Dopp Juice Archive

I usually try to keep my love life out of the public blogosphere, but this story just needs to be told. I have a date tomorrow night with a guy who is six feet tall and looks like a surfer dude. He enjoys talking about movies, society, philosophy, and politics, and is looking for someone mature and responsible. Sometimes he can get bored easily. Sometimes he smokes. He’s white, he’s college educated, and his religious beliefs are “Other.”

I also know his first name and his age, and that’s about it. We’re meeting at 7pm at a bar in San Francisco. And no, a friend didn’t set us up… unless you want to call CrazyBlindDate.com a “friend”…

CrazyBlindDate.com was started by the folks who brought us OkCupid — the free social networking / test-taking / dating site that’s given the pay sites like Match.com and eHarmony a run for their money. And so far, I’m impressed.

The premise is simple: you tell them a few things about yourself, who you’re looking to meet, where you’re willing to travel, and when you’re willing to do that. Meanwhile, other people are on the site doing the same thing. The Internet Brain lines you up, makes a match where requirements coincide, and asks both parties to confirm the date after showing basic information about the other person. This includes very blurry pictures of each other, as a teaser. Once you say yes, you’re committed to it.

Thirty minutes before the date, they open a phone relay so that you can send text messages to each other via CrazyBlindDate’s central number (you don’t actually get to see the other person’s phone number). This helps with the “spotting each other in a crowded bar” issue. Once you find each other, you’re on your own. Then, after the date, you provide feedback for each other on the site. This helps in coordinating and verifying future crazy blind dates.

Blind dates are inherently sketchy-sounding. Blind dates without mutual friends involved, even more so. That’s why I’m excited about this site: they’re taking something that has massive screw-up potential, and handling it well.

My favorite thing about the site is that it stays focused. When you get there, they don’t start by asking for your login info; they start by asking what city you’d like to go on a date in (sorry — it’s only active for Austin, Boston, NYC, and SF Bay right now). They then walk you through a full dating wizard, convince you that yes, this really could work, and get you emotionally invested in the process. THEN, at the end, after you’ve already checked your schedule to make sure you can have a date tomorrow night, they suggest signing up to actually make it happen. It’s clean, friendly, American-buddy-style language that sets an encouraging tone and asserts some basic etiquette. There’s nothing extraneous thrown in to distract. Not even any ads. And the service is free.

Since the site is pretty new, it’s not overrun with a massive dating pool yet, and finding specific kinds of people at specific times can be hard. I didn’t specify age, gender, or any other personal details. I also set my region to cover most of San Francisco, and I listed wide time slots. That seemed to do it.

What does Surfer Dude know about me? He knows that I have a shaved head, I like to talk about technology and poetry, I’m really just testing out this website, and I’m not planning on sleeping with him (let’s just get that out of the way now!).

The rest will come out over a beer tomorrow night.

Don’t worry, I’ll tell you all about it.

When I was nineteen, I never expected I’d ever live in China. The thought didn’t even cross my mind when I set foot on the plane to Beijing — I was just going for a 5-week study abroad trip, that was all. Three months later, when I was happily settled into a Chinese apartment and teaching English, I never expected I’d ever live anywhere other than China. Another month later, I was back in the U.S.

I dream dreams, I set goals, I make plans, I form expectations, and I get attached to them. Then time moves forward, things happen that I can’t control, and the scene changes. I blink, bug-eyed incredulous that this is my life, and then I shake out the cobwebs and go back to the whiteboard: dream new dreams, set new goals, make new plans, form new expectations, and get attached to them all over again.

The dreams, the goals, and the plans are important — even if they change, they still guide my decisions. (“If you’re not working toward your own goals, you’re working toward somebody else’s.”)

But the expectations lead to mistakes, and the attachments cause pain. And the most I can do is get used to those changing and relax when they make me uncertain — they’re not gonna go away.

Tonight I am sitting down with a blank canvas, trying to carve out my dreams again, and it’s hard work. It’s a process of finding the intersections between “What do I love?” and “What do I want?” and neither of those questions are easy to answer when I’m asking myself to be specific. I look for the shortcuts to these answers, thinking back to last time, to past dreams, to the constant threads in my life, the themes, the values, the ideals. If I can keep the big picture abstract, it starts to forms a story that make sense.

Everything is a project — it’s all about being able to make the projects happen.

It’s all about the words.

It’s all about creativity, creating, and creating opportunities so that others to create.

It’s all about the people.

But if I get any more specific than that, the details become almost arbitrary — a list of ideas that are taken seriously. A painting that will never be real. An exercise in belief and impermanence. A direction to look when I wake up in the morning, because I’d rather walk toward a mirage than stay in bed.

It’s not about obtaining what I’m looking at.

Building a life for myself in China was the best thing I could have done that summer — I needed the freedom, the responsibility, the home, and the perspective shift. I needed to believe I would be there for the rest of my life. The fact that I left in October didn’t negate the importance of that intention — it just prompted a new phase for the dream. And I got everything that I needed.

Dreams don’t get met. They get honored.

Don’t try to defend it. It deserves this. All of its waving and screaming and nagging and gossiping and babbling was getting way out of line. The Internet has been sent to detention, and it will be there till Thursday.

In the meantime, I will be at a hot springs campground, resting in an establishment that openly discriminates against the Internet. It is not allowed to follow me there. I will be safe.

Don’t worry — the Internet and I are still in love. No, really. That’s not changing.

But sometimes even the most passionate lovers need space from one another. And the Internet is one of those folks who tends to get particularly clingy — to the point where it may require a crowbar to escape from it. You’re close to it, too. You understand.

It’s all for the best.

Will you feed it for me while I’m gone?

kthxbai.