Category Archives: Commentary

To the Guy in the Pinto Wagon

Leave a reply

Dude! It was just a merge!

To the guy in the Pinto wagon who followed me twenty miles across New Jersey. Oh sure, when I first realized that you really were angry, and you were honking and shouting at me (with your window up), I thought I should pull off the road and kick your ass. My second reaction? This guy is obviously nuts, and might have a gun or other weapon, or at least, be someone who would get some weird satisfaction from smashing my window with a brick. Yea, that would be fair retribution for pulling ahead of somebody when the two lanes merge.

But most of my male defensive rage disappeared not long after you stopped honking your horn – which I remind you, you must have had going for a mile or two at least, from one backed up stop light to the next, down 206. So how could you work so hard to hang onto your anger? I started to become rational—even compassionate—very quickly. You must have had a pretty bad morning, or a pretty bad life, up to that point, to be so angry with a total stranger who just pulled in front of you at a merge. And then to follow me? And glare at every intersection? You had plenty of opportunity to pull ahead and get where you were going faster, if that was really what was important. But you stayed angry, and kept shouting obscene threats to your closed window, and kept following me. I got to experience a fear. What if this guy is more than a little nuts? What if he’s a Psycho-killer??

Then my survival instinct kicked in. If you were going to follow and attack me, sucker, I was gonna make damn sure you’d pay for your insane craziness. Oh yea. You stay behind me? I’ll pull into a Starbucks parking lot and see how committed you are. I’ll wait until you pull in behind me, then I…do something. Drive away, run you over, call the cops, or the baristas. But you know, once you start thinking about this, letting your imagination run, you can just go to incredible extremes with it. What if this guy gets my license number? Manages to find out where I live? And so on.

At that point I figured it out. Take the iPhone, take good picture. Get a record of the guy’s face, of his car. And I did. And make sure he sees me taking the picture. For extra measure, I might tweet it. Internet to the rescue. Sort of.

Because really, he was in the slow lane. I was in the fast lane. The lanes merged. He pulled forward, I pulled forward. He backed off his accelerator, I didn’t. It was just a merge. Dude! It was just a merge!!

WordPress Ad – Just Sayin’

Leave a reply

Dear WordPress,

I think it is inappropriate for you to post ads without providing advance notice that you are going to do so. Did I miss your email or some other notification you sent? Because everybody has to make a buck, and nothing is free. But I think you should make it clear that my carefully written, meticulously designed blog page is going to be munged up with a stupid ad for an automobile I would never consider buying.

And, if I have to pay $30 a year to keep my blog free of your ads, you should give me some time to consider if that $30 might be better spent on a Squarespace.com web site or some other alternative.

Just sayin’.

– Christo

Sent from my iPad

Here’s the ad you should see: http://astore.amazon.com/ztaichi-20

It’s Still Too Hard to Write!!

1 Reply

I am a writer. I have written. All I want to do on this blob is write the things I want to write. I have things to say, I want to write and post them. When I started this blob, it was my intention to create and write it on my iPad, push the limits of the device, find the best solutions, and prove it was possible. It’s been a hard battle, and a frustrating one. Because the awkwardness and stupidity and inconvenience of using the available tools have created a hesitation on my part to write when I want to. Pain—mental or emotional—is a powerful conditioner. And I have been conditioned to just hold off on my writing. Or to summarize my thoughts into tweets. An interesting exercise, reducing it all to the least number of characters. But tweeting is not writing. 

WordPress Hah! Until now, I’ve been fighting with the “official” WordPress app for the iPad. It was free. It was official. It ought to work well. Instead it was buggy, slow, awkward. Infuriating at times. I have over many years, as a surfer of technology, had to be patient, waiting for the improvements that were so obviously needed, the ideas that had not met fruition. The mistakes in interface and execution that needed to be fixed. Sometimes we could take a huge leap from one OS to another, such as DOS to MacOS and make these great advances in a single step. Too often, that step would open our eyes to the new limitations and sometimes we had to wait, again. A revolutionary tool like the Mac, when first released, was hindered by hardware limitations—a single 128k floppy drive, making it necessary to “swap” disks to save a file, or load a program. It seemed like forever before Apple could manufacture and release a second, external 128k drive (and for only $400!!) We had to wait for Microsoft Word for the Mac before we could create documents longer than 20 pages, because Apple MacWrite saved to MEMORY not DISK. These limitations now seem inconceivable! But with the iPad, with iOS, it is the same.

I’m trying BlogPad Pro. The fact that I have written these few paragraphs already is encouraging. It is not a beautiful App, but it seems fairly well designed and very functional. I want to check out the Markup and HTML support. And in a moment, I will see how well it can post a quick blob entry. Wish me luck friends!

Written on my iPad!!!

It Sneaks Up On You – A Few Words About Sleep Apnea

Leave a reply

At least as far back as I can remember, I was known for being a snorer. Not just a snorer, but a house-shaking snorer. This always surprised me a bit, because when I was snoring, I was asleep and unaware of it. In fact, when I was married, the topic would come up occasionally with friends, and my ex-wife would go on about how I would wake up the children, and could be heard all the way downstairs, even with the bedroom door closed and the television blaring. I joked that the strange thing was, I never snored when I slept alone!

I did have this occasional strange sleep event: I’d wake from a sound sleep because I couldn’t breathe. Not only could I not breathe, but I was suffocating! And I would spring from sleep, often clear out of bed, in a panic, to expel whatever was in my lungs, with a life-saving explosion that opened my sealed throat. You would think that this might generate some concern, but I didn’t think too much about it. I just thought it came from eating ice cream before bed, which caused the insides of my mouth to stick together (even after brushing :-).

There was the exhaustion thing. I loved to take naps, but they were never very refreshing. Yet if I had a moment to lie down somewhere, I’d be inclined to close my eyes. I had a minimum one hour commute on I-95 when I stayed at my girlfiend’s house in Philadelphia, and frequently had a hard time keeping my eyes open and on the road either driving there at night, or heading to work in the morning. And there was the time my son made a poster for his elementary school class. A collage of photos “About My Family”, I was portrayed in the series “My Dad likes to sleep. A lot!” A cluster of photos featuring yours truly taking naps at various locations around the house and yard.

The poking got to me – My girlfriend poked me when I slept with her. My perception—I was annoyingly roused from sleep because I was snoring. And not just from sleep, but from finally just starting to fall into a restful sleep. It seemed like this happened continuously throughout the night. She was harassing me because my snoring bothered her. By morning I’d be full of resentment, unrested, unrefreshed, looking at a long commute, and completely oblivious to her explanation that, “You stopped breathing.” It seems like years, maybe it was years, before it sank in that she was saying, “You stopped breathing. I couldn’t sleep because I’d be lying next to you and I’d be waiting for your next breath, and it wouldn’t come.” You know, (I’d think), I’m a very healthy person. This is ridiculous. Why can’t she just ignore the snoring? Denial is a powerful thing. The poking was one of at least two times Kate saved my life. (Thanks, Kate. I’m sorry I didn’t get it sooner.) It amazes me now how long it took me to realize that I had a real problem.

Headaches – I’ve had headaches most of my life, including occasional migraines. I think they are a learned response to stress. My mom had migraines. Usually 2-3 day events, which miraculously went away when the last of her four children moved out of the house. But I was waking up every morning with a headache. In fact the pattern was: very poor quality sleep, opening my eyes with the absolute certainty that I had been cheated, though I couldn’t explain in what way, a throbbing pain at the base of my skull, the wish that I could go back to sleep and feel better, and the knowledge that the only thing I could do was get up and move around, because that usually seemed to alleviate the pain a bit. For years I’d tried prescriptions for various pain killers for the migraines, but these, and regular aspirin, were usually ineffective for this morning headache. And then, every month or two, one of these morning headaches evolved into a full-blown migraine, complete with vomiting, rolling around on the floor in agony, all that stuff.

Thank You NPR This had gone on for at least a couple years. Chronic pain, sleeplessness, exhaustion, and so on. By this time, my girlfriend had told me quite directly, “I think you have sleep apnea.” And I still did not want to hear it. I think we had even gotten to the point of talking about CPAP, some kind of screwy contraption where you wear a breathing mask to bed. How absurd! Besides, I had more important issues to solve, such as my migraines, and a newly evolving chronic back pain. However, the seed was planted, and I am thankful I had the radio on one morning during a long tiring commute. I wasn’t paying that much attention at first, but I reached to turn the volume up when I realized that whoever was speaking, was describing exact symptoms in precise detail that matched my own. Everything. And the story was about how this person after years of pain, had gone to a sleep clinic, been diagnosed with sleep apnea, prescribed a CPAP machine, and after a few weeks on CPAP, ALL of his symptoms had gone away. All gone away. I don’t even recall if they spoke about the lethal aspects of Apnea—it can kill you after all—because all that mattered to me was that this guy made his pain go away.

I looked into my insurance, discovered the process to get into a sleep clinic, got a referral from my General Practitioner, and was on my way. That could be another blob, but let’s just say, I tried the CPAP. CPAP stands for Continuous Positive Airway Pressure. Basically, you wear a mask that blows air at your nose and mouth. Somehow this keeps the soft tissue inside your mouth from closing off your throat.

Within days, had dreams! One thing I haven’t mentioned, and hadn’t really noticed at the time, is that people who don’t have a healthy sleep cycle don’t dream (or not much, or don’t ever remember their dreams, whatever…) Suddenly my brain was exploding with vivid, memorable, colorful dreams. And, I was feeling rested. And, I almost never had a morning headache! Within a few weeks, I had more energy and my backaches had evaporated. And there were improvements that can’t be measured – I was thinking more clearly. I’ve been on the CPAP now for over 6 years. It is a little hard to get used to; you have to figure out what kind of mask works for you. It’s not perfect. If your partner wants you to live s/he’ll understand and support you putting on this screwy thing before you fall asleep. You can work it out. It is so worth it.

Written on my iPad

Reflections on Sandy

Leave a reply

Oh Sure, the drama of the “super storm” slamming into the Jersey Shore, destroying beaches, ruining homes, uprooting trees, snapping telephone poles – it’s all great news for the media. That’s the big story, the satellite photos, everybody preparing in advance, mobbing the stores, and then all the wonderful disaster photos of giant waves and flooding and ruination.

But here’s my reality.
First, for a change, we had lots of time to get ready. Everyone I know had plenty of water, and batteries, and an ungodly number of homeowners now have generators. I thought they couldn’t possibly have anybody left in New Jersey after last year who didn’t have a generator. Heck! My whacky landlord even bought one for the country house I was renting back then. He thought it would keep the oil burner going so the house wouldn’t freeze up; but however much muscle that thing had, it wasn’t enough to even get the oil burner to make a startup click. It kept the frig going, so I didn’t have to lose all my food, and I plugged my CPAP into it and slept on the living room floor, and that was good. It was not luxury, but it was good.

I am so glad I don’t live out in the country this year! It was lonely. That old stone house was cold. The stink beetles were embedded in the tops of the curtains and every exposed fold of wallpaper and every unsealed crack in a storm window. They filled the attic. The ghosts were always banging around and making noise. My cat had died and my son had moved back in with his mom. There was nobody to greet me at the door, nobody to come home to. And once the power was out, just that noisey generator, and the prospect of another gas run to the station down the road. After days like that, on my way home from work, I’d roll down my car window and listen as I pulled into the driveway. Power yet? If I could hear the annoying rattle and choking bursts of internal combustion engines, running in every garage up and down Route 523, then I knew, no power yet.

I live in town now happily, in a second floor apartment in an old house, on the Delaware river, far from the Jersey Shore. I pulled in my two window air conditioners and at the last minute, on Monday, located a couple of thick, old fashioned snap-in storm windows which I managed to pop into the two windows in my second bedroom “office”. I was really concerned the hurricane would blow in the old panes and dump rain all over my big iMac. So I felt better after that. Every other window, except the one in the little kitchen, had a storm window protecting and insulating it. When it began to rain late Monday, I felt fairly confident. (Sounds like the “Three Little Pigs”!)

Everyone said the power would go out by seven. I was working remotely (which is what IT geeks call it, when we sit at our computers, working from home), trying to get stuff done for my job. I couldn’t concentrate. The wind was picking up, and it was raining. My lights flickered a few times, and I tried to focus on what was most important to get done for work. I couldn’t. I got up and paced the kitchen. I set up my propane camping stove. When the power went, I would have no light, no way to cook on the electric stove, and no microwave. At least I would have city water (in the country you have a well, powered by electricity. Which means when the power goes, no toilet.) The apartment has oil fired steam radiators, but they use electicity at some point. I figured I would have heat and hot water for a day, maybe two. I had a lot of fruit. I made a giant fruit smoothee, figuring I could save it and drink it later when the power went. I started doing dishes (because who wants a dirty kitchen when you have no power?) I began to look forward to the cup of coffee I would have the next morning in the aftermath of the storm. I have everything… Wait! I have BEANS. I need to grind my coffee! I took care of that, placing the grounds in the frig. And thirty minutes later the power dropped. And it did not come back on.

Without wasting too many more words on details, the storm came that night, it blew like crazy, and made a lot of noise. There were all kinds of screeching and wailing sounds during the night. Even though I got up a couple of times to look, with all the wind and rain splashing on the windows, I could see nothing. Early in the morning while it was still dark, it sounded like the wind had found the little shed where all the renters dump their garbage. I heard garbage can lids zinging into trees, and rolling down the street. There was the metallic clunking of garbage cans bouncing across the church parking lot behind my house, and the solid crash as they hit trees or walls. Eventually it all stopped, and I slept.

I thought we must have been in the eye of the storm at 8 AM, because it was calm and even fairly light out. But that was it. There was surprisingly little rain. I cooked a big breakfast of food that I thought would go bad first – eggs, sliced turkey- too late for the mushrooms, tossed them – a pot of coffee. No cable, no TV, no Internet. But my cell phone worked. I wasn’t isolated yet.

To be continued….

Pictures Please!! Online Dating

Leave a reply

Pictures, Please!!
For God’s sake this is the 21st century, and unless we are blind, we want to see what the other person looks like. I don’t think you can even call that shallow any more. It’s realistic. Who doesn’t want to see a potential date? If you can find someone who actually says they don’t care; stay away, because if they’re not lying, they’re crazy. So put up a photo, or don’t bother with this whole online dating thing. Seriously.

Make it a good one. If you’re going to post a fuzzy, low resolution photo, then don’t bother. That’s aggravating. And while you are at it, post more than one. Give me an idea of what you look like now, and very recently. (Tip: Skip the rest of this paragraph if my being blunt is going to offend you. God! I wouldn’t want that!) It drives me nuts to see a sexy lady in the first image on her Profile, and my reaction is, hey, she looks great for forty! And as I go through the pictures, in each one, she gets older, and fatter, and greyer! Look, I was a young Adonis in my twenties:

20120902-163216.jpg

I was thin! I had muscles! I had hair! But I do not look like that now, and it doesn’t matter to anyone who wants to date me now, what I looked like that many years ago! Get with the program people!! Pictures, good pictures, recent pictures, plenty of pictures.

Picture Pet Peeves. Please don’t post a picture where you’ve cropped out your ex-husband or old boyfriend. These pictures always look just like a photo where someone has cropped out their ex-husband or old boyfriend. Sometimes your ex-husband’s head or arm is still in the picture. Jeez. You can do better than that.

And please!! I am BEGGING here. PLEASE don’t post any pictures of your pets! If I see another picture of a Pekinese with your socks in his mouth, or a woman lying in the grass with her Doberman, or a woman with mussed hair, her face dripping with sweat, standing with pride and a very satisfied look next to her horse, I am going to scream! I don’t have to love your pets, okay? They’re pets! It’s a dog! Save it for YouTube. Please.

This post was extracted from my original post on Online Dating-that one was about Lying, and this is really a different topic…

Sent from my iPad

Waterfalls and Pitfalls in Profiles – more on Online Dating

Leave a reply

Waterfalls and Pitfalls in Profiles
Once you start shopping around on a dating site and reading profiles, you start to draw conclusions. Such as: they all sound the same. I don’t shop the male profiles, so I’m going out on a limb here, but I’m pretty confident it’s an equivalent scenario for you gals. Women, they like long walks on a beach, candlelit dinners at a fine restaurant, snuggling by firelight, and a man who is a complete gentleman. Well of course. But no guy is going to get excited about a woman who writes that. Especially when there are so many profiles that say exactly the same thing. So the guy is going to look at the pictures (which I’ve already discussed), or look for profiles that are different.

The next step up—the “my friends tell me I’m interesting” profile. These are all the same too, the adjectives change but the story’s the same. “People tell me I’m interesting, fun, easygoing, lighthearted, and energetic.” Okay. That’s what they tell you, so you are like a million other women, but what do you think you are?

Move up to the ones who tell you. This level has potential. These ladies make no qualms about other people. They tell us who they are. “I’m fun, exciting, love a good meal and interesting conversation. I like to play sports, but hate watching football. Breakfast is my favorite meal, especially with someone I’m just getting to know. (Wink.)” I vote for these ladies. A cliche is a cliche is a cliche. But who can resist a pornographic cliche? Still, we’re not done. We still have to talk about the profiles that go over the top. Way over.

Usually these are women around my age. They’ve been married; they’ve loved and lost; they’ve had kids, they’ve raised families; and they’ve had time to find themselves. Yes, and in profiles, they’ve decided for some reason, they want to talk about all the great risk-taking adventures they’ve had. Cliff-jumping in Aruba, white-water rafting in South America, scuba diving in the shark infested waters of the Australian Great Barrier reef, underground cave tubing in Iran, riding a barrel over Victoria Falls, and of course the old standby, not just sky-diving but for the really risk-taking, BASE jumping, preferably off some enormous cliff in Montana or Idaho in a flying wingsuit, or into a huge open-mouthed cavern in Central America through an enormous cloud of giant fruit bats, like an episode of Nature. I even had one “match” with a photo of herself standing on the wing of a small plane in a flightsuit a-la-Amelia Earhart, with the statement that she really wanted a guy with a pilot’s license, so they could fly off together-because life on earth with gravity-bound mortals is so droll sometimes. I had a -vision of a couple of big sea birds, winging out over the ocean with no land visible on the horizon. Have fun kids.

20120930-220345.jpg

What’s wrong with this picture? I’m sorry. I don’t find the idea of dating a female Indiana Jones particularly romantic or attractive. What are these women saying? To me it sounds like, “Hey! I’m different. I’m no home body. You’re not gonna tie me down! I’m wild and free! I risk my life and do exciting things and I don’t need a man to do them with!!” Which is great if you’re not a man. The trouble here is that men generally take serious risk-taking adventures either alone, or with other men. There’s the whole manly tradition of the man bringing home the mastodon meat after a long dangerous hunt, of returning from war or some other fantastic journey (think Odysseus). We want to go do stuff, and then come home to the hearth and hero’s welcome. I know Penelope had a helluva time without that lunkhead around for twenty years, but I’m just sayin’. How many men want to play a good game of tackle football with their wives? How many guys think, “Shit, I’m gonna see if I can climb Everest without killing myself or getting any limbs amputated from frostbite, and I’d like you to come along and risk your youth and beauty with me!!”

This idea that your potential spouse/mate/partner is going to not only find your adventures attractive, but is going to want to share them with you, ignores or overlooks the truth that much of life, and many of its great moments, are solo excursions. As a man, I know it is true for me. I propose naively that this is also true for women. I LOVE to share new things with someone I care about, but I also know there is an unfathomable and exquisite pleasure from risk-taking adventures that derives from the unique sense of accomplishment that is NEVER a team accomplishment. Whether it’s rappelling down a cliff face you have climbed, racing a dirt bike up the sandy loam of a desert arroyo, or jumping into a glacier fed pool from the top of a waterfall, this is something you do alone, because even if you are with friends or lovers, even if you are holding hands when you jump, when you get to the bottom you don’t say, “Hey, I could never have done it without you!!” It is YOU that does it. And that’s at the heart of these adventures, probably because they remind us of the ultimate and irrevocably solo adventure, death.

I can see having a relationship, being close to someone, and having common interests and sharing new and exciting experiences. But like great sex, these adventures would be the product of the relationship, not the reason for it. I love Paris; who wouldn’t? I love nature. Let’s explore together when we know we actually like each other, have some chemistry, a common understanding, enjoy being with each other, and can carry a conversation. If we can have those things together, the remaining catalog of life’s adventures could be endless.

Surf School in Costa Rica

2 Replies

July 22, 2012

20120903-102655.jpg
In the air
Since there is no cellular capability in my iPhone, and no Wi Fi on the plane for my iPad, I am out of touch with the Inkernet, and the rest of the electronic world for the first time in recent memory. Even at 5000 feet in the cow town backwoods of Elko, there is at least spotty cellular. Not here.

So, a chance to write.

I’m out of my element. This place is paradise. But another day or two, and I’ll be more laid back. It is really…not sure what the best word is. Primitive. We have some of the amenities – like Internet. But there is no phone service unless I walk to the cafe down the road. Speaking of the roads, they are almost impassable – rutted dirt – most people here ride dirt bikes or quads to get around. We are surrounded by jungle, with the beach just a bit down the road. The hotel is a loose affiliation of relatively new buildings constructed of stone or stucco with tin or tile roofs. Between them and the small pool and lounging deck is the bar/restaurant, wood pole construction in classic “tiki-bar” style, essentially open on three of four sides. There are paths around the lush gardens leading to a few private tables, to the laundry and office, and to the board rack and shower – I don’t think this is actual rain forest here, but it is tropical. I’ve heard but not seen interesting birds except hummingbirds. There are howler monkeys and iguanas, and sea turtles, also which I have not yet seen. Many of the surfing teachers have dogs, and they are accepted as part of the community.

Speaking of which, it’s been a long time since I have been around a community of surfers. I forgot how odd they are. The men are all beautiful, absolutely ripped, almost invariably with thick shaggy hair – depending on ethnicity, they are blond, or they have dark hair bleached by the sun. If they are of a background that gives them the right kind of hair, they have pony tails or dreadlocks. If they are old, they look young. A few, I think the older men, have short or shaved hair like mine. Most are tattooed, some extensively. They are all relaxed, comfortable with their bodies, part of nature, at ease in the moment.

The women are a bit harder to characterize, but they seem to fall into two classes: those who surf “inside” and those who go “outside”. “Inside” is in the foam, after the big waves break, closer to shore. That’s where the novices learn the basics, or play if they never graduate to the big waves. I rank these girls in the same group as those who don’t surf at all, but who are definitely part of the scene. The women who go “outside” are pretty much accepted as equals by the experienced male surfers. Though I’m not sure, I think you can pick them out – at the beach because they are carrying boards-away from the beach, because they stand tall and straight, and have confidence, and talk with the men about what the men talk about – the waves, the tide, the ride, because they know, as the men know, that they love the water, and there is nothing else that is so important, no love that matters more, than the next wave, the next long ride.

This is the heart of the surfer. They love life, they are in the flow, they live in the moment, it is about the experience, their experience, and not about thought, past, or memory, or anyone else.

Hang Ten,

—Christo

Sent from my iPad

Lying and the Age Thing – Online Dating

Leave a reply

Okay
I took the leap and signed up for the online dating services. Does that mean I am really “ready” to meet women on the Internet and go out? After a few days of this, it means I’m ready to stop looking at pictures and profiles and meet real people face to face. Or even, just meet them on Facetime and have a two-way conversation.

Lying and the Age Thing:
When I told a friend that I doubted any younger woman would want to date a fifty-five year old man, he suggested, “Lie about your age. Everybody does on those sites anyway.” Really? Well, I’m not lying, I’m just dealing with the consequences…it just doesn’t seem right to start out a potential relationship based on a falsehood. You could fudge it like a woman in one profile – She came up in a search as “40 year old”, but in her profile she said, “Actually, I’m fourty-four, but I wanted to get in the search range”, (for an age I’m NOT, she could have added.) Is that lying or not? I’m lying to the search engine you’re using, but I’m not really lying to you. Right.

Most people would lie to tell you they are younger, non? And many do. There are puh-lenty of ladies who say they are fourty, but when you look at the pictures you think, NO WAY is she fourty! In fact, I saw a “fifty year old” that I swear must be sixty-five. And if she’s not, she must have lived one helluva hard life. I mean, we are all sensitive about our age, and getting old, and looking old. But let’s just deal with it. Shit, when I see myself in the mirror, I see a guy with a full head of hair, but I know to most people I am bald. And my face—I know I have some scars and “laugh lines” that would make you think I’m Mr. Happy, but I never think of myself as having a “hard” face like James Woods, but I probably do. I have a face with character. Denial is a powerful, and sometimes wonderful thing. But when it comes to the online dating game, the truth will out sooner or later. Why fake it up front and annoy people??

But why would you claim to be OLDER? I’m talking about really attractive, even hot, young women who list their age as 35 or 40. And there is just no way. These girls are in their twenties. Have you figured it out yet? Because I think the answer is that they are gold diggers looking to hook an older man who has enough sense to say he is interested in a woman in her thirties. Look at these girls’ profiles. To me the giveaway is that they are interested in a man between fourty and sixty-five, i.e. old enough to have money, young enough to give it to a young girl. When you look at the other match requirements it’s no preference, no preference, no preference. And if they reveal their income, it’s a pittance. Their description often reads like gobbledy gook from a Russian immigrant wannabe. “I’m pretty girl, good cook, make you happy in nice big house in USA.” Jeez. This is true more of Match.com, the MySpace of dating services, than of eHarmony. And there is more dreck the lower you go down the quality of these services. It’s like porn, you see these sexy girls, but it’s fake, or if they are real, you can’t have them, unless you buy them. After awhile I feel dirty looking at the profiles and I don’t want to see them any more.

Sent from my iPad