Where are the fellow writing majors....?

Obviously, not wooing me on match.com.

It's been a couple days now. I'm doing a lot of scoping and, not yet, a lot of writing. Working on the confidence for that.

One conversation is percolating, however.....an avid outdoor athlete from south of the city "winked", I thought he was physically attractive and winked back. Within 10 minutes he asked if I wanted to go for a run. I demurred out of necessity, filling him in on my post-marathon running break to rest the foot. Now his profile speaks confidently of a love of skiing, running, biking, travel and camping, and how he wants his match to enjoy those things too, but says very little in the way of job, other likes, etc. Thus, I queried....

Me: So what do you do?

Him: I pretty much like to run, bike, travel, ski and camp.

Your turn.

Me: I like music, etc etc (imagine about 5-6 lines of prose on this line, including a recent project involving piano bars.).

So if you're not from Boston, what brought you here?

Him: I moved here and got a job.

(Full stop.)

So my initial interest in this gentlemen, while still slightly active because he's lanky with great hair and smile, has waned. After merely a day, the thought of writing back sadly seems a chore. I'm not asking for Jonathan Franzen-style tales of childhood whimsy and detail. Just slightly interesting sentence structure. A play on words. Some creativity. A return leading question.

Tangent:

Back in 2004 I took my dating, or lack-there-of, game to the craigslist scene. (Hint: it's free! And as a classified-ad repository, a lot more casual.) And, I eventually came to believe, a place where no altogether woman posts personals....because every third male on the planet responds. I posted at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday, using my office computer before leaving for the weekend. An impulse move born out of some anxiety I had about being single...go figure...and I hadn't attached a photo or went into any great detail.

The next morning I logged onto my Yahoo! account to discover an inbox so overfull it had crashed. The night before at 6:30. Some 140 messages made it through before the fall. The majority had photo attachments. The majority of those featured pectoral muscles, both clothed and unclothed. Some had terrifically graphic headlines.

After scraping my jaw off the keyboard, I started scrolling, overwhelmed by how or what I was going to respond to any of them.....and picked a few at random. The threads mostly trailed off after a post or two....except for one conversation that perked up with one very sassy gentleman. Who ended up being two weeks-worth of scintillating conversation and, eventually, a pretty decent night out. Our chat was so clever I still think about it. And it still resides in my archives.

A sample:

"I was going to stay in with my cat Saturday night, so even just meeting you is a vast improvement on what I had planned. I live in the North End with two female roommates. Call me Jack Tripper. I often wish I lived alone, but would probably miss the company. Cats don't speak, as you know." (Full disclosure: this man has an awesome blog......which I still, surreptiously, read, and will not post here for any amount of money. But you can ask to see it.)

End of Tangent

So the killer creative force and I lasted one date. But it set my wits so high that simple yes and no responses to match questions are enough to make me run in the opposite direction.

Ah. If I could subsume my writing snobbery. So difficult.

One of my dearest friends is married to one of the dearest men on earth, with whom I am also friends. He is hands-down one of the least accomplished writers I know. Had he ever tried to woo me via e-mail, I would have fallen asleep before replying. Yet...if he weren't married to her, I would want him to be married to me. He's that awesome.

I'll try to remember that.

Note: I am not on this earth to publicly make fun of anyone who thinks I'm worth starting a conversation with. Hey, I'm on match too. I guarantee that in some alternative universe in Quincy MA, a man blogs away about some witless point I've made. Nevertheless, dear readers, do call me out if anything on this site approaches cruel and unusual punishment to the psyche of others.