I just listened to a perfectly reasonable and well presented perspective on NPR. Unfortunately it was undermined due to the presenter’s unfortunate name: Dick Meister. I’m guessing that happens a lot.

I Need Help

Today I realized that “therapist” is just “the rapist” with less space.

Dates are like buses. They didn’t used to be. That is all for today.

So I sat down to do my taxes this evening, after days, weeks, even months of procrastinating. I got through my basic info, W-2, panicked that I didn’t have a 1099 form from my bank for the tiny, pathetic amount of interest I’d earned on my savings account, and had reached roughly 30% completion when I was foolish enough to click next… “Come Back Later We’re doing nightly maintenance right now. We apologize for any inconvenience.” I don’t even have the words.
View Separately

So I sat down to do my taxes this evening, after days, weeks, even months of procrastinating. I got through my basic info, W-2, panicked that I didn’t have a 1099 form from my bank for the tiny, pathetic amount of interest I’d earned on my savings account, and had reached roughly 30% completion when I was foolish enough to click next…

“Come Back Later
We’re doing nightly maintenance right now. We apologize for any inconvenience.”

I don’t even have the words.

Rejectile Dysfunction

In 2009 I tried something new and slightly scary, dating. What follows will be neither revelatory or possibly even that interesting for you, but for me it’s an exercise in documenting something that has turned out to be both insignificant and yet transformational in a wholly unanticipated way. Be warned, should you embark upon reading this, get ready for an essay that became shockingly long. I’m more surprised than anyone.

Prologue

Being somewhat emotionally retarded I’ve never really properly dated anyone in the past. Relationships had tended to grow organically from existing friendships or colleagues that I knew. I couldn’t honestly say I’d ever had a real date with either someone totally new, or relatively so. However as you get older a funny thing happens, you stop making so many new friends. Your social circle becomes more limited, more insular. You hang around with the same people a lot of the time, doing many of the same things in mostly the same places. While this isn’t quite as dull and turgid as it sounds, it is rather limiting if, like me, you’re still firmly and resolutely single, even at the grand old age of 31.

Well as you might imagine this was not the most satisfactory of situations for me, so I decided to do something about it, and that something was internet dating. Now it’s worth bearing in mind that I’m old enough to remember when the web was new and soap operas and teen dramas routinely featured terrifying story-lines which depicted internet dating as an almost cast iron way of bagging yourself a morbidly obese rapist. However, given that I make my living from the internet, and that things have moved on since 1999, I swallowed my pride, and my fear, and set up a profile.

Read More