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!

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Chapter 37: "I got the town wired"

So I had been on the Internet dating circuit now for only four months. It seemed much longer. How many men had I been out with? How many had I slept with? Certainly way more than I ever could have by using conventional methods. The internet was proving to be an efficient and reliable method to meet an endless number of people from backgrounds I never would have crossed otherwise. As with anything though, you have to take the good with the bad. My screening processes absolutely had a little something left to be desired.

"Timon" continued his daily phone calls while he was traveling that week. I was increasingly getting more and more excited to see him during the upcoming weekend. Finally! But hold back, don't put too much of your emotional stock in one man. I learned that lesson with "Tramp." "Tramp," by the way, still plagued my thoughts from time to time, and I still felt helpless to the unknown knowledge as to why he cut me off so abruptly. I wondered what he was doing, how things were going for him. Had I come across as the most clingy and needy woman he'd ever met? Or was he back with his ex-girlfriend, and that's why he refused to talk to me? This was, of course, the most likely scenario, but still aggravating as hell not to know for sure.

So I was at work late one night, and contacted by "Zazoo" via Yahoo Messenger. He had seen my Personals Ad and was intrigued. I looked up his ad, and was intrigued. "Zazoo" was one of those, "I got the town wired" kind of guys, but his energy and enthusiasm was amusing. He was into making and producing music and had been doing so for quite some time. He pushed to meet for dinner when I got off work. I had no idea when I was going to finish, and I tried to explain that to him. But he was insistent. He wanted to take me out to dinner. Well, shoot, nothing wrong with a free meal, right? So I agreed.

This, I quickly discovered, was a mistake. Since I had agreed to dinner, and I had no idea exactly when this rendezvous would happen, we agreed to keep in contact by phone. I then began receiving phone calls from him every 15 minutes, wanting an update as to when I would get finished. Of course, this only delayed my progress each time. He ended up at the Outback restaurant we had agreed upon and asked if, perhaps, he should just get something to go, and bring it to my office. I still had work to do, and everyone had already gone home. Bringing a stranger to my place of business was ludicrous. But I was hungry, and it was late, and I DID work in a secured location that wouldn't be readily accessible should he turn out to be a stalker or something.

Yeah, I did it. And was beyond disappointed. Bringing me dinner to my office was incredibly sweet, and it did give us an opportunity to talk, but the picture he'd shown me was probably 10 years old, and at least 50 pounds ago. I did my best to be grateful and gracious, but I was completely turned off by him and his "I got the town wired" attitude. He had an egotistical quality that was irritating when I clearly didn't think he had any reason to be so. When "Zazoo" left, I tried to make it as politely clear as I could that I was not interested, and I thought he understood. However he attempted to contact me for a couple of days and finally got the hint. How do I seem to attract these weirdos?