and that, if I had bothered to check my messages, I would know that he had not stood me up. I wrote him back and tried to explain why I was so upset, but he refused to respond. I sent another email over the weekend in an attempt to get him to talk and try to smooth it over, but he apparently didn't want any part of it. Great, now I have a cop in the city I work in to avoid. Although, the fun part of this was that he would probably go further out of his way to avoid me. :-P

Lesson Number Thirteen: Don't overreact, don't let your emotions run away with you.

Refer to Lesson Number Two: Don’t invest too much emotional stock in one person too quickly. It takes up a lot of your time and energy, and closes you off to other opportunities that might arise.

Status: Probably will never learn