Knots

My sister lately has been pressuring me to join an online dating service — namely, JDate, "the premier Jewish singles community online". Morbid curiosity, a touch of loneliness, and the looming number 30 on the near horizon took me there tonight, just to see what I could see.

Turns out that before you can search the site, you need to set yourself up with a profile. Seems simple enough to start: give your gender (female), your religious status (culturally Jewish, but not practicing), marital status (single). But now I'm sitting on the page where I write a brief description of my life and my personality, and suddenly I'm stuck. It's making me slightly ill, suddenly making me realize that I am here, doing the thing I secretly see as hitting a lowest of points: asking for third-party help with my dating life.

I am well aware that I am a half without a whole. I know quite well that it's been nearly two years since my last real date with someone (an embarrassing affair that made me altogether too happy to scuttle back into singlehood). But doing something like this makes me feel pathetically dirty. It begs the question: What's so wrong with me that I can't find someone normal and wonderful on my own, someone who actually wants me with my virtues and my flaws as much as I want him?

The past six months have been something of an experimental phase — leaving the graveyard shift, becoming a part of the normal human race again. The result: crushing failure. The only guys who talk or anything-close-to-flirt with me all end up taken, or gay, or happily married. Obviously, I can't do this on my own. And it's time to stop dawdling, to stop crying at night because I'm lonely, and to stop feeling painted in a corner with my options.

So. We come full circle.

In more positive news: I had my friend Angela, from my company's Nashville office, visiting for the past week. We hardly saw each other, since she was working the graveyard shift and I, of course, am working days, but we both took the last day of the week off, and spent two days hanging out and running around town. I miss her now, but good times were had, money was spent, pictures were taken. I'm sure some of them will be up on my Flickr at some point. But most important of those pictures are the ones Angela took of my ceramic monsters. It's the first time they've been anything like professionally photographed, and it's inspired me to think about actually setting up a website or something like that to display them. I love my monsters, and these pictures actually make me feel like they're works of art, as opposed to clumsy ways to idle away my Monday nights.

Other positive, exciting news: at the behest of Friend Geof I've signed up for a short story contest. First round starts this coming Friday, and I'm looking forward to it. If nothing else, it will start me writing again. And that is definitely a positive thing.

I should get to work. I hate writing about myself (present blog excepted), so it'll take some concentration to get over this mountain and say something intelligent and non self-deprecating.