Ack, I think I wrote that email sloppily, Thursday is actually a bad day. I have a late dentist appointment out on LI so I can't see getting there by 6:30. How's Friday or Monday or even Tuesday?
Fixed. Friday works for me, with the same note about how the further uptown the better, and Monday or Tuesday are both fine, but I'll be at work so Fresh Salt is ideal.
I'd do Sunday too if anyone were up for that.
Why is my organization blocking me from the Clinton email thread? What were you people talking about? I guess if you say then I won't be able to see this thread either : (
Hang on, you wrote an OKC profile without letting us have any input? Is that allowed?
I read an otherwise fairly rubbish book in which at one point the main character, observing her friends getting divorced and remarried to perfect second husbands, says that she thinks of running through the streets of Cambridge shouting, "where's my perfect second husband? I want my perfect second husband!" I could/can sympathise with the feeling.
I want to see LB schedule a date to coincide with the meet-up.
5 I at least want to know that she ran it by Smearcase.
7: I did, in fact, tweak it on his advice.
I'm trying Bumble. First impression, a ton more blondes than on OKCupid.
(Which is not my preference, ceteris paribus.)
9 Good.
How about we try some kind of speed dating/Unfogged meetup mashup? With live-blogging, of course.
14: I don't think LB is the first poster to be hit on in a comment thread, but surely none of the others have been hit on this blatantly.
You're still new around here, aren't you? Back when the blog was young and wild, that would have been nothing.
What about Monday? We might try to get out of town over the weekend.
Belay that! I am getting all screwy with my schedule.
15 You mistake me ajay. I'm happily taken, I'm just looking to help a FPP out. And be entertained in the process.
I reopened my okcupid profile in solidarity but I may be about ready to drop it again. Ugh.
I tried bumble and my impression was that there just aren't very many people on it period, but those that are do tend to be, indeed, blonde and even somewhat bro-y (mutatis mutandis).
Is bumble the one that's tinder but women have to contact you? Or maybe secretly the b is for blonde and it's some stupid tech portmanteau and you just didn't realize?
It's the one that's like tinder but women have to contact you.
22: If the latter, there's a number of non-blondes not in on the meaning.
(Also a lot of women using the limited text space to mention their height. Is that a thing on Tinder?)
I have never been on tinder. I do know my height in case it ever comes up, though.
Huh. I think of height-emphasis as a guy thing (surprising number of OKCupid profiles that really emphasize that the dude is unusually tall. "Date me, I'm large" seems to be a thing.)
Some women over six feet or under five or so definitely seem to mention it, which makes sense if they want people to not be surprised and act weird. Seeing it for perfectly average heights makes me roll my eyes, which is probably mean of me.
If Thursday is out, it looks like Friday might be our best bet.
Venue on a Friday night might be tricky. I'm open to suggestions.
Pick a restaurant rather than a bar, and reserve a table? That implies having a headcount, but if we over-reserve by one or two that allows for an impulsive lurker, if there are any left. I haven't been out for semi-respectable Chinese in forever.
I think Sunday is maybe better for us. We could make it by 7:30. Would that work?
Advance planning note: I will be in NYC in early September (for a well-earned vacation) and would be interested in a meet-up sometime in the weekend of September 9th-11th (writing that I am reminded that my birthday is close to Sep-11, and I don't think about that fact unless I'm reminded) .
36 Allow me to be the first to suggest Fresh Salt.
35 Sunday works for me though earlier would be better (and then you could join us at 7:30).
If Sunday, can I again lobby for an UWS venue? Barry -- you're getting home by LIRR?
Good luck with the dating world, LB.
I think of height-emphasis as a guy thing
I have don't have a percentage, but a lot of hetero women on Tinder give you their height (some with a "and I wear heels" addendum). Some just straight up list how tall you should be. Everyone's favorite euphemism for "don't be fat" seems to be "be fit".
Also, humanity is terrible and going back to online dating after a long relationship sucks.
I'm still in the stage where I'm kind of fascinated by the process. Once that turns into actually having to deal with other human beings, I'm sure I'll be driven to despair.
41.3: But this is LB's first time online dating, so it will be awesome and exciting!
I suppose from the women's end of things, having your height out there is 'necessary' to avoid going out with men shorter than you are, if that's your thing. I think OKCupid asks your height as part of the background info.
I'm still in the stage where I'm kind of fascinated by the process.
Yeah, I am just jaded because I'm on my fourth cycle of online dating, and the first after a long time. I have had 1-year, 4-month, and 3.5-year relationships with people that I've met online (all through OkCupid). So it clearly works. The process is just really wearying to me right now.
Yeah, I looked and okcupid has you list it as part of your standard demographic data. That does make it a little stranger that people mention it in their narratives but I guess for some people it's a big deal.
Sorry to hear that, CB. I hope it's smooth for you this time around!
Do you change your profile and answers significantly or has it mostly stayed the same?
Do you change your profile and answers significantly or has it mostly stayed the same? are you done growing?
I must have mentioned that I know someone who, in a period of frustration, put up a profile consisting of this poem?
I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity, - let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.
She met a guy who she's been with for maybe six years now. Go figure.
Let me guess, his opening message was: "Ur hott, let's trott."
UWS is fine for Sunday. Or anywhere in Manhattan, really.
I would completely write to a woman who had put up that poem.
I didn't get much in the way of response when I made my entire profile a single long lipogrammatical sentence (incorporating the headings into it), but it was at least diverting to compose.
Of all people, George Kennan quoted that poem approvingly when writing, very late in his life, about sex and other personal issues.
I'd be very attracted to the woman who put that poem up too.
56, 57: That's because you're both sluts!
58: Sorry, that was supposed to have been addressed to 55 and 57.
I had a lot of good sex after posting a profile that was just an ok DH Lawrence poem about killing rabbits and a picture of my neck; really there is no way to go wrong.
I wish I could plausibly claim to be a slut.
60: Wow, that sounds like it had the potential to go horribly wrong.
64 is wrong at least for me -- there was no potential for it to happen at all.
You can be a slut, peep! Put your back into it.
I think slut can sort of be an orientation, where even if you're non-practicing, you're willing in theory to be one. Or that's how I console myself, anyway.
Maybe I'd be better off with a poem, but I don't think that would warn people away strongly enough. And I just finished the book on divorce with children and the whole last section is all about how if you're still mad at and blaming your ex, you have a lot of work to do on yourself. Most of the sections had stuff about how if your ex is a horrible person this may not apply, but I'm not sure if I get that exemption here or not and now I'm sad about that and even more sure I should be shying from human contact until I'm better.
65 you say that, but don't rule it out until you've tried trawling with rabbit poems.
And 51 is not at all what I meant! I'm honestly curious how people view the self-marketing and identity politics involved in crafting a profile. I have only had the one I used for six months or so and have reopened and not particularly bothered to change ever, so I don't know a lot about how it works.
Can't wait to see the babes I attract with:
Caught in the centre of a soundless field
While hot inexplicable hours go by
What trap is this? Where were its teeth concealed?
You seem to ask.
I make a sharp reply,
Then clean my stick. I'm glad I can't explain
Just in what jaws you were to suppurate:
You may have thought things would come right again
If you could only keep quite still and wait.
None if you can't spell suppurate, dude.
the … identity politics involved in crafting a profile
If there's one thing I'm certain of, it's that people who call themselves "sapiosexual" are not themselves actually smart. (But it is somewhat fascinating what putative personality traits or patterns of attraction can get coöpted into being -sexualities.)
71: I blame the source from which I thoughtlessly copy and pasted. You will note that on review I detected and corrected the misspelling. But you are, I assume, correct.
Oh my god, sapiosexual. I just learned that word this week, and yes, it seems to be a very bad sign.
73: I'm sure I'm not. There are definitely lots of sapiosexuals out there.
And why won't you let me be a little bitch? Now no one will ever know I was right!
Won't everyone who reads 73 know you're right?
75: no one who would overlook that misspelling could possibly be a babe.
76: Thorn was right! I was puzzled by that too, but I assumed it was an alternate spelling.
69: I know, I just thought it was funny in the context of all the discussion about height. I'm completely clueless here. Courtship for adults in the internet age seems fraught with peril in a way that the Victorians could only dream of.
My most fun interaction so far was a reasonably polite message that was responsive enough to my profile to get me to click through to his. At which point I was faced with a wall of text about his physics research interests.
This is not what I do for a living, so it took me thirty seconds or so of squinting at it to be certain it was word salad, clinched by the words 'virtually massless quanta (muons, quarks, etc.)'. Allowing me to message, "Dude, muons aren't massless", and block him.
Not a productive interaction, but I amused myself. Live by the attempt to intimidate your readers, die by the same.
73 "from which I thoughtlessly copy and pasted" if I am responsible for even the slightest uptick in searches for "potentially sexy rabbit killing poems???" then I am quite pleased with myself.
In answer to Thorn's question, I need to update my profile more, but have not. It would probably require having a better idea of what I am looking for from dating right now.
60 might belong in the asymmetry thread.
Also, is being a woman with a profile picture of yourself in a yoga position while outdoors a knowing/winking cliche these days (like men with tigers ) or is it just a cliche?--perhaps just an Austin cliche?
I'm afraid my search was actually for "myxomatosis larkin". Is it potentially sexy? I'm not sure.
Wow, a meetup that I might actually have made, if only it had been scheduled for 10 minutes at JFK next Thursday morning.
It's amazing, to indulge in what is certainly a trite observation, that such a loathsome piece of work produced some really beautiful lyric poems.
Do you have more to say on the sapiosexual thing? (I do, maybe.) I mean, it's not unusual for people to look for complementary characteristics in partners, so maybe these people really are attracted to another's intelligence and either do or don't realize the extent to which they're not shining examples of the same.
That said, it really is my goal this time to not date anyone I don't find attractive. Even if this is really limiting, it's probably important. I should also, though, probably loosen up on being so judgmental about people's eyebrows in their profile pictures. Just because I don't bother much with mine doesn't mean I won't have much in common with someone whose look completely ridiculous.
Maybe they are just looking for that elusive "mental whateverness"?
I guess, what creeps me out about the 'sapiosexual' thing is sort of... I mean, I think I'm fairly intelligent, and I'd be unlikely to be attracted to someone who I thought was really not bright at all. But calling it an orientation implies that "You're not just not smart enough for me; my judgment of your intelligence makes you an entirely different category of person than anyone I could possibly be attracted to." At which point I want to set the 'sapiosexual' on fire.
69. I think this is pretty interesting also. I only used Tinder, so only can assess women's profiles.
It's a short attention span medium-- choice of photos actually provides a lot of context. A complicating factor is that the photos are taken from fb. Most attempts at humor or subtlety with text fail IMO. It's not rare for women mention being bored of seeing men posing with fish or tigers.
I figured that the server would eventually be hacked and its content dumped, so I made an fb profile that doesn't use my name.
I think the minimal description approach is actually good-- I'm pretty sure that I wouldn't respond well if I read self-descriptions of many people that I like, women especially. Also, many people, even intelligent and kind ones, are not that good at writing.
Lastly, I just this morning downloaded a physics paper (about viscosity of glasses, something I'm interested in but only know about superficially) that I probably will not read in detail.
Is there a word for people who find Scrooge McDuck sexy?
Do you have more to say on the sapiosexual thing? (I do, maybe.)
I DO!
As already hinted I find it interesting as an example of self-construction-by-sexual-preference-self-ascription—that is, it's one thing to say "I'm attracted to intelligence" or "I want a partner smart than I am" or "I want a partner I respect as an equal [in intelligence]" or whatever; it's another thing to say that your sexual identity is: being attracted to intelligence, wheresoever it lies. It's interesting in part because of what gets in, as a candidate for being a "sexuality"; it's surely fairly common to want a partner whose taste you don't execrate but you don't see many people calling themselves aesthetosexuals or whatever. Or, of course, you might find yourself attracted to raw bodily power, the impression of strength and control, yet we don't see people ascribing a sexuality to themselves on those grounds. That gets to be a thing you're attracted to within the field of being, say, straight. Why does precisely this thing get elevated into its own category? Why don't we just say "I'm gay and I'm attracted to smartypantses"? It's styled as if it were a description of just the way one happens to be, but it really comes off, most of the time, as a revelation of how the person doing the self-labelling likes to think of him/herself. Sapiosexuality is the quintessential middlebrow sexuality! (It also reminds me of Kieran Healy's definition of Mensa as the society for highly intelligent people who nevertheless aren't intelligent enough not to belong to Mensa.)
That said, it really is my goal this time to not date anyone I don't find attractive.
That's a good goal!
92. I read it as an attempt to be trendy in language choice and stating a preference for people who for example own books over those who do not ceteris paribus.
It's tempting to indulge in hostile readings of others people's profiles, sometimes a guilty pleasure to actually do that, but I think doing much of it is a bad habit. Detailed style analysis is especially poisonous, because textual criticism is a relative strength for most people here.
95: are you sure it just doesn't mean "if the moment was right, I'd fuck a Tesla"?
96: I've achieved it approximately zero times in my life, but that doesn't make it bad.
97 hits really close to home. But if I don't rule people out by how much I hate what they say about themselves and how they say it, what better rubrics are there?
95: I don't think straight people can be sapiosexual, can they? Or I never see it that way. It's when being queer isn't sufficient, and certainly one can't claim to be bisexual because that implies a belief in a mere two genders, so there's sapiosexual that's evolved so far beyond any of that that bodies don't even matter. (I am this bitter about it all because parts of this hit a little too close to home too. Sorry!)
Isn't the answer to 99.2, by your own admission, "their eyebrows"?
Why does precisely this thing get elevated into its own category?
Because many people prefer watching sports or shopping to much of anything else, dating one of them would get boring fast, you have a little box in which to describe yourself and saw a new-sounding word in someone else's profile? Yes, probably middlebrow, or indicative of an indifferently written profile.
Tinder CEO gives painfully candid interview, confuses sodomy with sapiosexual
See, for me "I'm a sapiosexual" reads as "I
98: or a G-wagen?
Love breaks all molds. That is, it reads as "I [heart] [heart] [heart] eugenics."
101: I swear to you, there are some very odd eyebrows, even if I discount the woman who has both tattoos beneath hers and drag queen-level eye makeup. (I don't actually discount people completely. I just wonder how much they discount me.)
105: Yeah, that. "Let us avoid the untermenschen together, as you bask in the flattering feeling of my having chosen you as a peer."
95. I have seen it pretty often in straight ladies' profiles.
99.2 So, my way of looking at these things was with low expectations-- my aim of reading a profile is a pleasant conversation over a drink, rather than assessing the profile writer in detail. This because people put varying degrees of care into profile construction, and IMO an indifferently made profile is actually a pretty good sign. For a counterexample, all emoji is a blocker, as is posing with a firearm.
What is the moai emoji supposed to mean by the way?
I don't think straight people can be sapiosexual, can they? Or I never see it that way.
I never see it that way either but that's because "sapiosexual" goes in the slot where "heterosexual" would otherwise go. But all it means (innit?) is attraction based primarily on sapience, or (by analogy to hetero/homo/bi/whateversexual) attraction only to the sapient (since "heterosexual" doesn't mean I'm attracted primarily on the basis of someone's being a woman but rather to (a subset of) women). And that's something that seems to be on a par with being attracted to facial hair, or being really built, or what-have-you, as a discriminant among those who are candidates given your heterosexuality (or whatever). But you see no facialhairsexuals.
I mean, sapiosexuals still fuck bodies! They don't just commune in the realm of pure mentality.
(Perhaps the idea is that just as "homosexual" and "heterosexual" would seem to be based on the idea that "male" and "female" designate broad classes or kinds of people, so too the smart are a kind of person, in which case, it would seem to be shorthand for I ♥ eugenics.)
Maybe I should find a soi-disant sapiosexual and ask them What Even Is A Sexuality because surely they'd have a well thought out answer.
Ok, shouldn't have generalized. I definitely don't know what straight women's profiles look like!
Let's see, no profile pics with your children or firearms, no married couples looking for a third, a few weeding-out questions like no on the people who are cool with eugenics, but that still leaves pretty much no one who makes me excited about the prospect of a conversation. I was able to push one woman toward queer-friendly adoption agencies and helped a recent immigrant who was coming out find a friendly bar, but did both without meeting them or having any intention of doing so. The people I have ended up exchanging messages with were mostly talking about how dire the options are here, and only the once did that even lead to meeting.
Also, I assume the portmanteau is supposed to intimidate people by sounding "smart." "If you have to look this word up, you're not for me." But none of this is the real question. The real question is: how many of these self-defined sapiosexuals would find this discussion an attractive form of negging?
I'm pretty sure I've read people who claim that being sapiosexual is a variant of asexuality since it's not body-based, but I really haven't kept up with all the variants of asexuality and definitely don't feel I need to so I can date successfully maybe someday. (I'm pretty seriously Emersonian at the moment, but I'm not sure whether that's a good thing or not.)
Thorn, you have sometimes given me at least the impression that you regard dating as a wearisome moral duty. I think the Emerson line is (probably) an improvement on that.
Okay, I am now on board with 7:30pm on Sunday, somewhere on the UWS if that can work for everyone. I am not on board with "Sapiosexual."
I'm pretty sure I've read people who claim that being sapiosexual is a variant of asexuality since it's not body-based
But … they still bone and shit, right?
So do some asexuals, apparently. "Aces" maybe? I'm not kidding about not remembering and almost certainly getting it wrong. And you're also supposed to say asexual/aromantic because it's a spectrum in two directions if not more.
115: I am just terrified and can't get over how horribly depressing all the profiles are. It does seem like something I ought to be doing. I don't have the time to do it, but it's not going to happen naturally. I've failed at any kind of smooth or sensible breakup, failed at keeping up or finding new friends, failed at dating, and am working on only failing at parenting some of the time since that's the most important place to be successful. It just really is really awful.
Like, I think I could go out and have a drink with just about anyone and enjoy myself and have a decent enough conversation. But seriously not THESE people.
Not every personality quirk is an identity jeez
It's not an identity, it's just where you live!
107 and 113 seem to me to be hostile readings.
My reading is more like "open to nerds," just as there are lots of stylistically variable ways to say "I don't like drinking much" or "I like watching sports."
I dress pretty indifferently, and would feel that it was unfair if I were judged too harshly for say wearing unimaginative jeans or a shirt that was slightly trendy 5 years ago. Similarly, harshing out at diction-- unless the bad style actually causes a problem, or the style itself is a necessary part of the expression, what is to be gained?
I'm only attracted to brains in vats, but I won't message someone who doesn't list how much fluid they displace.
Not that I've actually seen this on dating sites, but "demisexual" also seems likely to tend toward the insufferable. (At best, the concept is an overreaction to the bad baseline idea floating out there that sexual attraction is nothing if not a faucet triggered by images, sensations, etc.)
My reading is more like "open to nerds," just as there are lots of stylistically variable ways to say "I don't like drinking much" or "I like watching sports."
No one claims that liking to watch sports is their sexuality.
Except maybe the protagonist of that kindle book about the football player, the details of which (obviously) now entirely escape me.
I don't have the time to do it, but it's not going to happen naturally. I've failed
I felt pretty torn about shallow interactions with ladies I didn't know also-- it helped me to think of the artificiality as a consequence of living a slightly harried, atomized life (like most of the people around me), rather than as a consequence of something particular to me.
I think the etymology is from the now passe word "metrosexual" Here is an explanation from Cosmopolitan magazine.
I think listing under "sapiosexual" under orientation was originally just supposed to be a joke, like "LISP" under spoken languages.
Well, the beauty of Emersonian giving up is that winning is easy! And I'm not looking for a grand romance that will yield a stepparent or even thinking I'd be appealing to most people. I just feel I should practice now and if there's ever the chance to find a kind, smart partner like lots of you seem to have managed then I wouldn't scorn that at all of course. But there's no point settling in a serious relationship ever again and yet casual relationships seem like too much work.
I suppose I could force myself to write one person a week and see what happens, something like that. I shouldn't drag down LB's threads with my mopiness because I really think it's operator error on my part mostly.
From the link in 128: 2. You never joke with vocabulary
This is how you can tell the Cosmo article is a joke on its readers.
Anyway, that article makes the parallel with the description of Mensa even clearer: "Sapiosexual" means you enjoy intellectual matters, but are not so intellectual that you didn't choose not to use "sapiosexual".
I shouldn't drag down LB's threads with my mopiness
Wait, now I don't qualify as mopy? I'm as dismal as anyone, when I'm working at it. I mean, you don't have to post about your dating process, but there's no reason at all not to. You've done this! And have thoughts!
Oh boy do I have thoughts! I just mean you should use me as a cautionary tale and not an inspiration.
108 corrected -- only saps will have sex with me.
131. Early nineties Cosmo had one personality quiz writer who was a wry and subtle genius. Unfortunately the quizzes were not bylined so plenty of unimaginative hack quizzes also.
I don't have the patience to actually do it myself, and they're copyrighted so it's problematic, but I've considered commissioning one of my son's friends to get cosmo 1989-1994 and then cut out all the well-written quizzes.
And because I was flippant, I should say that I definitely think non-mainstream sexuality is often complicated and idiosyncratic and that compartmentalizing can be tough. I'm sure there are people who feel very deeply and honestly that sapiosexual or demisexual or whatever is the most honest representation of how they approach relationships. The girl I was dating saw herself as polyamorous first and then queer, whereas I have no problem with open relationships but don't feel it's anything core to my identity or that I would be making an unpleasant or unnecessary sacrifice in agreeing to fidelity. Sex and longing are really complicated and having a more sophisticated vocabulary for talking about that is probably a good thing. I just feel like we're only partway there, I guess.
I remember a bi friend in college who was shocked and a bit scandalized when another bi friend broke up with her boyfriend and then found a new one, because friend one thought being bi meant you should alternate. (She was also heavy on the theory side and not so much the practice at that point, so I assume things have changed but maybe not!)
I guess I'm just suspicious of identities in general.
(Whenever I hear the phrase "A = A", I undo the safety on my handgun.)
138: That's a really endearing misunderstanding.
139: If only Objectivists knew about the other properties of equivalence relations.
friend one thought being bi meant you should alternate
There should be another term for someone who is committed to dating one sex and then the other in sequence. At any particular time they aren't actually bi! Maybe this is what you mean by a "more sophisticated vocabulary".
I'm down with 139 too except how does identity-free online dating work?
The being that wrote this profile will not exist by the time we may meet. I can't vouch for his/her behavior or predict what he/she will find attractive.
This is sexy and mysterious, right???
I'm down with 139 too except how does identity-free online dating work?
Prose descriptions? Or poems about rabbits, apparently.
I'm down with 145 too, but it's nice to be able to screen people out even though if we knew each other outside online dating the sieve would work differently.
Now that I've read a DH Lawrence neck-involving rabbit poem ("Rabbit Snared in the Night") I can only assume that Louisa's good sex was also quite kinky.
Though there are apparently a number of rabbit poems by Lawrence.
139: I don't think that's quite how safeties work, but I respect your Second Amendment ri--wait, no, I don't.
Candidly, I don't even own a handgun.
At the time, I was scornful about my high school girlfriend's insistence that she wasn't attracted to women, just happened to be attracted to me and I happened to be a woman. I still maintain scorn for any explanation that involves "happens to be [identity]" as the terminology in question, but sexual fluidity is a real thing and I've gotten more aware of my own variations over time in ways I wasn't at 16. (I did know I didn't prefer blondes and that I was dating one I wasn't particularly attracted to, but that was fine because it made me inaccessible to my overwhelming crush because I am and have long been an idiot. Crush also AFAIK hasn't dated any women but I still basically refuse to believe she's straight, where AFAIK my ex-girlfriend has only been involved with men since and that's probably a pretty fair expression of her interests, though I wouldn't know because we studiously never interact on facebook or anything like that.)
147: Ooh! I'm not even into vacuous, hideous passions because I'm a feminist, laydeez, but I had not previously thought about extending my ridiculous thing for Swinburne to an okcupid profile. I don't think I could use a photo of my neck, though, because I have a lot of peculiar hangups about my neck and I'd hate to end up with an interested fetishist.
Lawrence: kinky sex
Larkin: self-disgusted sex
Swinburne: technically overwrought sex
My primary association with Swinburne is "Nephelidia", so the above may be unfair.
153: I'd go for Swinburne: All of the above. I don't want to overspecialize!
That's a particularly ludicrous one, but I can't really try to absolve him.
You guys are tough! I liked dating, either for the horrible stories to tell later or because I have low standards about what constitutes an accetpable date. (I am long- and serially-partnered, though, so I haven't been on a normal first date in, um, a really long time.) What I hated was the clumsiness of learning to sleep with someone new and different. Maybe if I screened harder I would have flipped those?
Researching Swinburne has led me to the discovery that a comely young lady of Berkeley town has named her profile after one of his poems! Has she, I wonder, a "wonderful and perfect heart, for whom / The lyrist liberty made life a lyre" ?
You could ask her, neb! That's how this thing works!
I'd probably go with Anaktoria because it's stereotypical though also an awful choice and no one would ever read it. So I won't actually do this!
I was also scared about the sleeping-with-new-people-who-don't-hate-me bit, but that seems less awful on the whole than having to talk to them or schedule things.
I'm not comely, young, or Berkeleyish at all, but my username is stolen from a poem. Just luckily one almost no one will know.
I've been on a first date once, maybe twice if you want to be generous about the first time I went out with Lee. I'm not sure why I find that part so much more awful than the rest of it.
Maybe I will ask her!
I gotta say, I don't think the repetition "lyrist … lyre" pays off. I remember reading a review of a collection of Graves poems in which one, with a similar-ish repetition, was singled out as successful despite the cheeky repetition, but I can't remember what it was! Between the three sentences of this paragraph there exists no particular connection, pairwise or triplewise.
This is making me glad that while I met my husband online, it was not in a dating context! We just sort of....started talking and never stopped. I'm pretty sure I'm terrible at dating.
Oh hey here's a Swinburne verse with necks! With the saucy title "laus veneris" even:
Asleep or waking is it? for her neck,
Kissed over close, wears yet a purple speck
Wherein the pained blood falters and goes out;
Soft, and stung softly -- fairer for a fleck.
If the proper precautions regarding time limits and escape hatches are used, first dates are actually super fun. It's the second through fifth dates that really suck.
I think one of Booth Tarkington's Penrod books* pauses in Penrod's mother's drawing room to observe a visiting parson tell the assembled ladies: "Not Swinburne. No."
* I read a very odd childhood.
When I was in high school/college, I dated several guys and a girl who were students at... let's call it Princeton. (Not my alma mater, or geographically close to it, so kind of a disproportionate number.) And a group of non-Princetonians, one of them my high school girlfriend. Overall male:female ratio was around 7:2 and Princeton:not ratio was 4:5. A few years out of high school, I learned that the high school girlfriend was a) living as a trans man and b) transferring to Princeton. So I guess I had a type all along? (In fact, now I think one of the Princeton guys uses gender-neutral pronouns, so anyone using these numbers to quantify my sexuality has some technical problems. No one has had the Princeton degree revoked, to my knowledge.)
I am cleverly using a pseudonym because this would be super-identifying information for anyone who happened to know me well when all that stuff went down. Odds are low, but still.
With a 30 minute time limit, the expected value is positive. If they're terrible, I've gained a good story in exchange for 15-30 minutes of my time. If they're boring, I've simply lost that time. If we're incompatible but they're interesting or fun, I've been entertained (and what is the proportion of people who I've pre-screened who can't be entertaining for 30 minutes?).
Yeah, I admit it looks a bit ghastly written out that way. Maybe I should have gone with Columbia.
152 yeah probably advisable neck photos screen for basically ONLY interested fetishists. I found OKCupid better for goofy relatively casual sex stuff (even with a less targeted profile) and Tinder for actual dating and would probably have disregarded my current partner on either so what do I know.
167: In I Capture the Castle, Cassandra laments that Stephen has started reading Swinburne. There's no way the guy is not ridiculously excessive in any context, but I find it rather endearing.
138: Lady Dynamite has a character who believes bisexual means you can have a boyfriend and a girlfriend simultaneously, but being with another man is cheating on the boyfriend, and vice versa.
hangups about my neck
Maybe not the best phrasing.
176 is dumber than my usual, lately. It was supposed to have an "every other" aspect to it.
141: asynchronously bisexual
179 doesn't really communicate the desired information, or any information at all.
Double-blinded dating profiles are long overdue.
180: is there not a non-technical sense of "asynchronous" that just means "not at once" or "not at the same time"?
I will cop to not capturing the periodicity.
I just had an awesome fourth date with a woman in an open marriage. Despite the odd situation (and the fact that it's roughly 85% about sex right now) I think there's some longer term potential. She's a great lady. She just changed her profile to indicate that she's not looking for new partners, just keeping it active so her husband can link to it, which I take as a good sign. The big downside is that I only get to see her once a week or so.
Since I made a change to my profile indicating that I'm not at this point willing to do monogamy my response rate has plummeted. I was getting about one response per 7-10 messages. I'm currently 0 for 25 since the change. Oh well.
I had a first date recently with someone from OkCupid who did bring up "sapiosexuality" but in an abstract sense rather than explicitly stating that she identifies that way personally (though she certainly might). I think lw is right that references to it shouldn't generally be taken too literally as indicating that people see it as a true "sexuality" comparable to hetero-, homo-, or bi-, which is not to say that there aren't people who do, or that a lot of people who identify with it aren't insufferable in any case.
175: Ha! It's not that specifically that gets to me but basically everything. Especially when I'm anxious I get creepy crawly feelings there and I hate looking at necjs in movies and so on. Plus I'm anti-Adam's-apple-sexual. Eeeek!!
And teo, maybe you just like insufferable girls!
That is admittedly a possibility I hadn't considered: insufferasexuality.
That you've had trouble finding appropriate dates may suggest otherwise, but maybe there's more at play.
So is it Friday? Would be very nice to meet a fellow Unfogged Arabist.
You guys haven't met? It's Sunday, location TBDetermined but on the West Side someplace.
Cool, that works too, and no, I've never met Barry.
I do, but the Unicode Arabic section is confusing so I went the other way.
I've had a few stinkers lately (and whoever it is upthread who gets out in 15-30 minutes, I'm jealous--I seem to get stuck in for 1.5 to 2 hours no matter what), but my one Bumble contact has turned into quite a nice series of dates intermingled with very frequent texting. Hopes are high!
A weird thing that sometimes happens on okcupid is that you write to someone and they visit and "like" your profile but never write back.
The big downside is that I only get to see her once a week or so.
Weepinglaughing back to Emersonville for sure now.
197: Okay, am I right in thinking liking is a bunch of nonsense to get you to pay for their upgraded features? (Also I refuse on principle to like people myself, so I'm ruining it except when they send me emails outing people as having liked me.)
Also why does it let you bookmark but not do a "note to self" thing where you can be reminded that this person is cute but her knitting is really tragic or she's way way way too into Star Wars or whatever it is that makes you want to not have to look back? That too would be solved by paying for anonymous browsing but I'm not giving them my money, yet at least.
200: Set up an Evernote account and use the Evernote Web Clipper to clip each profile page, make notes to your heart's content. (Actually, I have no idea if this would work. Probably depends on if someone's profile has a stable address.)
Okay, am I right in thinking liking is a bunch of nonsense to get you to pay for their upgraded features?
Pretty much, yeah. I also refuse to like people. I guess if you did actually pay up it would be useful to be able to see who likes you beyond the occasional emails.
Also why does it let you bookmark but not do a "note to self" thing where you can be reminded that this person is cute but her knitting is really tragic or she's way way way too into Star Wars or whatever it is that makes you want to not have to look back?
Probably because they want you to look back.
If you want to not look back, just block the person in question.
200: you could hide the profiles you don't want to look at again.
200: you could hide the profiles you don't want to look at again.
I try not to block people because everyone who's more successful says what lw is saying here, that the point is not to rule out everyone and say "Ugh, her favorite poet is Shel Silverstein? NEXT!" and then block her forever but perhaps to grow as a person who can recognize that people contain multitudes and so do their dating profiles and you are hardly without sin and then be more accepting and try again. I've blocked people who've been awful in person (including Lee, I think? Or maybe she just deleted her profile) or who've sent offensive messages, but that's about it so far.
I did look at the photolistings for kids who are available for adoption a few nights ago. It will be a long while before I'd be able to do that again even if it were a good idea, which it isn't, but that kind of screening felt a lot more comfortable. (And I swear, the caseworkers of the sibling group of six with two sets of twins won't be hearing from me. Neither will the caseworkers of the sibling group of only five with two sets of twins. Nothing, I promise!)
When I was just a little punk,
I asked my mother, "What shall I be?
"Will I be fat, will I be stinky?"
Here's what she said to me:
"Quesedilla!
"Have a tortilla with cheese.
"The food here's not ours to eat,
"Quesedilla."
--Vinnie and the Stardusters
A weird thing that sometimes happens on okcupid is that the more of those stupid questions you answer, the more your matches are members of the same tiny social scene that you already know.
I haven't observed that—I very rarely see anyone I know (possibly because I hardly know anyone!).
Unsurprisingly, my experience matches Natilo's on that front, at least to some degree. There are people I know well but don't want to date. I see people who look familiar and was able to warn the woman I was dating about one profile that I knew would look appealing but because the woman had been engaged to my good friend, I had inside scoop. The most awkward was when the new foster parent I had just started mentoring kept coming up as a recommended match. (Wait, no, the worst for awkwardness was one of Rowan's immediate family, where I did go right to blocking.)
I think there's got to be a major effect of metropolitan area size and narrowness of sexual orientation/other demographic factors on the intersection of OkC matches and social circles (God help the sapiosexuals of Butte!).
On a similar note, you know the "Recent Stories" section you see when you first sign in, showing recent updates by people in your area? For me the people who show up there are almost all in Vancouver. Algorithms!
oooooo what was the tragic knitting??? it's a wide field, that's for sure.
this online dating all sounds quite dire. i actually really enjoyed dating/fooling about back in the day, but now regard having to do it again with extreme trepidation as can only imagine it ever happening on the other side of horribly tragic ending to current super content happiness, so actively seek to not imagine it.
about once a year hear hilarious and confounding accounts of online dating perils from younger colleagues always leading me to wonder what ever happened to just meeting people? like just flirting in person and then seeing what happens. it's not like they live in some lightly populated remoteness. but then they (younger colleagues) start going on and on about how awesome it is to order and pay for their mid-afternoon coffee online and then walk across the street to pick it up *without ever having to speak to another human being* when to my mind the major benefit of walking across the street for coffee is the opportunity to have random inconsequential human interactions and then i realize why they can't seem to meet someone the old fashioned way.* so grim. to me! clearly they prefer the constant bulwark of their phones.
*see also - egregious work conditions of giant law associates.
oooooo what was the tragic knitting??? it's a wide field, that's for sure.
this online dating all sounds quite dire. i actually really enjoyed dating/fooling about back in the day, but now regard having to do it again with extreme trepidation as can only imagine it ever happening on the other side of horribly tragic ending to current super content happiness, so actively seek to not imagine it.
about once a year hear hilarious and confounding accounts of online dating perils from younger colleagues always leading me to wonder what ever happened to just meeting people? like just flirting in person and then seeing what happens. it's not like they live in some lightly populated remoteness. but then they (younger colleagues) start going on and on about how awesome it is to order and pay for their mid-afternoon coffee online and then walk across the street to pick it up *without ever having to speak to another human being* when to my mind the major benefit of walking across the street for coffee is the opportunity to have random inconsequential human interactions and then i realize why they can't seem to meet someone the old fashioned way.* so grim. to me! clearly they prefer the constant bulwark of their phones.
*see also - egregious work conditions of giant law associates.
God help the sapiosexuals of Butte!
I'm sure they're all smug self-satisfied atheists.
God help the sapiosexuals of Butte!
I'm sure they're all smug self-satisfied atheists.
please excuse double post - actually on a computer for once and apparently do not know how to work the darn thing.
barry! my comrade in double posting! so sorry to miss meeting you in person.
if you need engaging light reading for long plane flights in near future, i heartily recommend fred vargas "mysteries." extremely odd in a very satisfying way. do not know about English translations.
When do people "just meet" other people? Who are these people who talk to strangers in any but the most inconsequential ways? I don't understand.
Ummm people talk to me all the time, always have??? Sometimes I engage in return (i mean usually i'm polite, sure, but if the person is appealing of course respond more engagedly). When I was single one thing often led to another, this is all perfectly normal, no?
220 speaks truth. The only people I talk to on a regular basis are co-workers and service workers, neither of whom strike me as good romantic prospects (for different reasons).
To 221, strangers 100% do not speak to me, nor do I speak to them, without good and immediately apparent reasons. And this is as it should be, I think.
When I was single one thing often led to another, this is all perfectly normal, no?
Not in my experience, no?
I mean, I do know and have known some outgoing/approachable people and I suppose it's inevitable that one of that sort would approach another of that sort. But I sure as shit can't remember the last time I struck up a conversation with someone as I walked down the street. (Being shouted at on account of my hair doesn't count.)
It's not like I take particular relish in not interacting with people (like dq's coworkers). But to me these reports come as if from a foreign country, where they do things differently.
LP Hartley's assessments of the characters in The Go-Between are a good argument for mostly ignoring what novelists think about their novels, at least in some cases.
well the dude I'm shacked up with now met me when I was a "service worker" also that job led to several other satisfying liaisons and two very lovely declarations of "if I wasn't happily settled I'd be after you in a majorly major way." hmmm places/situations where I've met people ... market, concerts/shows, bars, restaurants, shops, clubs, airports, at work of course, committees, school of course, museums ...
I think this is one of those things where different people have radically different experiences in the world. It's weird, I'm pretty highly skilled at preventing one thing from leading to another when it comes to, uh, personal interaction, but somehow I've had decent experience making professional contacts via the combination of social media and attending conferences.
Meanwhile, I have cow-workers who seem really socially well-adjusted but are in near complete terror of attending conferences, especially if they know very few people. Although I guess part of the reason I don't have the same conference anxiety is being alone is my more normal state, so it isn't a huge deal if I don't have lunch or dinner with anyone.
well the dude I'm shacked up with now met me when I was a "service worker" also that job led to several other satisfying liaisons and two very lovely declarations of "if I wasn't happily settled I'd be after you in a majorly major way." hmmm places/situations where I've met people ... market, concerts/shows, bars, restaurants, shops, clubs, airports, at work of course, committees, school of course, museums ...
And how many creeps hit on you in those situations that you had no interest in but politely laughed off and later made fun of to your friends, or didn't mention to anyone at all because you were so weirded out that such a person would do such a thing? And how many people did you approach unbidden to indicate a romantic interest, and of those how many politely declined and how many recoiled in horror?
Swinburne really does write like a very precocious thirteen-year-old. I feel there is a perfect pseud in this
Dumb tunes and shuddering semitones of death. or at least the best title for my collected essays on music. But it's hard to take entirely seriously as poetry.
Actually, of course, it's a band name (do they still have these?) Dumb Tunes and his Shuddering Semitones of Death. Or possibly an alias for Declan McManus.
the sapiosexuals of Butte!
The 1970s called, they want their vaguely porny science fiction novel back.
Ah teo, nosflow, fake accent, it's almost as if there are some salient differences between you and dq!
I can't think of the last time I had a conversation with a stranger that wasn't their asking me for directions.
I suppose I could date lost Germans trying to find the 9-11 memorial. But they mostly seem to want to bring the direction-getting part of the interaction to an end and go look at the memorial.
Having just bitched about my OKC hit rate going to zero after putting in stuff about not being exclusive II just got 5 hits and a message on Bumble. Guess what's not yet in my Bumble profile? Apparently non-monogamy really does kill the response rate. Surprise!
I only message women on OKC who've answered the non-monogamy questions appropriately, so you'd think my response rate would be less disastrous, but nope.
Anyway, other OKC users in the mineshaft might be interested in the Chrome plugin for non-mainstream users. It gives you a customizable little control panel that shows answers to questions of interest. It defaults to a poly-oriented set of questions, but you can make it look at a whole bunch of other ones, so you can tweak it to select only things of particular interest to you.
Re: Conversations with strangers, I have many, many more since moving back to somewhere suburban/semirural and Midwestern, but I think the dating pool is largely orthogonal to chatty, extroverted strangers. The boyfriend keeps pointing out how nice it is to be somewhere that people are friendly. I am suppressing my urge to snarl.
212.2: Are those supposed to be local? (For straight metropolitan people, I suppose I mean.) Right now mine stretch from Tennessee to Mississauga just in the first five, and someone from Georgia just messaged me for no reason, so I presumably showed in hers.
236: maybe offer to personally show the cute ones the way* to the memorial and accompany them on the tour?
*originally drafted as "escort the cute ones" but in this context that word could have unintended implications.
237: "Having just bitched about my OKC hit rate going to zero after putting in stuff"
Couldn't you just get a great big contract with the Warriors?
240 was my first thought, too. Even better, tell them you are taking them to the memorial but instead bring them back to your love shack.
I've always heard the best way to truly pay homage in remembrance is to have sex with a native New Yorker. Wink wink.
I've always heard the best way to truly pay homage in remembrance is to have sex with a native New Yorker. Wink wink.
Just like the fourth goal of Peace Corps!
160: my username is stolen from a poem
VTSOOBC, surely you must be in some way rhododactylic?
231: Swinboo-urns? C. Montgomery Swinburne? Sweet Swinburne's Badass (sp?) Song? Swinstonburne Smithburne? Gonna Make Swinburne Love To You Down By The Fire? You Got Swinburned? All-Star Swinburneman by Grant Morrison?*
* Duplicative of his "Sebastian O.," I suppose.
Or actually the more Sapphic brododactylic?
248: Ha, I guess you're not in the Flickr pool! I know from the knitting social network that it reads as "some kind of dinosaur" to most people, so I went with something from Alcman this time.
Damnit, phone, I'm not that concerned about keeping online identities separate!
the knitting social network
"Miss Marple cast Zuckerberg a cool, appraising eye. He shrank from her gaze as a guilty child would from a periwigged Master of the Rolls, called in to resolve an issue of broken cookie jars and spoilt appetite. 'And you were, I suppose, refreshing your feed whilst all these stitches were dropped?' she posed him, the needles in her gnarled grips striking like the flint and steel of a Hudson Bay trapper."
What are these "cookies" of which you speak, Mr. Flippanter?
[Knowing better than to mess with elderly British ladies, having read a great deal of Wodehouse, Flippanter runs for Pall Mall, hoping to invoke the ancient right of sanctuary in the gentlemen's clubs.]
Togolosh, if you're interested, I'd appreciate hearing more about designating non-monogamy in dating and what it means to you beyond not making anyone want to message you.
I had no idea you were so slutshamey, peep! Also and unrelatedly, I miss you! We should make a slightly less pitiful south-central OH meetup happen someday!
I have random conversations with strangers all the time in Boston, and almost never on the West Coast.
257: Sounds great! But less pitiful than what?
Also, yes, I m done with the half-hearted troll persona. Now I'm all about shaming sluts.
Less awesome? Wait, does our meetup count as a first date since the service workers were so sure it was one? If so, my first!!
At the cafe at which I'm a regular I have brief chats with the cashiers and baristas (some more than others) and when it's a matter of actually ordering always feel awkward when the time comes to move from random phatic chitchat to the commercial transaction that is my actual purpose.
260: Yes, Thorn, that was our first date. See! Dating is easy!
Yes, Thorn, that was our first date. See! Datingpeep is easy!
263: Slander! My reputation is ruined! What ever shall I do!
264: I suppose there are some obvious suggestions!
||
I'm having my first typhoon day! No work tomorrow! Hopefully no structural damage either!
|>
I'm having my first typhoon day!
I'm old so I can't remember - does this mean "anal" or "a threesome"?
That's a serious typhoon. I hope for no major damage and no lives lost.
255: I'm hoping to find more or less what my date has. An anchor or nesting relationship that's open to dalliances which can extending into real longer term dating. Currently the lady I'm seeing is at the dalliance stage with me, but it's clear there's potential for more. I dislike the word polyamory for a bunch of reasons, but where I am right now fits roughly within that umbrella. I'm not into swinging because I need a connection before I sleep with someone, but I've strained against the bonds of monogamy in the past, so I'm trying something new - asking for exactly what I want. So far it's been a little bleak, but I did get a response to an opener on OKC this morning, so maybe it's not hopeless. If I don't see progress in the direction I want in six to nine months I'll reconsider my goals in light of that.
I've done a bunch of reading about how other people have successfully navigated non-monogamous relationships and I feel like I have a rough handle on how to do this ethically and with maximum consideration for partner's interests. The book Opening Up by Tristan Taormino is good for providing insight into the spectrum of non-monogamous relationships and how people have managed to make them work. I recommend it if you are interested in the subject generally.
It is kind of alarming scrolling down the government warnings page and seeing that they're shutting down essentially the entire country.
268. Pretty sure you're not thinking about the good kind of threesome there.
I can certify that it's hot and wet already, and the show hasn't even started yet.
273 So we're talking threesome then.
The typhoon is a flat circle. It has neither beginning nor end; enumeration of its members serves nothing, as all members will return to you, all in the same succession and sequence.
I have belatedly noticed that my top-floor apartment is not in fact part of the (solid, concrete) building, but rather of the (probably illegal, sheetmetal) additional storey built on top of the building. Reassuringly, such constructions appear on virtually every building in the city, and few appear to be rebuild on an annual basis.
269: I think I'm pretty well-covered on the theory side, just am curious about how people I know and like are making it work in practice.
My main issue is that I have no time off. I have one child 100% of the time and while that may decrease at one point, it probably won't by much. (Plus that's my most perceptive kid, who totally noticed when a neighborhood dad was flirting, though doesn't know he's divorced yet and bought my explanation about how she knows his (ex)wife and kids. But I don't need more "Who's your frieeeeeend?" shit from a child!) And even when I had four free weekend nights a month, I didn't feel someone looking for a standard primary relationship was going to be happy to settle for that at best for the foreseeable future, and even if I can manage babysitters and so on, that's what I've got. My main deal is taking care of these children, which takes a lot of time and makes me unreliable.
So it was great to not feel like a burden on someone who would have a date with someone else if she wasn't with me, less great for me when she'd get confused about what days she'd said she'd be with me and accidentally would be dating other people at that time. But that's about logistics more than anything else, plus that I shouldn't have pursued it in the first place in certain respects because I wasn't healthy or interested enough.
Also it seems unfair to anyone to drag someone else into all the stuff going on with Lee, though Punchy was lovely about it and has personal and professional experience that let her easily see what was going on. But it sounds like I'm being unfair to nonmonogamy if I'm saying "I'm no catch and so I might as well go to someone who has other better options but not on a given night" but I really do think that's probably my best chance of anything reasonable. And it may mean I'm cutting off options for something more serious or satisfying for me, but what do I know?
Mossy, you have to survive the typhoon. We're way too lazy to finish summarizing Deluge on our own, plus it will perhaps be literally topical for you!
269: Also I have no idea what I might want in the larger scheme of things. Maybe someone worthwhile someday might actually love me and treat me decently? That seems like way too much to hope for! So I would settle for a decent person who's willing to hang out with me and have sex occasionally, sure. But if not that, what? Dunno! I have no idea what any of this looks like and think I won't until/unless there's a specific person involved, but I'm sure that's warping the way I funnel potential specific people in.
I'll agree to survive the typhoon if you agree to stop flagellating yourself. Deal?
Within reason, obviously. Flagellation has its place. Also I'm probably lazier than any of you, I just have more free time, in virtue of not having offspring.
I'm really not trying to! I just don't know a better spin on any of it. And the breakup annoyance is hitting me hard right now. I think that will be easier once we've moved. I just can hardly believe that after a year I'm still dealing with all this particular bullshit so frequently. It's ridiculous.
And I'm not saying I have nothing to offer. The girl I dated got a ton out of it and I don't regret that. It's just still a tradeoff for anyone who might be interested. And most likely no one is.
I can recommend moving to another continent for tendentious relationship issues. So much less infuriating by email.
278: Scheduling is a big deal for K (the lady I'm seeing), she lives by Google Calendar. People with kids manage to date, so hopefully there's a way. Perhaps once things settle down a bit with Lee? I wish I could be more helpful.
280: Figuring out what I wanted was actually quite hard. I ended up having to end my previous relationship because of incompatible long term goals and that triggered a lot of introspection, which is how I ended up here. I started thinking about what I'd like my life to look like the day I turn 50 and realized that if I want that I need to get cracking.
I wonder if you might be able to find a single parent in a similar situation to yours. You'll have similar constraints so presumably the time thing would be less of an issue. I bet you can find a decent person who'll connect with you. You are a pretty cool person, after all.
In seriousness, do you actually want someone, or just feel obliged to look? "Hell is other people'', etc.
I mean, there's no hurry. I'm not desperate and I'm doing fine, despite how I may sound at the moment, which is why the dating part is something I'm forcing myself to do. Eventually it will work out somehow or it won't. (Luckily the interested neighbor dad is on an alternating-weekends schedule opposite mine, so I don't have to worry about him getting more interested. Though in the interests of TMI I can add that having two women with regular menstrual cycles and my two weekends a month free, there's a fairly reliable way for life to get in the way of ideal fun. Not something I can screen for on okcupid, certainly.)
"Hell is other people'', etc.
To wit, a recent actual exchange in the Flippanter-TWYRCL relationship:
"Are you in a farro mood or a quinoa mood?"
"Hmmm. Quinoa!"
This fucking typhoon is about four times the size of the entire country. I'm on the right side of the mountains, but the east coast is going to get pounded.
On the plus side I have for the first time a legitimate reason to use the phrase 'lay in supplies'.
this is all perfectly normal, no?
I expect this level of blitheness from attractive women in their teens and 20s. It's a little dispiriting to see it from someone old enough to know better.
I didn't think to lay in either quinoa or farro, though, so Flip and his lady will have to shelter elsewhere.
Good cover story, Mossy. This way when Flip mentions his typhoon threesome, everyone will be sure it couldn't have involved you!
Well sure, it was a good cover.
While we're on South American foodstuffs, I was pleased to find maté in a local supermarket, and unpleased to find it was anodyne and tasteless. I blame Americans and their parochial palates.
"Sapiosexual" makes me cringe and I'm not sure why. I, too, like smart people!
And by "smart people" I mean "people who forget to sign their comments."
The problem with "sapiosexual" is that it's nerd-arrogant.
Is 'sapiosexual' even a correct construction? I want an etymology nerd to weigh in.
Unlike polyamory, at least both halves are Latin.
I'm not sure, but it does have the benefit over homo/heterosexual of being entirely Latinate. If we want to continue the Latin/Greek mixture theme it should be something like sophosexual.
And I get two of them! Best commenters in the world.
Pwned, but with value-add. I didn't realize there were other sexual identity terms with that quirk. It must be some sexual linguist's kink.
Pwning dalriata without extra value is my first step in shittiness!
Tolkien must have invented whole new fields of anthropology.
Again with the flagellation. The wind is picking up over here.
It's not a terrible neologism. As I said above, I'm somewhat sympathetic to the feeling as I am to what gets termed demisexuality. I just don't like the words or that they're becoming standard.
No, that was bragging! I'm going to ruin his life until the election is over, if I feel like it.
Apologies! All pwnage to Queen Thorn!
Sapiosexual is pretentious. It, like neoliberal, fails the first and most important test of a neologism: does it have a meaning that is common and clear enough for it to be a valid time-saving device? If not, it's just a shibboleth and you might as well just spell out what you mean because you're gonna have to most of the time anyway. It's like some bizzarro version of Armstrong's maxim - if you have to explain, they'll never know.
I'm not sure, but it does have the benefit over homo/heterosexual of being entirely Latinate. If we want to continue the Latin/Greek mixture theme it should be something like sophosexual.
How about German: Hirning.
I'm torn between two responses, so choose your favorite:
Thorn, you dastardly shitfuck. You'll rue the day you became my nemesis.
or
Oh! Senpai noticed me!~
By definition, I think it's you who has to do the ruing.
I'm provisionally performing current ruing, but I'm promising her retribution in which it will be incumbent upon her to respond with future ruing.
When you don't know what a word means is definitely is not going to save you time when other people use it.
What am I supposed to "know better" about? It's just flirting, a perfectly normal human pastime!
Joke's on you, dalriata, because I'm not ruesexual and so I don't even care which way it goes.
...this is all perfectly normal, no?
I honestly can't remember a time when someone randomly struck up a conversation with me when they weren't in a situation where they were more or less forced to, like at a party, so, maybe but certainly not as a rule or for everyone.
It's probably normal for some people, but it reminds me of when a friend who had the advantages of being both beautiful and charming in an unintimidating way tried to give reassuring dating advice at a party. (I think it was something close to "just say "yes!" to people when they ask you out!", which almost certainly worked great for her.) Since the rest of the people there were mostly surly introverts who looked like the philosophy graduate students that they were it was about as useful as you'd expect.
319: You didn't just ask her out, then?
319 gets it right. A party is the venue to chat with strangers as far as I can tell. That's what "party" means. Otherwise, it is impossible.
319, 322. Waiting in line sometimes leads to conversation. Public transport with people I know by sight, sometimes. I've had people ask me where I am from after seeing me eat.
Furthermore, this very venue is a bunch of anonymous strangers, interacting.
My most recent ex could walk into a room full of strangers and just start talking to people completely at random. The first time I took her to the neighborhood watering hole she talked to more patrons than I had in the prior year. Some people just have the touch.
What am I supposed to "know better" about? It's just flirting, a perfectly normal human pastime!
This is like my friend who kept telling me about how people were always so *nice* to her, like the time it was raining and this lovely older man just held out his umbrella for her! And was utterly baffled when I suggested that no, that sort of thing didn't happen to everyone.
Which is to say, there are all sorts of people who never get the chance to flirt, for all sorts of reasons, and it's a failure of empathy to suggest that they don't exist.
Talking to strangers is fun! It doesn't come naturally to me at all, but always ends up making the world feel brighter.
A few recent sample conversation starters, for inspiration:
-"What book are you reading? The cover looks cool."
-"No helmet?! Tsk tsk." [Pulled up to a stoplight next to a fellow biker, while I also wasn't wearing a helmet.]
-"This is literally the best sandwich I've ever had."
Yeah, striking up conversations with strangers isn't natural or common for me, but it can happen quite naturally on occasion (I think the most recent time was mutually observing the cuteness of a third party's dog) and when it does I can glimpse the world of people who do it routinely. Talking's a muscle.
The often exclaimed incredulity usually goes in the other direction around here, I believe!
I've been empathetically contemplating the intimidating chasm across which is connecting with others a lot lately as child appears to be eyeing it all, warily.
Only the most tangentially relevant: when men come up behind me at a street corner, or pass on a bike, and do the head-check indicating that they have found my rear view pleasant enough, and then have to rearrange their faces to not show that my face is a disappointment, it's *much less painful* now that I can think "Well, yes, I'm old" than when it was just that I was naturally plainer in the face than the ass.
330 How could your face possibly be a disappointment? I thought you looked like Diana Rigg (can't find the link in TFA).
Do we have a venue for the meetup? I'm thinking of coming in to NYC early afternoon to either catch Chen Kaige's "King of the Children" at 3 or "The Lusty Men" with Robert Mitchum at 2:30 (at the Metrograph in case anyone wants to join me) and can probably be wherever we're meeting by 5:30ish.
332 Oh what am I saying? Theo Angelopolous masterpiece "The Traveling Players" will be at MoMI at 2. It's 3 hours and 40 minutes long so if I do that instead I can be where I need to be by 6:30 at the latest I think.
Piggybacking, but I'm in Austin and should be free Tuesday night and Wednesday evening. Maybe also Thursday in the afternoon, too, but that looks rather less likely. Would be happy to meet up with anyone who is around and free.
Wondering how Mossy is doing right now. It's gotta be hitting really hard.
I liked Dive Bar fine -- 96th and Amsterdam? If anyone has a better idea, say something, but if not, call it Dive Bar at 6:30.
I muted my dad's smart tv in the den earlier and now he can't figure out how to turn the sound back on. And neither can I. Damn thing has a universal remote and you need to turn on and off individually the TV, sound bar, and DVR. I'm kind of mildly amused at the situation but he's pissed off. At least I can't hear Fox News blasting from the den.
This one's for Tigre if he hasn't seen it already: Heavy Metal and Natural Language Processing, includes a list of most metal and least metal words. I note that one of the least metal words of all is "attorney."
Sorry, that should probably be in the other thread--Cross posted over there.
There was a protest of the recent shootings downtown. Someone shot some cops. No more known details at this point.
I am nowhere near that area.
Holy shit. It's up to 5-6 officers that have been shot now.
332: I just saw "The Lusty Men"! It was quite good and I suppose the fact that it's basically a rodeo movie about what is now called "toxic masculinity" is made less surprising when one considers that the director also made "Johnny Guitar".
The three leads all turn in good performances too.
neb are you going to the Ades opera in Oakland later this month? Better half may go, you could meet up!
I'm going to all of West Edge Opera's productions, in fact. Ahem, I have a pair of tickets for each, even, maybe you know a young woman or three who want(s) to go to the opera.
Well the typhoon has turned back to sea. Gusting wind and rain here. Massive rain and evacuations on the east coast and mountains. Heaviest rain is yet to reach me, I think.
The lists of metal and unmetal words in 338 are just completely wonderful:
You live inside
particularly,
indicated,
secretary,
committee,
university,
relatively,
noted,
approximately,
chairman,
But inside you live
burn,
cries,
veins,
eternity,
breathe,
beast,
gonna,
demons,
ashes,
Attorneys are totally metal. The list is a lie!
I am suddenly curious about which metal songs actually include the words particularly, indicated, secretary, committee, university, relatively, noted, approximately, and chairman, if any, in what context, and whether any contain more than one of them. Would it be possible to discover the least metal metal song? Or if it does not exist, to write it?
I AM THE CHAIRMAN OF DESTRUCTION THE ATTORNEY OF DESPAIR
APPROXIMATELY NO ONE LIKES ME AND I DO NOT CARE
A PLANET MADE OF PAIN WHERE LIFE IS RELATIVELY SHITTY
I LEAD A BAND OF DEVILS MY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
THE LIST IS ENDLESS OF THE CRIMES THAT WE HAVE PERPETRATED
AND ENDLESS IS OUR EVIL I'VE ALREADY INDICATED
OUR SECRETARY WRITES THE MINUTES ON THE SKIN OF BABIES
WE ARE A COLLEGE FULL OF WOLVES A UNIVERSITY WITH RABIES
GNAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHH
[guitar solo]
Neb is to set this to music
The next Hamilton starts here
I can do the metal guitar solo (or at least a faux metal solo, as it's been 25 years since I properly played metal).
Now I'm wondering what the band members get introduced as. "On bass, The Bursar Of Blood."
I AM THE REGIUS PROFESSOR OF ANNIHILATION! AND WE ARE... TENÜRE TRÄCK!
As tabletop gamers will know, there is already extensive prior art for "Blood Angel Terminator Librarian".
GUT FEELING and his HEPCATS EVISCERATED KITTENS
I'm so glad I clicked on this thread even though I will not be meeting up.
You guys. That was awesome and seriously needed.
Now I have to refresh fast every time dalriata posts to see if there are slurs against my honor. Having a nemesis is fun!
Thorn: Somewhat, but not very, metal.
Slurs will become more slurred after coffee. No. Less slurred, but slurrier.
I hope you haven't been swept out to sea, Mossy!
I've been out of the dating pool for a long time and this thread is actually the first time I've encountered "sapiosexual", but I remember that "I'm attracted to smart people" was an overused cliche. It's a bit pretentious, and it says a lot less than people think. "Sapiosexual" seems like a much more pretentious way to say the same vague thing.
Chatting with complete strangers very rarely comes up, for whatever reason. I think it's been almost exactly seven years (I can say "almost exactly" because I'm thinking of a certain holiday party) since I went to a party where I knew literally no one. (And that resulted in a date that turned into an actual relationship, so in that sense I'm 1 for 1, but we're talking about a small sample size.) If I'm out with Cassandane, or another date before her, or with friends or co-workers, then they're the default people to talk to and the icebreaker for conversation. There is tabletop gaming (Magic: the Gathering, more specifically), and I've been to some of those events alone, but for whatever reason I never take conversation beyond the game itself. Maybe I should make it a point to try, the next time I go to one. That might be as little as a month away, but if not then, probably won't be for something like a year.
As for dating specifically, I occasionally wish I had done it more. I was single but happy with my social life for only like a year and a half before I started dating Cassandane, and we've been together since then. It's like I missed out on making all those stories. I realize this is ridiculous since those stories are often called horror stories, but the grass is always greener.
Definitely wouldn't want it now, though. Too busy with parenting and barely keeping up with housework, scheduling, etc., I don't know how people with multiple children do it. If I had a week off I could spend the whole time doing long-overdue and genuinely-at-least-somewhat-urgent errands or stuff around the house.
Sorry about that comment. The thread has clearly moved on to metal lyrics. This is not the first time I've felt inadequate around here because I only do prose.
I think we all feel a little inadequate compared to TENÜRE TRÄCK. Isn't that the point?
366 No need to apologize. Besides both Cyrus and Cassandane are pretty metal names. Much more metal than the word "attorney".
368 was me.
ALso loving this bit in particular:
A PLANET MADE OF PAIN WHERE LIFE IS RELATIVELY SHITTY
I LEAD A BAND OF DEVILS MY EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Still unwashed to sea
Your humble correspondent
On the Roc abides.
Because apparently kudos flows from flaunting of prosody.
Still unwashed to sea
Welp, now I have Iron Maiden's version of Rime of the Ancient Mariner stuck in my head. I hope you all do, too.
Did you shelter in your apartment? How did it do?
Congratulations on not being washed into the ocean, Mossy.
Fine, thanks. There was nothing here really, not even the heaviest rain I've seen here. The storm just turned off toward China, basically.
374: Hard work, but someone has to do it.
Re: earlier comment whose number I don't feel like scrolling for, I have lightly contemplated severing association w company doing Adès to obviate obligation to see same. The Tempest was three of my least loved hours in an opera house.
Maybe instead of watching the opera, Mr. S., you could liveblog nosflow's date with the girl(s?) of dq's choosing, thus keeping the blog alive and happy.
Let me hasten to explain that I referred to three women because there are three operas. I did not contemplate taking three women to the same opera. For one thing, I only have two tickets to each opera.
This does raise the question of whether Powder Her Face is a suitable choice for a first date.
dq has arranged for neb to take three different women to three different operas? Well done!
(Though as stated above, my first-date experiences are maybe having a long and chatty breakfast with peep in which we trash-talked the whole lot of you and then more recently having two glasses of punch and a ninety-minute conversation about rape and trauma therapy and related stuff, after which I had to go pick up my children and we both realized that this was probably kind of a weird date.)
On my way in to the Metrograph to catch a couple of films. Unlikely I know but if anyone's around I would hang out.
Empty train car and the gaggle of chattering teenagers takes the seats right in front of mine. Harumph.
Given what I have learned in this thread the only reasonable inference is that they want you to strike up a conversation with them and later ask one or more of them out on a date.
They were just talking about some drunk forty year old dudes on the train last time so maybe you're right!
"You know, I've been known to get drunk on the train...laydeez."
Is opera ever a suitable first date? I guess it was for me one time. Another time I went and saw Mother Courage as a first date.
There are probably worse things than Powder her Face. Like Bluebeard's Castle is not optimally romantic.
My question, I suppose, was founded on the thought that material as sexually explicit as I understand it to be might not be the best choice. But then, a friend of mine did take some dude to a shoot at the armory club (I think I've mentioned this before?) on a first date. But then again, I don't think that worked out very well for her. (A friend of my least-liked ex went on a first date to what turned out to be an orgy. San Francisco!)
On the other hand, maybe that's just the thing to break the ice. What do I know?
I know I need to think of a concrete proposal for a date for thursday with a woman who was just thrilled that I mentioned David Markson on my profile. That's something!
the first onstage blow job in opera history
Sounds perfect for breaking the ice!
Oh god, 392 sounds horrible too. I am never going to be competent at dating.
What's horrible about sitting around chatting about Wittgestein's Mistress and Springer's quest to (a) finish his book (b) give his mistress an orgasm (c) have anal sex with his mistress?
395 sounds lovely and I'd go for it any day! Planning, organizing, and communicating about how to make 395 happen sounds like hell.
I've surely mentioned that my first date with AB inadvertently involved being in a basement gallery ringed with platforms on which stood lifelike vibrators, vibrating, right? That sort of cleared a lot of hurdles right off the bat.
141: There should be another term for someone who is committed to dating one sex and then the other in sequence
Differential-Manchester-encoded-sexual
My suggestion was deemed "fantastic".
neb, when are you going to see all those operas in the train station? I have ambitions but am likely to do it over the August stretch as that's when a parent will be in town to sit baby.
401 is very good. Taken literally, "sexual, in the way of an ox turning" may involve entirely novel techniques.
398: I don't recall if I mentioned it here, but on my first date with K we ran into her BDSM meetup group. People from the group kept popping in to check me out. It was awkward for her but hilarious to me.
Do you want to go through a breakup with someone who is a big David Markson fan? No, you do not.
First date of my whole life was the Kenneth Branagh "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein." The second date was "Pulp Fiction." The breakup included the plea, "Just... promise me you'll try acid sometime. I think you'll really, really like it."
406: I myself am a big David Markson fan and have been broken up with!
But how did the breakupee(s) take it? (Is the question, I think.)
As is implied by my "with", I have been the breakupee.
Ah, failure of reading comprehension on my part. Apologies!
Medical emergency on the LIRR. Being held up in Wyandanch. Please entertain me
I find it hard to believe that "Wyandanch" is an actual place, but I'm willing to take your word for it.
And what's more entertaining than that?
Hi teo. Good job stuff up thread it seems. It looks like you advocated for yourself just fine.
Actually I think this might be Farmingdale and Wyandanch is the next stop.
Yeah, I think I did alright. I'd still like to advocate to be the manager of the group they've agreed to put me in, which I hope they'll agree to, but I haven't brought it up yet.
I have confirmed with my Rand McNally atlas that Wyandanch is an actual place, so I withdraw my skepticism.
I ought to spring the likes of Cutchogue and Comsewogue on you.
For a place that pretty effectively eradicated native Americans from its landscape many centuries ago, Long Island sure does abound in native American toponyms.
No, those seem like pretty plausible Algonquian names (not that I have any particular knowledge of Algonquian languages).
I'm sure Wyandanch has an Algonquian origin as well, it just doesn't show as obviously.
Was just wondering where it came from.
426: And yet there are still some Native communities, like the Shinnecocks, that have persisted in some form to this day there.
429: I mean, I don't actually know that it's Algonquian in origin, but it doesn't look English or Dutch, and those are the most plausible alternatives.
430 I know. I've been to the reservation. Should have qualified my statement.
This hamlet is named after Chief Wyandanch, a leader of the Montaukett Native American tribe during the 17th century.
Eastern Long Island is definitely part of a concept I've been kicking around for the past few years of "Marginal" or "Peripheral" America, consisting of those parts of the east coast that were relatively undeveloped by white settlers before the nineteenth century, when they began to be subject to the same kinds of colonization and development that were occurring in the West at the same time. Other areas subject to this phenomenon were South Jersey, South Florida, and possibly the DelMarVa peninsula, Martha's Vineyard, and eastern Maine, among others. The persistence of Native American groups is one indication of this phenomenon, but not a necessary one.
(In recent years this concept has receded to the background as I've become more focused on earlier periods, but it's still there as an idea that I might want to write a book about or something.)
Thanks! It's fallen to the backburner lately as I've become more focused on earlier periods for which I have other ideas for potential books, but it's still there.
Not that I've made much progress on any of this lately as I've been mainly concerned with issues in my personal life, but I hope to have more time for it in the future.
435, 436 it does sound intriguing.
It does sound intriguing. All I now of Long Island is Fitzgerald and Caro. Can Barry see the cold gigantic eyes of Robert Moses brooding over the benighted LIRR?
440 He didn't have much, if anything to do with it that I'm aware. It's the one of the oldest operating railroads in the US. (I did some archival processing of a cofounder and the second president of the it some years back).
Now the parkways on the other hand.
Dammit, now you guys are going to push me into actually writing this book.
I'll admit that I don't know all that much about Long Island, and haven't spent much time on it myself. I also haven't been further east on it than Cold Spring Harbor, where my aunt taught one summer (which was not a good experience for her). The persistence of an Indian presence to the present day is very intriguing, though, and does fit with the overall thesis which is based mainly on my understanding of New Jersey and Florida.
ISTR he strangled funding for railways all over greater NY. Anyway, is he brooding at you?
440, 442: Yes, the LIRR long predates Moses. He was much more influential on the highways.
And to 444, the LIRR is still going strong despite whatever Moses did (I haven't read the Caro).
444 Oh that's true, but I don't think he was actually successful in doing so. Been far too long since I've read Caro's bio of RM.
[Above meant to write: (I did some archival processing of a cofounder and the second president of the LIRR some years back).]
There's also the Poospatucks.
LI repeatedly surprises me with how big it is. Somehow I assume place descriptors are wry English irony, but nope, 200km long.
You realize, Barry, that 447.2 doesn't much clarify matters? Were you archiving his fingerbones for a museum of osteology?
448 Funny that, because it's kind of comparable in some dimensions to Arrakis. Sometimes I go to another place all the way across the country there and think, this is like me back in high school, heading out to Massapequa to hang out.
449 personal and business papers. I've found hair and occasionally teeth in the archives but no finger bones as of yet.
Heh. Roc Island is similar that way.
They call it "Long Island" for a reason after all.
451 was me.
ALso reminds me I recently saw a post somewhere about finding finger bones in the archives.
By 452 I mean teeth keep turning up in my files.
I take it teo shares the humorless blood of the Puritan explorers of New England.
What? Are there just a whole bunch of teeth randomly floating around in archives?
I searched the NYT a while back for whether buses ran to Jones Beach and as far as I could tell they always did.
I take it teo shares the humorless blood of the Puritan explorers of New England.
I am in fact descended from many humorless New England Puritans.
443: Write it! In a fit of insomnia I mocked up a cover for an idea I've toyed with for years, and it looked so good I'll hate myself forever if I don't actually write the thing now.
443: Write it! In a fit of insomnia I mocked up a cover for an idea I've toyed with for years, and it looked so good I'll hate myself forever if I don't actually write the thing now.
I am also descended from many fun-loving Irish Catholics and Lithuanian Jews, to be fair.
Sure. At least in 19th century archives. And it's usually milk teeth. Hair is more common though.
458: If true, sort of burns down much of Caro's book, no? Unless the buses were meandering out on the farm roads.
463 is fascinating, but by no means enlightening.
Well, sure, deciduous teeth. Permanent teeth would be a different matter. And hair gets cut all the time.
458, 464 Jones Beach sure, but not Fire Island IIRC.
461: I may well eventually write it, but like I said it's not the book project at the forefront of my mind right now, and my real job has been taking up most of my time anyway. The support on this thread has been encouraging, though.
467: I didn't look up Fire Island, but here's Caro repeating the claim about Jones Beach.
I was always uneasy about The Power Broker. It's fascinating, but poorly written in many ways, and the referencing (in the edition I read, anyway) was bad enough to be worrisome.
Example from 1944: Railroad and Bus Services Make Jones Beach an Easy Goal for City Crowds
I've never found teeth in archives, just evidence that certain widely repeated historical claims are false.
"weekly hegiras to the widely heralded playground are on"
Awesome.
The sharp teeth of Clio, ignored at one's peril.
1944 was before the Southern State Parkway was built with the bridges preventing buses from accessing the beaches.
I still haven't read The Power Broker, but I did look up the sourcing and I think it's just the memory of one guy who worked for Moses at some point. I don't think Caro ever asked anyone about bus height and bridge clearances.
476: A lot more interviews than that, and at least some archival work, but like I said, worrisome.
Did the Southern State Parkway prevent buses from driving the Wantagh State Parkway, which seems to be the original route to Jones Beach?
Don't make me log into proquest again.
The bus height bridge clearance thing was a part of local history/mythology growing up on LI. And it's real when you see the bridges in question. You might be able to get a bus under one if it straddled two lanes, though I doubt it and it couldn't be a very tall bus. No way you can get one under a bridge and have it stay in the lane. It might have also been done just to bar commercial traffic from the parkways in general.
Were the bridges raised between 1944 and 1974, when this article described how to get to Jones Beach by rail and bus?
481 That's not how it reads to me, you can't get to those beaches by bus. The directions are for car or train to the station nearby and a local bus that takes you there which doesn't use the parkways because it's on local roads. Anything using the parkways exclusively is inaccessible by bus.
"Alternatively, you can go all the way by bus. From the Port Authority midtown bus terminal the one‐way fare is $2.25 for adults, $1.25 for children."
I'll have to ask my brother for more info, he's a lifeguard at Jones Beach and I haven't been there for years.
What 482 said: no end-to-end bus routes.
483 Not for Robert Moses you can't. As for Jones Beach they would have taken the LIE to what I don't recall now. But not the Southern State which is the usual route. The Meadowbrook has those bridges on it too IIRC.
483 is a direct quote from the article. You're saying that that bus must have avoided the parkways? Again, as far as I can tell the Wantagh State Parkway allowed buses from the start, so unless it was later cut off, I don't see how the other parkways stopped access to Jones Beach.
485 before seeing 483. On reading properly, FA is right, the article does say bus access all the way, but doesn't say which route it took.
I have zero knowledge of the details of any of this, but I'm thrilled that this thread has gone in the direction of detailed discussion of Long Island bus routes.
Presumably yes, on different highways. Caro's point wasn't that the parkways actually stopped access, but that they deliberately catered only to private motorists.
Apparently arcane knowledge is necessary for all NYC navigation, so it is most fitting.
Wantagh State Parkway was built in the 20s and 30s before Robert Moses. I think the bridges on it may actually be higher than those on the Southern State which was built in the late 40s. So the buses sure weren't using the Southern State Parkway to get to the Wantagh, they wouldn't have fit under those bridges.
Fuck it, I'm looking for my library log in passwords.
Imma grab a tape measure and hop in my dad's car and take a drive.
But I guess I can accept Moses made it hard to take the bus on parkways to Jones Beach, but you could find a way to take the bus there anyway as a revised claim. That's not how I've understood Caro's original.
I think that you couldn't get to Fire Island and Robert Moses State Park by bus because of the low clearance of the bridges on the parkways but you could get to Jones Beach or ride much further out to Smith's Point.
One of the things that bugged me about that book is it says essentially nothing about Moses's work on the State Power Commission. Granted the focus was NY City not State, and the book was very long anyway, but it seems like a massive omission. And Caro spent plenty of time examining state/city relations anyway.
I remembered seeing this one, but didn't have the link handy at first:
Jones Beach buses believed exempt, from 1942, about the Bee line hoping the buses could be exempt from wartime rationing. Mentions 20,000 riders starting from Jamaica and 50,000 getting on at Wantage railroad station.
I'm moving on to looking up Fire island, but Moses was definitely already around when they built the bus terminal at Jones Beach, but might not have amassed full power by then.
I did turn up a more recent article where the headline said Trump was complaining about some regulation, so there's that.
When everyone else wakes up, this thread will be 100% links to NYT archive articles.
Belatedly buttressing Teo's thesis, it is consistent with some stuff in the S. African Cape, where marginal areas were bypassed by white settlement, or left to be settled by independent mixed-race groups.
As of 1942, you needed train, taxi, ferry to get to Fire Island without a car.*
*same article promotes ease of bus to Jones Beach
Further to 503: Griquas, Basters, Oorlam people.
If I'm going to be up past midnight, it should at least be on a weeknight, so I can call the swedish tourism association.
Ok, I got tired of the NYT, plus Fire Island always seems to have been pretty hard to reach. Anyway, I looked up The Power Broker, since I have it here, and Barry remembers correctly.
Caro's claim about Jones Beach is more nuanced than what I remembered. Caro does say that Moses forced the buses to use local roads, not that the buses couldn't get there at all. At the same time, it's clear that buses got there and that people took them. Caro adds in a bunch of additional information about how Moses and the park system discouraged black people specifically from going to Jones Beach: limiting bus permits for charters, manipulating where buses could park, placing black lifeguards in outlying areas of the beaches.
So I was wrong and the larger parkway story that Caro tells is accurate.* But the Jones Beach aspect of this that I've seen in later summaries, which has boiled down to a simple story of how engineering kept Jones Beach white, isn't quite right in that it ignores quite a lot of more active racism that kept black people away. It wasn't just the bridges. That's less an issue with Caro than it is with the way some histories get turned into shorthand stories.**
*Caro's sourcing still seems thin on what Moses said about it, but what Moses did seems pretty clear.
**I looked this up because I read a discussion where people were arguing about whether objects could have politics, and one example was whether the bridges on the parkways were racist, using Jones Beach as an example. No one seemed to think to check whether it really was impossible to get to Jones Beach by bus, even though that changes the example by bringing people back into the story.
I may never read it, but I have to say The Power Broker has an excellent index.
Talk about bus routes, neb. You'll feel better in no time,
508.1 Comity. My Long Island pride, which I never knew had existed before in any way, shape, or form, has been assuaged.
Caro's an interesting writer. I read The Power Broker, and was completely convinced that Robert Moses was the worst person in the world. Then I read the first three volumes of his LBJ bio, and while I'm sure his facts are generally reliable, LBJ simply cannot have been as bad globally as Caro makes him sound. From the biography, you'd think he had literally no redeeming features.
even though that changes the example by bringing people back into the story.
I'm not sure that's quite right, though: if it's true (and it does seem to be, thanks, overnight/early morning crew) that the bridges were built low to make bus access much more difficult, then, for the purposes of the discussion you read, they are (arguably) racist. The fact that the racist scheme was more involved and far-reaching doesn't absolve the bridges from their role.
On the broader issue, while the greater extent of the scheme is only more damning of Moses and his contemporaries, I think that the pop-cultural fact stands as a sufficiently shocking one that gets the point across. I mean, to me the key takeaways are 1. Robert Moses was racist af, and 2. institutional racism is tangible. Hell, the bridges are actually more effective for the latter point, because you can undo the charter policies, you can reconfigure the bus parking, you can reassign lifeguards, but nobody's raising (nor razing) those bridges.
513 last being exactly Moses's reasoning. But, ffs, the bridges aren't racist, the people who built them are.
514: "Can an object be racist?" is too philosophical for me.
I am in fact descended from many humorless New England Puritans.
Restrained, affectless fist bump.
What, you're too good for the traditional barely visible nod?
Barely visible nod to both 516 and 517.
Fun fact, teo. I went yesterday to my ancestral home in Dedham, MA built by Jonathan Fairbanks. The Charles Fairbanks after whom Fairbanks, Alaska was named was one of his descendants as well (though I'm not descended from the VP).
I'm currently passing through Wyandanch. Again. How's that for a fun fact?
Wyandanch! A lovely, woody sort of word.
520 is indeed a fun fact, despite neb's skepticism.
Damn near 4 hour movie and it started late. I'm still waiting for an R out of Queens so will be late.
I'm onsite, happily ensconced with my crocheting and a beer.
That's like having a sign saying "hit on me".
I think that's what she's going for.
It says very clearly: "I am down for some mild inebriation, yet I use my time efficiently." Hott.
One problem: Even New York no longer allows nineteen-year-olds in bars.
A 19 year-old as intrepid as our hero could figure something out.
I am trying to come but my progress is slowed by the lack of a downtown C.
I am trying to come but my progress is slowed by the lack of a downtown C.
Good to know the double-posting gremlin is welcoming to lurkers.
I'm not sure that "LurkerTia" is actually a lurker in the usual sense.
The gremlin welcomes apostate commenters too! Such a friendly little fella.
We are in a cab, on our way! Terrible traffic on the bus in.
That is, Blandings and I will be there soon.
This meetup is not very rich in liveblogging.
Meetup is over and I'm at Penn waiting for my train. Thanks to everyone who showed up (in order of remembered appearance): LizardBreath, Flippanter, dagger aleph, lemmy caution, Tia, Blandings and Jackmormon. It was a great time and it was nice to se old friends and put some new faces to old pseuds. A finer bunch of reprobate you will not find.
Passing through Wyandanch again for those of you keeping track at home. And I'll see you all at the next meetup next year.
Ha, I was just going to tell you to say hi to Wyandanch for us.
I'd wave on your account but people would look at me funny.
Just pretend you're playing Pokemon Go.
"Sapiosexual", like "literally" is a word which is now useless because people can't agree on what it means.
What's the best way to express "if I like you, I don't care what shape your junk is, and if we're seriously involved, and you realize you need to reshape your junk, I'm not going to dump you" ?
It seems pretty ill chosen in that case!
You'd think that choosing words well is an crucial party of sapienity.
So, even more clearly, it's the wrong term. Moving on...?
I'm still stuck on a non-junk-contingent relationship and how it could work.
Yeah sure sorry, I was just surprised (obviously).
I'm still stuck on a non-junk-contingent relationship and how it could work.
In my head, you said that like Cary Grant.
It's all the rage in New Neotokyo II.
562 sounds like it was an actual thing. Like some horrid heretical offshoot of Fluxus or some other 60s art movement.