JDaters Anonymous

I’ve been published a few times this week, on everything from my nephew to vacation, with a smattering of Jewtopia thrown in for good measure. Read, enjoy, and comment away!

The Boy Who Changed Everything

From the second I laid eyes on him, that phrase about having known and loved him before I met him suddenly made perfect sense. He’s a relative heavyweight; but I’m still way taller. He’s a new player on the stage of my life, but fits perfectly into the family I’ve always known. We’ve all literally and figuratively embraced him, even though all he does is look around at this new, exciting world, demand sustenance, and poop on us.

For more of this week’s First Person Singular column, click here.

Sole Searching

Even after many of us have graduated from an academic calendar, we think of July and August as the time to escape: to leave the countless papers on our desks for innumerable, sprawling seaside sands. It is a time of sun-filled getaways, SPF 45, and bathing suit anxiety. We look forward to letting our hair down and taking our clothes off, to whatever extent we wish. We court relaxation like a soulmate, and hedonism as if it’s our last night of freedom…

…Would we be able to free our City selves from the code of acceptable behavior as mandated by our tight-knit, seemingly omniscient Jewish community, and embrace the possibility of relative debauchery? It wasn’t like Turks and Caicos was Vegas; there was no advertised assurance that what happened here would stay here. What if we “went wild”? Would the video proof of our adventures end up on the Internet? At shul board meetings? Would reputations be damaged? Jobs lost? And would any of us care?

The above is excerpted from “Vacation: A Spiritual Retrospective” (my “Sole Searching” spirituality column at GenerationJ.com). To read the column in its entirety, click here.

Jewtopia‘s becoming a book…

“Jewtopia’s” co-creators Bryan Fogel and Sam Wolfson, who also co-star in
the play, were just finishing up the script for “Jewtopia: The Movie,” when a
book agent saw their show and made them an offer they couldn’t refuse.

“We weren’t even thinking about it,” said Wolfson. But the agent was
persistent. “He hounded us … ‘I can get you a deal,’ he said. He got every
publisher out and started a bidding war; it was supposed to be a small kitschy
paperback, but it got so much heat that it’s going to be a hardcover
[WarnerBooks won the bidding war, and the book is slated for September 2006
release].”

“Jewtopia: The Book,” Wolfson explains, will include “silly stuff from the play, but in more detail; like Jon Stewart’s ‘America: The Book,’ with graphs, charts etc., but for Jews.”

For more, see this Jewish Week article by a fairly prolific writer. Of course, most of you have already read about the book deal here. And still others of you will remember this column. No, Sam and Bryan are not paying me to promote them. (But maybe they should…)

Your scrolling bonus: three stories I posted to Jewlicious and one from My Urban Kvetch…

This Space for Rent: A woman rents out her forehead to be tattooed with the name of an online casino

Man Rents Billboard to Find a Wife: This post at My Urban Kvetch has started some interesting discussion on whether renting a billboard is or isn’t an effective way to find a spouse. Come on over and participate in the conversation…

Hummus is Potentially Trayf: An argument over whether tehina used in making hummus is kosher if ground by a non-Jew.

Could Lead to Dancing: The Wednesday night Israeli dancing scene at the 92nd Street Y. (Postscript to this: a friend of mine went and said the scene was pathetic, so it’s possible much of this article was spin.)

That’s the egomaniacal Week in Me.

More undoubtedly to come…for which I apologize in advance.

I’ve got readers who kiss and readers who don’t. Whatever the reasons, religious or lack of opportunity or desire. But when Miss Fish writes about kissing, you just want to go out and do it. (Or maybe that’s just me. In any case, it probably has nothing to do with the little imp-girl she met while she was out the other night.)

On the flip side, there’s P-Life, going all passionate in his head. Turns out he met a girl who’s also passionate in her head. And they’re being all expressive and stuff:

Today we did a meditation exercise and it turned out that – when I was supposed to see my soul on its own light I couldn’t at all – your soul was so attached to mine that I couldn’t see my soul on her own. Saw us together as one. Sounds scary to verbalize it…

And in a completely different vein, Anna Broadway, “enjoying” (or at least answering) lots of reader letters after her appearance in the Rolling Stone article about the new virginity movement, gets down and chaste (and as always intellectual) about being Queen of the Castle and why other should be Master of their Own Domains. (And I don’t mean domain names. Those can be purchased from GoDaddy.)

And a roundup wouldn’t be a roundup without visits to H, who’s over at Slay Your Demons taking on weak online dating profiles; Annabel Lee, who’s ducking the usual JDate inappropriates; and Ari, who almost took a homeless guy back to her apartment for some lovin’ and warns mothers everywhere to hide their sons.

Anna Jane Grossman, of BreakupNews.com, on truth and online dating in Salon:

Meeting people on the Internet was nothing new to [LA resident Jessica] Walters, who had spent her high-school years talking to people all over the world in chat rooms. “I remember feeling like people were pretty straightforward about themselves when we’d chat,” she said. “They didn’t seem to be pretending they were something they weren’t.”

So when the first guy who contacted her through JDate revealed on his profile that he was only 5-foot-3, Walters assumed he was telling the truth.

I think we all know where the story goes from here. And it involves the words “Oompa Loompa.” (Not my joke; Walters’s.)

Read the rest of the story here. (And who’s that quoted on page 2?)

Crisis may be too strong a word. But still, this blog has definitely changed.

When we first began in April 2004, this was our purpose:

There are thousands of us out here, in the online netherworld, shopping for love and companionship over the Internet…We have experienced the joy of an email from someone we thought we found interesting, only to be disappointed in real life. We have encountered people who lied about their height and interests. We have chatted with people online who seem witty with the 10-20 second IM delay, and moved the relationship to the phone, only to find that their conversational skills are clearly lacking. We have wondered how to handle the delicate situations we encounter, and have sought advice from friends. Now, there’s one more friend to consult…

The goal of this blog is to record our experiences, good and bad, of men and women, serial JDaters and novices, from NYC to L.A. and everywhere in between. When the muse inspires, there will be features, rants and raves on related subjects. But this is your blog, your forum. Speak.

I vowed to myself that I wouldn’t write about the people in my life, because it wasn’t fair to present a story that was half theirs, but strip them of their voices. Besides, just because the chemistry wasn’t right with me didn’t mean that person wouldn’t make a great boyfriend/husband/companion for someone else. The one time I wrote about a specific person in a blog post happened on My Urban Kvetch, and it was after a decade. And I had learned that he had just been married. And, just to be sure he was unrecognizable, I changed his name. I was extremely careful about such things.

As weeks and months wore on, with my commitment to being a neutral zone open to all and that wasn’t about me, content was less of the “speak and be heard” variety and more of a way for singles-columnist me to track trends and patterns in online and offline dating, with the occasional foray into “I can’t believe he (or she) did this (or that).”

But over the last several weeks, the content has changed*, and not in a manner that’s totally comfortable for me. And these are posts that I may yet live to regret, because they, in some small way, violate that promise I made to myself when I started blogging. I’m still not naming names or specifics. I’m writing about the emotional fallout from such encounters or expectations thwarted, often in so abstract a manner that it can confuse people who don’t know me.

I write as myself, under my own name, of my own experiences. I’m trying to reinforce my emotional fortitude by being more open about how I feel, writing my way through perceived and actual betrayals of whatever magnitude, and letting that come through in my writing. And at the same time, I’m trying to maintain the reputations of the people who, often through no real fault of their own, made me feel this way. Because the inquisition is all internal, it’s easy for me to write about what I’m feeling, and extremely difficult to push that “Publish” button. I’ve learned that with a few exceptions, people protect their own interests, and that’s a lesson I could stand to internalize, in moderation, at least.

I find myself wondering if this kind of writing does me a disservice, even if I don’t name names. Perhaps it would be better to slay my demons privately instead of expelling my disappointments into the blogosphere to land in the ears of the similarly disappointed. Perhaps I should refocus the blog on observing the trends and contributing snarky commentary that keeps everyone laughing, and feeling like they’ve found a community. But then again, the emotional posts seem to have found their own audience, and a network of support has reached back from an Internet void to embrace me and provide me with desperately-needed comfort.

I’ll have to give this some serious thought. Your feedback, as always, is welcome.

*The posts that inspired this one: The Single Gal’s Survival Guide…Up Late…Emotional Jetlag