I recently joined yet another social networking site. It’s a small site that was formed last year as a home for expatriates from another site, now defunct, and a few other sources. I hesitated to join, because I am a little uncomfortable with the by-laws of the site, which are whatever the founder/sponsor/editor of the site thinks they ought to be. There’s no need to dwell on the details, except to say that I feel more at home on sites that are more aligned with the premise that I can do pretty much whatever I want. When a site has, as this one does, a zero-tolerance policy about violations of rules defined in overtly subjective terms, then it’s inevitable that I’ll be given the pumpkin eventually. The challenge is to see how long I can behave myself first.
As is customary on such sites, I posted a self-introduction soon after joining. These self-introductions are usually extremely formulaic:
My name is so-and-so.
I live in this place.
I work at this kind of job, or used to work and am retired or am between jobs.
I have the following religious/political/etc beliefs.
I will/will not tolerate the following deviations from my beliefs.
I am interested/uninterested in meeting partners for romance/sex/hook-ups/bridge.
The following quote summarizes my philosophy.
After this there is rambling discussion of other salient life experiences and whatnot. This is where you mention that you’re a vegetarian, or an ex-marine, or believe in fairies, or have a blog, or any sort of uncategorizable whatnot or fringe beliefs that might set you apart from the rest of the herd.
Anyway, I hate things that are formulaic, so I decided that mine would be a little different. But not different enough so as to be completely foreign, of course.
I’ve been around these sites to know what the usual subtexts are, and a few other useful tidbits. These are reflected in my introduction, albeit obliquely.
Another thing that I’ve learned on these sites is to save everything you’ve written that you might want to reference in the future, because sometimes things happen to things you post on the web. There might be a glitch, or the site founder/sponsor/administrator might expunge your post because it’s off-topic or posted in the wrong manner, or you might be on open.salon.com, where deleting other people’s posts is considered fair and civil.
Anyway, I kept a draft. I hope you’ll like it, because it’s all you’re getting today. The next chapter of AQoLC is a mess, and I’m feeling too charitable to release it yet. Maybe tomorrow, more likely Sunday.
Please allow me to introduce myself
Some odds and ends that you might find interesting or useful to know prior to any future interactions we might have (after all, forewarned is forearmed, as my eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush–no relation to any recent presidents–used to say):
- I’m happily married, and plan to stay that way, so please keep in mind that when I flirt with you I am not really interested in having sex with you, unless you are a perfect match for me in every possible way and can absolutely prove to me that my wife (who is somewhat computer savvy and shares a computer with me) will never find out, ever. Also it would be best if I never found out either, because I’m the sort of person who would feel very guilty and eventually break down and confess the whole thing to my mistress, who is a bit melodramatic and fickle, and would be so pissed off that she’d be certain to tell my wife, and then the shit would really hit the fan when she told my parents, and I’m just not into that much drama. My eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush, used to call this a “no-win clusterfuck”, which, if I understood her meaning correctly, is the bad, undesirable sort of clusterfuck.
- I enjoy writing short fiction, such as most of the previous paragraph.
- I’ve been told that I have the mind of a philosopher, the thoughts of a poet, the wisdom of a plagiarist, and the heart of an angel, although probably an angel who spent too much time at the pasta bar and not enough time doing cardio at the gym–but not by anyone whose opinion matters. My eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush, used to call this “fainting with damned praise,” or something like that.
- I have several advanced degrees in computer science and related fields, including at least one from a university that doesn’t advertise in the back pages of People Magazine, and so I know how computers are supposed to work and how they can work, which means that when I try to use applications like Microsoft Excel, two things usually happen: first, the computer gets so wrapped around its axle that any attempt to fix things or even remember exactly what I’ve done is a complete waste of time and it is usually best for all concerned to curtail the attempt and simply encase the hard drive in a concrete-lined lead sarcophagus and dump it into the Marianas Trench, where it will pose no further threat to mankind, and second, I need to go away and spend some time in my happy place with a bottle of scotch, a bowl of Cheetohs, and a copy of Caddyshack. This is what Mrs. Bush, my eighth-grade history teacher, used to call a “coping strategy.”
- I have sort of a thing for Guo Jingjing. If you don’t know who she is, that’s OK. All you need to know is that whenever I mention her, if you roll your eyes, my attention, which has been graced with a gnat-like attention span, will soon fixate on some other topic. If you’ve been on these social web sites for a while, the process of rolling your eyes and counting to ten will, I expect, be old hat to you. If not, you might want to practice it a few times. It’s one of the sort of things that my eighth-grade history teacher, Mrs. Bush–who must have been mercilessly teased for her name at various points in her life–would call a “valuable life skill.”
- I am a very private person, who communicates with the outside world only in short, carefully constructed sentence fragments. If at all.
It’s great to be here.
