Home Sweet Home

I bought my ticket to Berlin today. May 9. Non-refundable. I spent an hour building up my chi before taking the leap, and I've been feeling like I used up all my hit points, not to mention twenty-three hundred dollars, on this purchase. I'm trying to be positive — great deal on airfare! JFK to Berlin and Budapest to Paris to JFK for $618! That's less than eight cents a mile! — but here's what I can't stop thinking. Foreign language. Roommate. Foreign languages, plural. Fifty or so peers. What if I don't make friends? How do I get from Tegel to the hotel? I don't even know what hotel I'm supposed to get to.

I worry about my inability to micromanage this tour.

I was at work when I booked the tour, so I went back to my desk kind of shaken. I told my boss... I e-mailed him, even though he sits five feet away from me... I told him that I wouldn't be in for twelve days in May and, parenthetically, that I bought a ticket to Berlin. Oh my God, he couldn't have been more excited. I got the same thing from people when I went to Italy, and I'm speechless at that. "I think this will be really great for you!" "Tell me more, are you in Berlin the whole time!?" And of course, since I e-mailed him, "Oh, why didn't you tell me the good news sooner!?"

Uh... you are aware that you're not going to Europe? Right? You're gonna be stuck here, working.

But it balanced out, since I told Mom ("Oh, by the way, I booked my tickets today. And we're out of Poland Spring.") and she was noticeably less thrilled: "Are you sure you don't want to wait till tomorrow?" Thanks, Mom — after I booked the trip. Real encouraging.

Jumping to Conclusions

I updated my blog's title after reading through some of the old crap I wrote and realizing, or coming to terms with, that my thoughts are less fascinating than they are... uh, impetuous. Honest, too, and organic, but since I bitch on other people's impulsive, rash gut reactions, it's fair that I at least recognize spewing my own rote responses drawn from a functional narrative rather than reality, then justified post hoc: Well, they are morons. At least I'm not wrong there.

In my defense, I usually write these commentaries in public, naturally surrounded by jackasses. Like these two people at the table next to me, having their twelve-inch conversation but with their playground voices: God, I'm right freaking like three feet away from them! Are they even aware that I can hear every single stupid word of their stupid conversation? Are you familiar at all with how sound works? And I don't give a damn about Wendy or the audition she just landed or how she's getting back together with Jim because it has absolutely nothing to do with me so why are you invading my personal space with your twaddle! I'm not up in your face, even though I could, but I'm not because unlike some people I could mention I'm not a solipsistic inconsiderate piece of...

Sorry. Sort of a habit.

Seems like there's a correlation between this need to spew my impulsive thoughts and those thoughts turning out... not exactly wrong, but simplified and devoid of the nuance that makes living as an imperfect being among other imperfect beings interesting. Like these two chatterboxes next to me, who would probably be decent people if they'd just take the conversation somewhere else. Or who I'd probably even like if they were talking with me.

I suffer from a confirmation bias — the other day I ran into the subway station just as the train was pulling out and, "Shit, I always just miss the damn train!" — I'm sure I knew on some subconscious level. No matter how strongly I've concluded the universe is out to screw me, I cannot reconcile that the trains are trailing me, scheduling their arrivals and departures as to not coincide perfectly with mine — speaking of solipsism!

This means I'm working on questioning all of my assumptions, though that's easier to do when I don't have other people's inane blather a few feet away from me. Microsoft Excel and I are going to track my experience, whether it's positive, negative, or overall neutral. I expect that it'll turn out to be more or less neutral, maybe a bit on the self-fulfilling prophecy negative side, but I believe I'll validate my own sense of victimhood of divine impishness. I also believe I'll have cause to question my methodology.

Results to follow.

"How Does That Make You Feel?"

I started watching In Treatment, HBO's latest exploration of psychotherapy after the brilliance of The Sopranos and the excruciating tedium of Tell Me You Love Me. In Treatment is slow and tough to watch, or more precisely tough to sit through, set entirely in a psychiatrist's office with only two characters' (three on the Thursday episodes) back and forth, and I oddly admire it for breaking television paradigms. It's like watching a stage play, maybe one of those Greek tragedies before the concept of "action" had been invented, and the character study is hidden in the way the patients exposit their stories. But the show is having this bizarre side effect on me; I'm beginning to feel inadequate about my own therapy sessions. Do I talk enough? Are my narratives interesting, meaningful, clear? Or am I just paying two-hundred dollars a fifty-minute hour for a live audience, for the kinds of incoherent ranting write so hastily in my blog?

This is typical for me: Thanks to many, many years in therapy, I now recognize my habit of ascribing the idea of "normal" to my external observations and then using that contrivance as a standard against which I judge my own experience. With that view, I find it interesting that I only read half the show ━ the patients' role, their physical, tangible behavior, their acting ━ in the context of my own psychotherapy. The doctor, Paul ━ as if I call my therapist by his first name ━ remains a cipher, the Greek chorus in the dialectic, frequently just pulling on the patient's issue even as it's flowing smoothly out. "Tell me more." Or, "Go on." Punctuated by one of those weird therapy revelations: what you just said is interesting, illuminates differently, contrasted to this other thing that slipped out of your mouth five sessions ago, like the whole thing's scripted. I mean, obviously In Treatment is, in fact, scripted but Rodrigo Garcia does a truly sublime of job of revealing these characters, where they're blabbing on and on and on, self-assured, and then Paul does his mental calculations and turns his patients transparent before they're even aware of it.

I wasn't seeing Paul as anything more than the sounding board until the Friday episode, when Paul has a weekly appointment with his own therapist. You'll recall that on The Sopranos, Dr. Melfi also had an analyst, distilling (and, by the end of the series, adulterating) her emotional reactions, and I'm now wondering if my therapist sees a therapist. I approve of, and appreciate, and value psychotherapy and the dynamic ━ to the non-initiate, it's like paying somebody to be your friend; but, in a healthy relationship, you're paying the therapist to not be your friend. He's someone who has no emotional stake in your well-being and his relationship with you, so he can be what your friends can't: objective and critical. And that's beneficial; obviously, psychiatrists realize that benefit, and that's why I'm now working on the assumption that my therapist has his own Ivy League-educated Psy. D., and he spends fifty minutes a week on that couch, and they call each other by their first names. The idea makes me jumpy, and not just because I've never cared to conjure anything about my therapist's life outside our sessions. I'm not happy with him having issues, or if he doesn't have issues, then he has issues in that sort of self-help way people go, "Everybody has issues."

Now I have to see him as a person, and not an Eliza with intelligence, textbook education and life experience. He's a person who could find my sheepish narratives tedious, or could be frustrated with my stubborn impenetrability, or could just plain resent me. He can judge me, in the same way I'm afraid everybody else does, and I'm sure that's compartmentalized somewhere off in my brain.

But on the other hand, I've been meeting with this particular therapist for seven years, and another one for three years before that, and another one for two years before that, all of whom, I now presume, can't fit into my reductive mold as emotional processing units, the role I secretly want to foist upon everybody else. That means that despite my best efforts, I actually am succeeding at normalizing my relationships with them, objectively and in reality, as human beings. Which is why I'm in therapy in the first place. Hmmm....

Chemistry.com Just Doesn't Get Me

Lovelorn, I took a web surf to chemistry.com, the matchmaking website for people too freakish to be considered by eHarmony. Chemistry.com is sort of like getting relationship advice from Miss Cleo. It'll be what you want to hear, and not remotely helpful. Still better than Dr. Phil, who'll throw folksy insults at you and not be remotely helpful. God, I hate Dr. Phil.

Chemistry.com just makes me laugh incredulously. Not as hard as that time my grandma tried to set me up with my cousin though. Maybe if she was a cousin by blood instead of marriage. eHarmony tries to psychoanalyze you with questions like "How important is it that your partner be physically attractive?" "What three words would your friends use to describe you?" Here's how chemistry.com finds your soulmate:





Be honest, chemistry.com, you're just matching people up by spinning a bottle, aren't you?

My favorite part of all these dating sites is the end of the survey, where they tell me what my personality is. As if I don't know — it's my personality stuck inside my damn head. The soulless machine algorithm doesn't have a chance:

You are a DIRECTOR/explorer

You are courageous; and you seek challenges. You are a tough-minded, independent and daring thinker who likes to explore ideas or problems thoroughly. You focus easily. And you are persistent, systematic and competent in pursuing your interests and goals.

You are also assertive; and you enjoy the opportunities your hard work wins.

You have a lot of energy. You think quickly, make decisions more easily than most, dislike unnecessary rules, and take a rational approach to people, issues and ideas.

You don't often enjoy "small talk." You are generally not interested in pleasing boring people and you gravitate to men and women who are intellectually exciting and get to their point quickly during conversations.

You are not conventional in most of your attitudes and values. You tend to be irreverent and pragmatic and you like spontaneous people. You can be an exciting, yet hard driving and exacting, friend and companion.

This has to be what you get when you answer "C" for all the questions, because it's so not me. "You are also assertive" stands out — a lot — and overwhelms what's right about it. (Recall the Forer effect.) Stuff like "[you] dislike unnecessary rules:" everyone dislikes unnecessary rules, sort of by definition, but I'm here thinking, "Well, I do have a lot of contempt for superfluous rules..."

It's not the personality test that worries me though, since it's not like you can fail that. It's the stuff that I contributed; I'm so sucky at introducing myself. I'm a little happy I can't link directly to my profile... but here's what I look like: Chemistry.com suggests posting a picture where you're smiling, maybe something from a vacation, and this is the best photo I have of me. Aside from the one on the upper-right corner of this site, of course. I should probably pay a professional to make me look as not-constipated as I feel.

My personal blurb isn't any better. Do other people have this issue, where they can only write about themselves at two extremes: terse and uninformative ("I am a carbon-based life form.") and too much information? I believe I went with too much information, although I tried to temper it:

Hi.

I'm pretty shy and quiet and don't warm to people very easily, but I can get very lively and funny around people I'm comfortable with. I'm eager to try new things, even though I sometimes need a little prodding. I'm open-minded and extremely picky -- because life is short and why waste it on things that aren't good, right? But you also (well, I also) never really know where you'll find stuff you really like. I'm fascinate by just about anything, as long as it keeps filling my brain with new ideas....

What else? I'm an aspiring playwright who does gigs coding websites until Broadway calls, which should be any day now. I raised tropical fish as a kid because my parents wouldn't let me have a dog, and I was pretty surprised when it turned out some of those fish were more carniverous than they looked in the store. I bake the world's best (and probably, only) kahlua and cinnamon brownies. I'm not a big sports fan, but I love watching those made-up sports they show on ESPN2.

Okay, well... nice meeting you.

I didn't want to put weeks and weeks of work into this online personal ad, but I just read that again and, hell, I wouldn't date me. (Also I wouldn't date me because that would be really weird.) Ugh. I figure maybe I'll just get a cat and one of those Japanese sex robots (like that's not weird) and call it a night.

Advice and/or words of encouragement appreciated.

Soulmate Buying Guide

Finding someone to date can't possibly be this difficult. Inmates on death row get marriage proposals. Scott Peterson, who murdered his wife, got a marriage proposal within an hour of being incarcerated! Of course, he had all the publicity of Nancy Grace, while all I have is a blog and eHarmony.

Speaking of which, eHarmony — and remember, this dude and this douche are both wife-hogging polygamists — eHarmony still thinks I'm a freak and refuses to subject anyone to a relationship with me. I mean, refuses to match me up with anyone. I also played around with perfectmatch.com, which does a whole similar psych profile thing with computerized matches. Perfectmatch.com is a true romantic, however. There's someone for everyone (and there'd better be, if this dumbass could find love) and perfectmatch doesn't filter out the undesirables.

As a public service, I want to compare eHarmony and perfectmatch, to help you figure out where best to waste your time, dating from behind a screen. Perfectmatch gets bonus points for not rejecting me. That's my date's job.

I think perfectmatch was much more successful at cutting through the psychological walls and bullshit and figuring out the enigma that is me... in a vague, profiled kind of way. Perfectmatch describes me as "risk averse, relaxed, cautious, seeks variety," while eHarmony says I am best described as "consistently taking care of [my]self." That just seems wrong, since I suck at taking care of myself and there are days when I'm surprised I went twenty-four hours without stapling my hand to my forehead. I think what eHarmony means is I'm consistently taking care of myself, I'm "fiercely independent" and "believe deeply in personal freedom and responsibility," which is a tactful way of calling me a self-obsessed jerk.

So while perfectmatch saw through me, I think eHarmony picked up on a pretty fair superficial description. (Or maybe it's the other way around...) eHarmony's telling me pretty much how others see me, down to their "Negative Reactions Others May Have Towards You" analysis. Some people think I lack compassion. Some people might see me as selfish. eHarmony tries to be supportive: "That is part of you and your basic beliefs about life. And some people will inevitably want you to be different, but that is simply not who you are," like it's saying who cares about anyone else? eHarmony will be your friend. Except it won't, because eHarmony thinks you're a freak and would rather hang out with folks who fit neatly into a mold.

It's not that I think eHarmony is wrong, but I feel like it's reductive. I won't dispute that I'm frequently an ass, but I hope it's a product of my environment — a lot of people I know are aloof towards me, and it hurts, so I respond in kind — rather than who I fundamentally am. In different circumstances, like when I've found my soulmate, I'm different. I feel like perfectmatch avoids those hazy areas, so when perfectmatch says, "This person is cautious about love, and life in general. They will need to know quite a bit about a person before investing in them. Even intense attraction won't make them jump in before they've gotten to know the person pretty well," it seems like a fair, general description, like it's a comfort zone that I gravitate to rather than a reaction to what's around.

Basically fuck eHarmony: it's a vapid bitch.

I can't say too, too much for perfectmatch either, since it only found ten women for me among the three billion on the planet. The self-reported profiles seem weak and a little scatterbrained, like "Could you be with someone who doesn't share your views on the environment?" seems like something you wouldn't want to tackle till the fourth date. Or I'd prefer if someone just came out and asked me what kind of music I'd like, rather than reading the responses that I checked off from a list. If perfectmatch came up with a few more hits, I'd think about spending a little money on it, but as it is, I feel like perfectmatch is just a tiny bit less effective than landing on death row.

Which isn't happening. Sorry, ladies.

And People Say I'm Anti-Social!!???

We need to talk about a major problem in this country: people blocking me from their Facebook pages. The other day, I ran into someone — ex-floormate from college, kind of a nice girl (at least six years ago...) — or at least I ran into what could've easily been the back of her head. What the hell, I thought. She didn't seem like the kind of person who'd bother having a Facebook page, but I wonder what she's up to. I put the super-nifty Facebook search feature to use, and since we went to the same college, I was able to see her profile. I'm like ninety to ninety-five percent sure that this isn't creepy; it's why not-Tom from MySpace (who kind of looks like George Michael Bluth) made Facebook in the first place.

Okay, it's two days later and I'm on Facebook again because it's like freaking crack. No motion on the friend request front. This happens — you people know who you are — and it's absolutely beyond comprehension to me. Let's say you're someone I went to middle school with and you get that e-mail with the subject "Jay Harris has sent you a Friend Request on Facebook." What's going through your head? "Oh, wonderful. Jay wants to be my Facebook buddy. Now I've got to click on the link, log in, and click the little "Confirm" button. That's gonna take a whole thirty seconds of my precious, precious time. We were never that close." Yeah, sorry to bother you, being all curious about what you're up to and how you're doing. How rude of me!

The other option I came up with is that you guys aren't quite picking up on the whole Facebook deal. Just because you tell Facebook that we're friends doesn't mean we actually have to be friends now. It's just a dumb little computer program so you can tell people your favorite movies and show them pictures of your trip to Paris or wherever. We're not gonna start hanging out, telling each other secrets, being total BFF's... maybe, MAYBE I'll send you a little note on your birthday, and that's it. Which, correct me if I'm wrong here, is why you have a Facebook account in the first place. There's a certain logic here, and the dangling friend request lives miles outside it.

But wow, this girl from college went one better. Two days later, no friend update, so I went back to her profile and... gone! A full profile, fifty-something friends, just disappeared from Facebook. It hardly seems worth my time to verify my Occam's Razor theory here, but I believe I'm blocked from her profile. Let's go through this step by step: She got the friend request e-mail from Facebook — note, nothing special, no personal message or anything. So she logs into Facebook and the "Do you want to confirm Jay Harris as your friend?" window pops up. There's two options, "Confirm" and "Deny," and instead of clicking on "Deny" and moving on with her life, she went into the Privacy control panel, typed my name into the little search box, went through the more than 500 Jay Harrises in Facebook, found my profile, and clicked on "Block." I'm almost touched that she'd that much time on me.

I'm insecure, so I've gotta go through all the different possibilities: Did I ever burn my name into her lawn? Nope. Was I ever caught on hidden video with Chris Hansen? Don't think so. Did I call her something mean in my blog? That's a distinct possibility, but she escaped my literary wrath unscathed. I checked.

Point is, unless you've got some compelling reasons not to, stop being a jerk about and confirm your Facebook friends already. Stay tuned next week, when I tell off people who walk slowly in front of me on the sidewalk.

Miracle Drug

I'm happy to report that I'm on a new pill, and now modulating three of my brain chemicals keeping me away from despondency. The new medicine is Wellbutrin, a.k.a. buproprion, and side effects include dry mouth, nausea, insomnia, tremor, excessive sweating, tinnitus, and seizures. Still way, way better than alli. I was doing some Wikipedia research on buproprion and it turns out that over twenty million prescriptions for Wellbutrin were written last year. Not only that, but Wellbutrin was the fourth most prescribed anti-depressant in America, which means that over sixty-million prescriptions were written for the top three drugs — Prozac, Zoloft, and something called Lexapro — so eighty million plus, total. A Department of Health & Human Services report from 2002 says that 8.5% of the population was on anti-depressants, that's twenty-four million people who are depressed.

Here's my question: Where the hell are all of you?!

I mean, that twenty-million Wellbutrin scripts a year thing made me feel pretty good. Just in case you're one of the 91.5% of the population who's perpetually thrilled to be alive, let me explain. Being sad sucks, and, for obvious reasons, it's stigmatized. So you don't just feel bad because your serotonin is low and your monoamine oxidase is high; you feel bad because you're alone in your misery. No longer, though! Like, last week's happy hour had eighty people; statistically, there should've been five or six fellow despondents, all mixing alcohol and potent psychoactive drugs to make ourselves feel better. We should've started a club!

I Rationally Deconstruct eHarmony's Relationship Profile

People change, eHarmony.com, and it wouldn't kill you to let users update their personality profile. Maybe I've matured since eHarmony did it's algorithm-match thing for me, and I'd like to find out. I'm still answering honestly — I think that's really the only way to find the woman of my dreams... or the woman who can tolerate me — but there's always the chance that eHarmony will find deep inside me reservoirs of affability I never knew I had. I got a new email address, so a brand new Relationship Questionnaire will follow, and let's see where it takes me.

The first page of the eHarmony profile is just basic personal info, plus (I think) your soulmate's height and age, so onto the profound stuff, right?

Page Two. Oh... I remember why I stopped this. "What is your personal income?" Less than $20,000 — although I like how $0 is an option, too. This seems superfluous; first, last time I was in math class, zero is less than twenty-thousand, and second, how many homeless people are actually posting profiles on eHarmony in the first place? And then there's another problem question, which is "How important is your match's income to you?" The short answer is, like everything else in this stupid survey, I don't know. There are so many ways of interpreting this question — are they asking if I wouldn't be happy unless I married rich? I think most people's gut response, certainly mine, to the idea of marrying into wealth is that it would be great. No sitting in traffic commuting, or ordering a small coffee to save money, and you can make a hobby out of getting ineffective plastic surgeries. (I can't believe those trophy wives haven't filed lawsuits yet.)

But Western society also has a complicated, several-millenia old history of gender relations, and frankly I already have an inferiority complex without a pre-nup and yet another, quantitative, measure of my worth. Maybe they're asking how important it is that my "match" have a similar income to me? Or is it a negative question, would I reject my "match," my soul mate that God, in His infinite wisdom, has chosen for me, because she's poor? How much of a golddigger am I — what if I loved her in every other way, would the money still matter to me? Would I even give us a chance to find out? Plus, there's political correctness to take into account: I think this is a good question to be wishy-washy over, on a scale of one to seven, I'm choosing a three.

My ethnicity: that's easy.

What ethnicities would you be willing to accept as matches? Mother-fucker! Maybe I'm reading too much into this, because you look around the room and.... Maybe it's just me, since I've never really asked anyone about this, but everybody I know who's married is married within their race. I see people walking down the street holding hands, and they're usually the same race. You look around the room and you first focus on people of certain races. You have to pick someone to talk to, to get to know, and it's not like you've got a ton of information about them. I guess I can check off all the ethnicities here without feeling like a liberal guilt jackass this time; presumably eHarmony takes care of the awkward compatibility testing, and then I've noticed that no matter what their appearance is, people look a lot more attractive once you get to know them. I guess "How important is your match's ethnicity?" Not very.

Now I get to describe my appearance, via vague characteristics and this coarse seven-point scale. (FYI: Seven means the given characteristic describes you perfectly.) Rank the degree to which I'm: well-groomed, handsome, athletic, overweight, fit, and sexy. Well, Mom says I'm handsome... Here goes, in order: 4, 4, 2, 2, 3, 2, but that last one's really for women and himbos, right? I want to explore this a bit further...

Honestly...

I put this application called an "Honesty Box" on my Absolutely Indispensable Facebook Profile, which never really seemed like a super idea. The idea is that people can leave little notes anonymously; officially, "Honesty Box lets users send each other anonymous messages, removing any inhibitions and letting people be completely honest with you." Honesty Box basically presents you with a decision: do you want to know what people honestly think of you? There seems like not only a good potential for abuse — it's restricted to your friends (or "friends") thankfully — but also a great way to shatter your blissful ignorant belief that people actually like you. I was conflicted over the concept, but I eventually decided that, first of all, my friends/"friends" are completely indifferent to me. (Check out my Facebook wall. It grows at a rate of about one post a year.) There are days when I feel like I could grow to fifty feet tall, start breathing fire, and walk around stomping on Tokyo and the people who know me would still be completely oblivious. Well, things are busy at work, and I'm totally stressed, and it's my other friend's birthday next week or whatever.

My other thought is that if my friends do hold an opinion about me, which they don't (see caveat below), their opinions can't possibly be any worse than the opinion I have about myself. This is what we call a "win-win" situation, right? But then, here are the first four reviews for the Honesty Box application:

[anonymous person] (Putnam City North High School) wrote at 12:52pm I NEED TO DELETE REPLIES. SOME ARE... NOT APPROPRIATE. Message - Report

Whitney Porter (LA Tech) wrote at 12:41pm I want to delete replies Message - Report

Lyndsey Shea (Hingham High School) wrote at 12:27pm i want to delete my reply threads too. how do i do it ? Message - Report

Alicia Colón (Howard) wrote at 12:05pm What if I want to delete a reply thread? I don't see where I can do that. Is there not an option to do that?

I think that speaks to the quality of some people's friends.

Much to my surprise — I was really expecting "Jay, you are an ass." — somebody wrote something nice to me. I quote, out of sheer joy, "Hey Jay. I think you're a very cool person I knew from a very long time ago. I always pictured you working at NASA or something just because you're so smart. Anyways, I really do hope you're doing well and having a happy life." Thank you, Anonymous Person. That really made my day; I'm even going to resist the temptation to cynically pick it apart because I'd like it to keep making my day. (This does not come easily to me.) Did you hear that? Somebody thinks I'm a very cool person! Smiley emoticon, please! I see a meet-cute romantic comedy in the making here: like Anonymous Person turns out to be my most despised rival at work, but it turns out that from behind the Internet, we're great friends.

I can't say anything because I'm about to cowardly compliment my friends through Honesty Box — my original plan was to cravenly tell people off via Honesty Box instead — but what the hell? Call me crazy, but I think being nice should be, uh, a nice thing... free of subtext, ulterior motives, and face-to-face. I'd like to extend a little invitation to them: Contact me! Leave messages! Constructive criticism appreciated! (Euphoric praise appreciated even more!) I don't bite — okay, I do, but not the amiable — and I won't read into your comments or develop expectations (really, when have I ever had expectations?) or anything. Just want to share the love.

Loneliness is haunting me, following me around from one desolate happy hour to another, leaving my Facebook feeds unchanged for a week, and taunting me with commercials for Age of Love. I have some time, just me and my computer, and I thought I might try expanding my social network... but I don't want to go outside my bedroom. I don't feel like putting a shirt on. I gave online matchmaking a shot two years ago, only to have that snooty bitch eHarmony.com reject me. I answered eHarmony's personality profile honestly and the computer dating monkeys at eHarmony headquarters were unable to match me "at this time." Should've lied, I guess.

Anyway, I logged into eHarmony again — still going to answer honestly, but I figured that maybe I've grown a bit since eHarmony unceremoniously snubbed me. Or maybe eHarmony's grown, not so much superficial, self-absorbed, and marginalizing... diverse... profiles. Nope. I love this little blurb from the home page: "Meet and communicate with quality women today" — and that emphasis is theirs. "Quality" women? This is exactly why personal relationships are bullshit: I've never used an adjective to describe both women and snow tires, but somehow that doesn't factor into the love equation.

I'm re-reading my eHarmony personality profile, now outdated, and I'm thinking this is a good place to put some links explaining the Forer effect.

Fine. Fuck eHarmony anyway. I'm moving on to Match.com, which is endorsed by Dr. Phil, so it'll probably berate me into dating, right? I was signing up for Match.com, but then I stopped and thought it might be fun to take you, my adoring public, on my journey through the world of online dating. I can make fun of it, be self-deprecating, so it won't matter and it'll sting less when I fail. Ingenious.... But you know what would be even better is filling out a fake form, pretending to be an Asian-American hog farmer from Montana or something, then when Match.com rejects me I can just be like, "Ha, joke's on you, Dr. Phil!"

The only questions Match.com asks before matching you up with, by my count, sixteen random eligible singles are your location and the age range beyond which you absolutely will not touch. Today, I'm 25, so I figure there are three ways to answer this question:

• The open-minded, full of shit way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 18 and 114."
• The honest way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 25 and 25."
• And the perverted, I know the age of consent in all fifty states way: "I'm looking to meet someone between the ages of 16 and 18."

(By the way, I had to look up the age of consent in New Jersey, just in case you were wondering.) I mention this because the next page on Match.com has this pull-down menu where you give them your birthdate, and it goes all the way back to 1919. I really want to know just how many octogenarians are actually on Match.com, how many are looking to meet someone in their twenties, and whether Grandma will let me put up a profile for her.

Okay, now I'm onto the search part of our evening. I didn't set up a profile on Match.com, so I sort of feel like this is the electronic version of peeping through a hole in the girls' locker room... but somehow when you're hiding behind a computer this all becomes appropriate. Don't ask. Here's the search criteria I'm offered:

• Height: Anywhere from 3'1" to 8'11". Three foot, I can understand, cause there's a population that's three feet tall. But eight feet, eleven inches?! There's one guy in history who's that tall, and if he's your soulmate, then you're S.O.L. cause he's dead. I don't know, maybe Match.com just put that in there to satiate the pituitary disorder fetishists out there.

No idea what keeps me going to these alumni happy hours, but they bore the hell out of me. I sit. I stand. I look around, maybe someone I know will show up. It's unlikely, because I only know... let's see: one, two, three, four other alumni. I do get to observe the social dynamics of young strangers on alcohol, and I think it's amazing how quickly happy hour conversation motives go from, "I'm talking with you because..."

• "I want to sleep with you," to
• "you look like a fun person," to
• "you're standing next to me," to
• "you're alone and it's pathetic."
  

Matt Lauer was doing his annual "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" travelogue this week, instead of reporting on actual news. On Wednesday, Matt was in Bhutan, a country that you probably first heard about on Wednesday, and will never hear about again. My guess is that Today's producers chose Bhutan because it's a nation transitioning to democracy — peacefully — under the auspices of its royal family, and the Bhutanese recently held mock elections for practice. The Yellow Party won and the Red Party was the runner-up; the Blue Party came in third, and just like in America, the Green Party came in last. Goddamn Nader!

After visiting Italy last year, I've really wanted to do a lot more traveling. Like everywhere: I bookmarked the Lonely Planet website and everything. Bhutan isn't exactly listed in Tourism for Dummies; the country only issues six thousand tourist visas every year, is pretty unfamiliar with comforts of modern life like electricity and roads, and is physically challenging to get into in the first place. But that's part of its appeal over, say, Disney World. It was early in the morning, I had to go to work, and I was grumpy when out of nowhere, I asked Mom, "How come Matt Lauer gets to go to Bhutan and I don't?"

"Because Matt Lauer has a good job and you don't. Once you get a good job, you can go to Bhutan, too." Which is bullshit: when you have a "good" job, they expect you to be at the job, and not trekking the Himalayas in Thimpu. I decided to call Mom on it.

"You have a good job. How come you don't get to go to Bhutan?... Or anywhere else for that matter." That shut her up for a little while, until Matt Lauer starting talking Bhutanese politics again.

Bhutan is moving towards democracy because the Dragon King Jigme Singye Wangchuk is abdicating his post and installing his son, the Crown Prince Jigme Khesar Nagyal Wangchuck as the head of state. Matt pointed out that Jigme Jr. is the world's youngest head of state; he's twenty-six, less than a year older than I am. "Look at this," Mom said, still with that early-morning half-pissed facetiousness, "He's twenty-six and he's the king of a whole country. What have you accomplished?"

That shut me up. It's probably not as depressing as being in your fifties and walking into the office one day to discover that you now report to a twenty-six-year-old hot shot just out of Harvard Business School, but still. Ouch. I felt a little more cataplectic than usual. I'd make a good king of Bhutan — at least for someone who knows zero about Bhutan; I'm a fast learner — but it looks like that position is already taken.

Vow of Celibacy

Here's a counter-argument to the proponents of abstinence-only sex education: the strip of condoms I found in my dresser drawer that are, as of today, past their expiration date, and the profound wave of unfulfilled, celibate depression that washed over me as I threw them out. They're not fish, you know — they have a lifespan of years, apparently. Even counting that Summer of Mono, I still had fifteen hundred nights, mornings, and lunch hours of potential carnality wasted.

I should've taken one of those virginity pledges with my church back in my younger days, before I turned jaded — apparently a sexless quarter-century will do that to you — and when it was okay to have sex with anything, regardless of whether it was inanimate. The virginity pledge route would've been a win-win for me: seventy-five percent chance I'd get laid, and if that fails, when I get to the Pearly Gates, I could tell Saint Peter, "I may have raped the earth and shown antipathy and callousness to my fellow man, but at least I kept my virginity oath." James Dobson says that's what counts. "So, Pete. There any loose women here in heaven?"

And there'd have to be, cause otherwise it wouldn't be heaven, would it?

Not that the opportunity hasn't quite presented itself — once. I was hesitant. I could get pregnant. The pill's ninety nine point nine nine seven percent effective. I knew all the erotic stats, plus in ninth-grade health, they showed us that Lifetime movie where the teenagers do it and there are Consequences. You know the one: Dermot Mulroney gets that late eighties' chick knocked up and she tells him and he's totally like, "I thought you couldn't get pregnant the first time," and the whole entire sex ed class bursts out laughing because even if you didn't know that you could get pregnant the first time, what kind of wishful-thinking dumbass would you have to be to say with a straight face that you thought you couldn't get her pregnant the first time. It's this constant being talked down to that turns young people to... well, drugs.

But our health teacher was — clearly not too squeamish — but too busy promulgating her paranoid Wilson Bryan Key theories to warn me that condoms are lubricious. Rip it out of the package (teeth help!) and the damn thing slips across the bed. Maybe I wasn't ready then and I needed a minute to get used to the idea of rubber condom grease all over my cock, like I'd been eating fried chicken and ribs off of it.

Bad metaphor.

Abstinence by default, the overwhelming sense of sexual hibernation, now fills me with disenchanted deadness. Purposelessness, in an evolutionary manner at least, watching the world slowly populated by Tom and Katie's crazy Scientologist alien children. Pining, the whole lubrication thing — and yes, I know, it's a convenience for (I guess) her pleasure — now seems trivial, and I'd die to slather my dick in lard and spermicide, maybe disinfectant, and just have a big old life-affirming slobbering food fight with some girl's vagina slime.

Worse metaphor.

You Are Getting Sleepy... Very Sleepy...

My mom, for the longest time, has been disappointed with the speed and direction my psychotherapy has been going in. I've been in therapy for social anxiety disorder, on and off but mostly on, since tenth grade — since this experience, actually — so she sort of has a point about this snail's pace progress I've been supposedly making. You might think that, since it is my life that's often socially deficient, I should also be disappointed with my therapy, but the lack of progress in itself never really bothered me until I got a letter from my insurance company saying they were tired of paying for my therapy and why the hell am I not cured yet? The last thing I need is some bureaucrat at Blue Cross Blue Shield judging me, so I succumbed to my mom's incessant nagging and decided to try a different tactic. Mom suggests (i.e., wouldn't shut up about) hypnosis.

I went in for hypnotherapy yesterday afternoon and I kept reminding myself to keep an open mind, which of course meant that I wasn't keeping an open mind. Not that hypnosis isn't a documented phenomenon or that my hypnotherapist was pulling past lives or repressed memories out of my mind. There was really little to no "self-discovery," but I'm getting ahead of myself. The hypnotherapist is apparently a real doctor, a med school professor, and a small, quiet woman who speaks in a steady, low monotone. I found it really easy to get hopelessly adrift in her voice. Her office is decorated in Rorschach art, and I feel like I'm being tested.

I opened the forum explaining why I'm there and distilling seven years of talk therapy into a couple of index cards. I tried not to read straight off my notes: "I have an ingrained belief that I'll go into social situations and appear ingenuous or callow, and that belief creates a lot of anxiety and often inhibits me from doing things. When I find myself in social situations, I perform poorly, and I'm analytical and self-criticizing, which only makes me more anxious. I want to ameliorate my anxiety prior to finding myself in social situations, and I want to quiet the self-critical voices that bridle me during social situations." Now that I type that out, I can't believe I've spent seven freaking years of my life on that.

For the first half of hypnotherapy, she's profiling me, which is where I start becoming skeptical. It had this kind of Myers-Briggs feel to it, with the overly general questions leading to false dichotomies and the questionable correlation between my answers and her interpretation of them. The old standby: "When you are in a group, would you rather be in charge of the group or let other people make the decisions?" Here I point out how complicated that question really is and that its underlying assumptions may be faulty, and I'm told to just go with what comes off the top of my head. Um, "When you're learning something new, do you prefer to learn by looking at it or by touching it?" (Turns out that "both" is also a valid answer.) "Would you describe yourself as an organizer, director, balancer, [I forget what this one was], or complier?"

The second test is even hairier in my opinion. She tells me to roll my eyes towards the ceiling, then to close my eyes and answer more non-descript questions. Now I can open my eyes again, and I'm supposed to clasp my hands together. Good. Finally, she comes over really close to me. I'm sitting in this big leather armchair, kind of on the edge with my knees bent, in flight-or-fight position. She puts my left arm on the armrest and her hand on my hand. There's this big red herring spiel, the gist of which is, "When I count to three, you will lift your arm up." It's not really a stage command; she sounds more like she's making a hypothesis, like when I tap your knee with this rubber hammer, you'll reflexively jump. More talking about breathing and relaxing and energy fields flowing through me. It's very new age. (I'll buy the breathing and relaxing stuff, but "absorbing luminous energy" and crap like that totally sticks out to the physicist in me.)

Here's the interesting thing. She finally counts to three, and I'm like, "What do I do?" This might be exactly what she's looking for, it occurs to me later. I don't want to choose to raise my arm because I'd only be doing so to validate her earlier prediction and not because she hypnotized me. And I don't want to not raise my arm, because I'd just be doing that to be contrary. My dumbass solution is to raise my arm, slow and shaky, like I'm being hypnotized, which is exactly what she was looking for in the first place. Interesting experience in suggestibility.

We arrive at my star chart profile thing, which my hypnotherapist says is "very unusual." I'm shocked. eHarmony.com said the same thing, so now it's got to be true. My eye-rolling is consistent with that of a complier (?), but my hand-clapsing indicates logical, left-brain tendencies(?) and most of my answers to the personality test questions highlight my "Apollonian" psyche (???). Whatever. Here's what I believe about how personality analysis works. I see two forces at work — the first is the actual set of experiences one has and the second is selective memory applied to those experiences, creating a narrative explaining one's role in the world. The former is what makes you miserable, and the latter is what you walk into therapy complaining about. The goal is to see how your experiences outward affect your experiences of yourself, and maybe change the filter you use to interpret the two... but again, I've been in therapy for seven years without tons of progress here.

In the second half of psychotherapy, the doctor recorded a personalized hypnotic cassette tape full of weird mixed metaphors just for me. I'm going to stop short of mocking it here because I really do want to approach this without preconceptions or bias, as much as possible anyway. I'm supposed to get comfortable and listen to it at least once a day, presumably without falling asleep mid-mantra.