Follow-up ramble

Having thought a bit more about last night's mini-dates, I found myself conceptually dividing the guys into two categories: the natural conversationalists and the cliche-ridden interviewers. I'll elaborate in a minute, but let me tie this even more directly into the last post, in which I meant to state--but only implied--that there are dates that help you get over the other guy, and there are dates that make you think that no one will be as right for you as the other guy. Now, align the two left-hand categories--the conversationalists and the helpers--and the two right-hand categories--the interviewers and the regressers. Even if the conversationalists are not for you, they at least remind you that dating can be fun and interesting; the interviewers remind you that it can be brutal.


A couple of JHLA run-ins ago, I might have mentioned that another guy who was there that night later hit on me. That guy specified in his message that we wouldn't be talking about [a subtopic of the topic we all work on]. That was never necessary with JHLA; we'd pretty much instantly moved away from the topic area that had brought us into the same room. We had plenty of things to talk about, and it was never forced.

There's nothing inherently wrong with talking about that thing; my friends and I--I'm IRL friends with quite a few colleagues--do it all the time. This afternoon I met up with a friend--same topic, different workplace--who was recovering from a car accident and wasn't supposed to think about weighty things, but we had to actively move the conversation away from The Topic.

By the way, The Topic can be fraught. Like the GMO issue (which it is not), it's something about which people have strong opinions, feelings, and--sometimes--agendas. The last straw that helped me push BE out of my life was a debate that we should not have been having about The Topic. But I digress.

I don't have much to say about the conversationalists; with them, conversation flowed. It was enjoyable. But these interviewers! I couldn't help but feel they were trying to sort me into a box, and I'm not the kind of person--if there is one--who can be sorted into a box. I'm far too interesting for that, and that they couldn't see that only reveals their strikingly dullness.

It's a basic social skill that's especially valuable for dating: talk to the person in front of you, not to the code you may be writing in your head to reduce the person in front of you into a prototype. If you have to ask me a job-interview type question, things are not going well. That idiotic question about whether vegans can breastfeed was inane, but it wasn't dull. "Tell me about your best friend and what you like about that person, because, after all, aren't you looking for a best friend" is neither here nor there. It's so canned. It's almost as bad as "what makes you tick," which I've always found silly. "What's on your bucket list?" Really? Actually, it was worse than that. The guy asked me whether I'd traveled, and if so, what countries I'd been to. I found it easier to tell him which continents I hadn't been to, and he then asked me whether one of the two--Africa--was on my bucket list, then. I hadn't really thought about it that way, because I don't think about my life as a bucket list. And I couldn't help but bristle at his need to have reframed what I said into a preconceived cliche.

And then there was the guy who responded to my telling him that I wasn't on Facebook with, "I guess you can't afford to be on Facebook." What?

I didn't even mind the guy who asked me whether I'd ever been married, and since not, why not. It was a bit prying, but it was at least interesting. I simply told him that I'd never met anyone whom I liked enough to marry. Because, I mean, look at what you guys are giving me to work with. My friends are interesting; my job is interesting; my life is interesting. Why the hell am I going to waste my time on these dullards?