my book about me

I'm on OkCupid. Again. Sort of.

Sort of because I don't use it for dating. I use it to exchange stupid messages with friends whose profiles I come across. For example, with B..:



(Also please to send the Social Security number)

 And with J.S.:  


(I flagged a magenta hanky during Pride but nobody approached me! Sad face!)

Very few people contact me and I almost never respond. Responding feels unnecessary. I meet plenty of nice people in the flesh. And more importantly the thought of getting strangers' hopes up about my emotional availability - the things we'll say, the faces we'll show each other, the friendships we'll foul, the FEMA tents that will replace our hearts in two months time - and the reputation that will follow me - makes me want to run away screaming. The last incarnation of my OkCupid profile had not one but THREE warning labels to this effect:

• "Quick to love, but not looking for it at the moment."
• "Open to other suggestions, but not looking for romance."
• "I make an excellent wingman."

 

(Caveat emptor, ladies!)

So why bother, if I don't actually want to meet anybody?

First, I like thinking about and honing my social media writing style. In the last year, I've micromanaged at least five friends' OkCupid profiles. I have strong opinions about how to not come across like a fool in Internet writing. So many things can doom a profile, including but not limited to 1) saying too little (reads as lurker), 2) saying too much (one should not have to hit Page Down more than twice), 3) misspelling words, 4) claiming middlebrow tastes, 5) claiming elite tastes, 6) identifying interests as if they're friends, like "Ani and Adrienne," 7) using the username "ilikeboobies" (a bona fide profile), 8) photos taken from a consistent angle, 9) excessive use of "Wheeeeeee!!! xoxox !!! :) <3 >.< "-like statements, and 10) being too literal in self-summary (e.g., "I was born in San Jose. Then I moved to Milpitas. Now I'm a dogcatcher. My favorite food is Greek yogurt."). So much to beware. But worst of all are those handwringers who backspace even as they type by saying "I never know what to say in these things!"

Profiles that work are those that embrace the genre and spell out the prospective's opinions clearly and unapologetically. On Friday night, I'm in the northeast corner of Washington Square Park, killing a game of Scrabble. The Ghost Writer blew. Fun Home wets my whistle.

If you would like me to improve the writing on your profile, I charge lawyer's rates - but your reward is life partnership so . . . you choose.

Second, I'm a little obsessed with the self-definitional aspect of it.

I like OkCupid for the same reason I like the Myers-Briggs types and love languages and astrology and other personality taxonomies. It gives me the opportunity and vocabulary to understand and describe people, and by people I mean myself.

(OkCupid reads my palm.)

Like the other social networking websites, OkCupid asks you to create a persona through words and photos. Your choice of words projects a certain image. You have to think about who you are and what part of that you want to let the world see. Except a dating profile probes a little deeper than Facebook. Your photo of you doublefisting Coronas works differently from one of you digging postholes for an environmental restoration project. How do I self-summarize? What six things can't I do without?

One day in May 2010, I blew off work for an afternoon and fell into an OkCupid wormhole. I browsed through all 56 pages of profiles on OkCupid meeting these parameters: gay women, 28-33, with 25 miles of Brooklyn. Then I had a mild panic about not being able to answer the OkCupid profile questions, and what that meant about my self-awareness:

Yesterday I was trolling for profiles of people I knew. I found the online dating profiles of A., B., C., D., and E. I was expecting more to turn up, but those that did were treasures. I read and reread and looked at pictures. I was most interested in A.'s. I was cruising along on her profile thinking, Yes, I have everything that she wants, strong shoulders, goofball tomboy personality, baseball glove, tree differentiating skills, "dizzying linguistic capabilities" - I mean, I wasn't lifted because I was flattering myself about my own attractiveness, or that I was hopeful that I could be with A. again, but because I felt like I had found a clear description of what I too valued - but then - wait. She also wants her dreambutch to have "self-knowledge and humility."

I stopped there. Is that what was wrong with me? That I didn't have either? And all that compatibility, all my androgyne to her androgyne-seeking, meant nothing because I didn't know what I wanted, or I was scared of what I wanted, or I couldn't express it, and I was a coward?

I take breaks every few years. I take long, lonely trips, dislocate myself, make myself confront new things. This, I say, is in the service of making myself a better, more self-reflective person. But I must have had the wrong idea. I think I should stay put. I think I need to sit down where I am and pay attention to what makes me happy and what makes me unhappy. I should be able to fill out questions about the movies that matter most to me without referring to my NetFlix history; because the movies don't matter when you don't remember them, and it's a lie to say that they do.

I was probably right to panic, because at that point I had wandered somewhat far away from the interests, activities, habits, and communities that I feel are part of my identity.

I was also interested in the metaphysics of self-description, i.e., how do we know we are describing ourselves accurately? How to not be three blind men describing an elephant?

I remember how dishonest the act of self-summary seemed from last year's online dating adventures, how your profile is a mixture of who you are and who you aspire to be, and how confusing it gets to differentiate the two. Yesterday, O. showed me the "Leadership Compass," a concept she picked up at a workshop at Creating Change. It's a personality chart with different characteristics on two perpendicular axes. North and south are relationship- versus goal-oriented. East and west are prudent sloth versus reckless speed, as working styles, or so I gathered, because I didn't find anything describe the axes in any coherent way. I glanced over O.'s chart and decided that I was all of the characteristics of all of the quadrants. It was baffling. On the underground walk between the Q and the 6 trains at Union Square, I told the back of S.'s head (she was tugging in front of me) that personality tests should really be filled out by the people who know you or work with you, because you can't be trusted to represent yourself honestly. Somebody has to tell me what my leadership style is, because I can't seem to perceive my inability to perceive myself as a personality dominated by indecisiveness.

On these websites you see dozens of people who appear to be within a standard deviation of yourself and your desires, with similar modestly pleasurable and unwasteful tastes, life goals, and interests, but the sell seems so different from the reality. When you meet face-to-face, why can't you two banter like your profiles do? Why are you so old and misshapen when you're not a 121k jpeg? And how much of this careful differentiation matters anyway? I found it so easy to judge a person's coarse tastes in art, poor grammar, seeming immodesty, embarrassing proclamations. But seen from outer space, how much difference is there really between somebody who likes Arrested Development versus somebody who likes Freaks and Geeks? Somebody who makes $185,000 as a corporate lawyer and somebody who makes $29,000 as a freelance radio producer/non-profit admin? In the end, we all turn bland-colored and die.

Note how my emotional defense mechanisms steered thoughts about romance toward death.

(The first thing people notice about me: halting motions, rotting flesh, blood on mouth, cute haircut!)

As I've written before, the last few months I've been busy hunting for identity in a period I'm calling a spastic second adolescence. Somebody following my profile in the last few months would have witnessed the schizophrenic evolution of my self-awareness. When I first reposted my profile, this was my self-summary:

A man set sail on a stormy sea. The boat that bore him yawed. Fleas set upon his collar. The air was salt; the food was salt; the medium was salt. He played the tin whistle and never slept. In his low voice, he said, to nobody in particular, "This is neither allegory nor reality, this is just something somebody wrote to meet the minimum word count demanded by an online dating service."

A good Samaritan sent me this helpful tip:

I left that profile up for about three months. Then I changed it to this:

Things I like: nattering on with someone awesome, learning new things, viola jokes, feeling dislocated in a foreign setting (this includes international travel as well as Billy Graham revivals in the Superdome), stringed instruments, an efficient sentence, a well-considered opinion, feats of strength, playing catch, giving gifts, walking out of a museum with the memory of just one piece of art.

I spent college in a hippie vegetarian co-op, baking bread, nerding out on art and politics. That's still my ideal household and community - warm, open, caregiving, nontraditional. I'm trying to figure out how best to live this ideal.

But this felt like too much, too humorless, too open to ridicule. Embarrassingly direct is not my style, colonoscopy cam though my blog might be. And guardedness is as much a part of my personality as the things I value. So I wanted a self-summary that would be honest and sincere but also creeping toward void for vagueness.

Which brings us to the present:

Warm, sloppy, enthusiastic, verbal, bicultural, non-judgmental, curious, searching. Sometimes uncertain, sometimes destructive, always attentive. Obscene in thoughts but traditional in unexpected ways. Values education, distrusts power. Cocky yet fearful. Too old to suffer fools. Very interested in limits. Quick to love, but not looking too hard for it at the moment.

With each revision, I feel like it's getting closer to the truth. It's a funny way to go about pinning down my identity, questions on a dating profile, but I suppose it's no less funny than the personality inventory tests that my high school sociology teacher made me take to identify my future profession. And before that, at age 5, circling professions that looked interesting to me in "My Book About Me."

In this book, I circled "Rabbi." Why? I misread the text. My life aspiration at age 5 was to be a rabbit.