Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of MetaData

Do you remember the George Orwell Book, 1984? I do, vaguely.

Here's what I remember:

-It inspired the first Apple Computer commercial for the rollout of the Macintosh.
-Whatever it forcasted to happen in 1984, did not happen in 1984
and we were all a bit disappointed...kind of like when the
Y2K problem failed to cause anything interersting of note to happen.
-The Terry Gilliam movie, Brazil, borrowed heavily from its themes.
-Kurt Vonnegut, in his book, Welcome to the Monkey House, wrote a short story called
"Harrison Bergeron and the Handicapper General" that also portrayed a futuristic
environment of government intervention
-It portrayed a futuristic world of government monitoring whereby people lived in a
constant state of paranoia.

...so I don't really remember anything about the book. We do this a lot nowadays, saying we know something when we really only know things that relate to it and can talk about it in a general way. I think that's called metadata, but then again, I only know about metadata in the same way I know about 1984. Both terms refer to an idea that has come to mean something in it's cultural context.

In the world of online dating, you tend to run into a lot of this kind of talk. How do you make yourself look interesting in a page or less? Easy, blurt out interesting jargon that makes you sound like you have your finger on the pulse of science, technology, cuisine, fashion, politics and entertainment. OK, OK, forget the part about politics...no one really wants to talk politics on a date (although no one wants to date a Republican either, so you put that part up there simply to screen out the morons).

My current favorite bit of metadata from an online personal was posted by a woman who claimed to be a massage therapist and actress who "studies" quantum physics in order to understand more about how she relates to the universe. Now don't get me wrong, I believe in all of that theory...how we are made up of energy, how our thoughts have electric force that affects things around us, how our thoughts manifest themselves in the universe, how all things are related. I've seen the secret. I've seen What the Bleep Do We Know Anyways? But so has everyone else. But I don't think I would ever claim to study quantum physics based upon seeing a couple of poorly produced film projects.

But maybe I should! Here is a list of things I am going to claim to be an authority on for my profile:

Interactive Technology
Martian Robotic Explorers
Undersea wonders and reef culture
Global warming
Plate Tectonics
Tsunamis
gopher mating rituals
the iPhone
Postmodern Asian Expressionism
Classic Movies of the 1980's
Portugese feats of mechanical engineering
reading fossile fragments from the mesozoic era
Texas Hold'em poker
clown farming

Yeah, I should get some heavy traffic with buzzwords like those.
The truth is, I do manage to spur some interest with what I put out there. And after a couple of dates, it seems that the women I go out with want my full attention...meaning, they want me to be NOT ONLINE anymore. Another way to say that is they want me change...for them. A better way is that they want me to take my profile down. And yet another way of saying it is THEY ARE MONITORING my activities. On several occasions, I have had a couple of dates with someone and the minute she starts feeling something for me, she brings up the idea that she saw me online and that there is something wrong with this. It's a little like a woman saying, since we met in a bar, if you are in a bar, you must be meeting other people. Personally, I think being online, not matter what forum we're talking about (even this forum), is a bit like a video game. There is the appearance of reality, but that's not necessarily an accurate reflector of the world around us.

So here's the interesting paradox about online dating, then. It's a forum for meeting people, but it's also a forum for loosely monitoring other people's activity. It is your virtual field to plow, but it is also your shackles. The chalice for the hopes and dreams of postmodern, post-apocalyptic, post-9/11 procreation is also the training vehicle for ushering paranoia into our lives in a very comfortable packaging. You're literally paying for other people to monitor your activities. OK, so why are so many good-looking, intelligent, interesting people submitting to this form of intrusion? Easy...It's easy. You introduce yourself to the world once. You write an email to someone once. You meet for coffee or a drink once. ...and you're off to the races without any of the social hurdles that present themselves when we try to do this in dance in person. It's fucking for lazy people. I believe the human race will become weaker for it because negotiating obstacles is part of the Darwinian process. Take away the barriers and we're essentially letting the Dodo mate with the Quagga.

While internet dating holds the possibility of finding mr. or ms. right in a needlestack full of pricks, it is also conditioning us to send personal and financial information over publicly accessible lines, to accept the premise that we might currently be under observation both by people we want to see us and people we don't, to accept avatars as representations of actual people (photos often lie), and to loosen the personal bouondaries we exercise in person. Now I'm not saying we cannot find love in a world of 1's and 0's ad I'm not saying the mechanism for dating in the 21st century hasn't gotten me laid more times in the past couple of years than the count of my sexual exploits in the entire decade of my twenties. I'm just saying that 1984 came and went seemlessly without us knowing that what Orwell described is here in a way much more subtle way than we might imagine. Though we live in a world where the government has it's dirty hands in our wallets, our civil liberties, and our travel plans, it is not the Bush brothers we need to fear. Big Brother is the Borg we willingly plug ourselves into in order to be functioning parts of the society. Big Brother, in other words...is US. And with all of the perks and pleasures that seems to provide, we sacrifice bits of our humanity that tell everything about us, but which we don't value at all.

The Great Melting Pot

Just as in New York, normal people and celebrities seem to occupy the same world in LA. The weird thing about this place though, is that the former can become the latter in the blink of an eye. One minute the person next to you is just some poor shlubb from a parking lot while the next he is a movie star living in the hills surrounded by opulence. There was once a New Yorker magazine cover done by Peter DeSeve, a master of pictorial irony, portraying the rich next to the poor in the form of a cigar-smoking fat-cat walking across a sidewalk artist's work while simultaneously praising it. L.A. is like that image with entertainment billions pulsing through its arteries.

A couple of years ago, I saw a vision, a girl in line at the checkout in the supermarket. It was a sunny day outside, so the light streamed in through the windows like a Vermeer painting, pointing its finger towards one thing in the room. She was a gorgeous redhead wearing a white top embroidered with various colors and she smiled at me. In a room of hundreds of people, chaos all about us, this sweet woman, chosen by the elements, turned her attention, albeit briefly, in my direction providing me with an image to hold in my head for the rest of my days...a painting to lay down from memory one day. It was an instant of perfection...and I had to go and ruin it.

I finished my shopping and went to my car. My eyes followed her loading groceries into her trunk, getting into her car, backing out of the lot. She came to the intersection of flowing traffic awaiting her turn to go. Had she noticed me? Would she look back before joining the stream? I was burning a hole into the back of her head with my stare. If she looked back, I decided, she was interested, I told myself. I watched the side mirror. Waiting...waiiiitiiiiing....there! She looked back at me and smiled and then she hit the gas and was gone. Shit! My life is a series of almost run-ins with destiny. If only I had stepped up and said something...anything! Ugh!! I berated myself as if this passing validation and invisible defeat meant something to anyone else. I cursed the hurdles of shyness that I'd been stepping over since adolescence. Then, like a 747 matter-of-factly crashing into the house next door, she drives back into the picture, having done a U-turn somewhere and enters the parking lot across the street. Yes!!
I eagerly drove across the street and followed her into the adjacent store. There she was again. This time there was no confusing miasma. There was just her and me and the opportunity of an awkward silence before us. I stumbled through an introduction and said hello. In my way, I am charming, I suppose...the kind of charming you sense in a man who is really a boy, who is self-conscious, but working past it. I get her number and we subsequently make a date.

A couple of days later I meet her in Larchmont Village for sushi. We eat outside. It's good, but not great, but I'm there for the company, not the cuisine. She is still a vision, if a slightly more mundane version of it. We have a nice conversation. She is won over enough to give me her home phone and accept a second date. It's gone incredibly well. She sounds excited on the phone. We walk past the newsstand that has stories about incredible lives that have no bearing upon reality...but none of those things matter...we're just a guy and a girl on a date...and I offer to walk her to her car. I always offer to walk a woman her car. It's polite and even in a time when the world doesn't appear to be dangerous, the gesture is always appreciated. We share a goodnight kiss. I walk back to my car, pausing in front of the magazine rack. Newsflash! The broken-hearted has triumphed and found love in his heart again! And that's where everything went wrong. Immediately after date one, I decided I had found my someone and that she had found me.

In a nutshell the relationship, such as it was, went like this.

Two great dates
One daytrip date to the beach (which was good, but not great)
An Emmy Party date in which her opinion of me turned (I don’t know what went wrong, but it’s not like I threw up on the host or groped another woman, though)
A cancelled date.
A low-key “just-hanging-out date.”

Even as my attraction to her grew, when she kissed my goodbye this time, it seemed final. Afterwards, she called my phone and thanked me...for what? I wonder. For being understanding about her desire to slow things down, I suppose. But I am still in fantasyland in my head. It is already done and I still think we're an item.

...This is where the frog analogy takes hold again. Remember the frog sitting in the pot of water who will not jump out even though he's being slowly cooked alive because he's unaware of his circumstances? Two and a half years later and it's only now that I realize that the water was getting hot.

So fast forward to tonight...as I said, much later in the story. I just got done dropping off a chair to my most recent ex-girlfriend, who is amazing and who I did not appreciate enough. She is producing an independent film. After having sushi alone at that same joint in Larchmont, I stroll past the magazine rack and the actress is on the cover of one of those magazines. Her life has no relation to mine anymore and she is famous while I....well, I'm....not. I'm still the same guy trying to wrestle an artistic vision to the ground in a gluttonous town that devours ideas and throws them back up.

The irony of the place is upon me. This woman touched my life briefly and I am still disturbed by it...by the fact that she was so close for an instant and is not so far away. I wonder if I'll feel this way when the producer gets her magazine cover. I realize that the fairy tale is not about the frog becoming a prince. It's about the frog getting out of the pot and selling the rights to his story of overcoming enormous odds.