Glossary:
Outremont: well-to-do professionals live there. Rich people too.
Nerve.com: the personals site where I met Adam, and Mark, and Anne (in that order).
100 pounds: about 45 kilos.
>on 4/15/03 3:51 PM, Cummins, Alison at wrote:
>Um, may I forward this? It’s funny and lovely. (Just like you.)
—–Original Message—–
From: Anne McKnight [mailto:______@sympatico.ca]
Subject: Re: One more reason in favor of Internet ‘dating’–a true story
Hi,
A funny story about Internet dating, with the moral being, you never know what will happen.
Remember last fall when I met that cool musician guy with the heady imagination, had a nice coffee with him, after which he asked to meet up again, and then he up-and-said his trials (“”) with Internet dating were over, when we actually hadn’t even been on a ‘date’?
Well, the scene at that time was kind of bleak. I was dog-sitting. In outremont. In a house with no good food to raid, except for dog food, very expensive dog food. The dog had allergies and had to be given pills often. The dog’s allergies made its anus itch. The dog would sit & spin on its poor itchy anus for hours on end. I didn’t know this was an allergic symptom. I thought she had to go out. I took her out alllll the time. She has no discipline and weighs over 100 pounds, and would drag me down the street, towards other dogs, towards piles of dogshit, towards sodden donuts in gutters, all of which I would pry out of her mouth. If she put anything in her mouth, it would activate more allergies, more sitting & spinning. Is it any wonder I turned to alternate-virtual–worlds? Also, I was writing grants, which in academia means inventing parallel lives you will probably never get to live. Which I have already not gotten to live about 7 times since I moved here, all those parallel lives recycled back to the drawing board…
So, anyway, I answered the cursory, wildly funny ad on nerve, and started a conversation with this guy, the musician. Even though I was stuck with the itchy-anus dog, in outremont, with no food but dog food, it made me happy. I met him, and that made me happy too, since more than ‘dating trials’ I thought, oh at last, someone I can talk to about the freaky things I like, music & etc. well, that didn’t work out, obviously. I was dissed-electronically, ick.
The synchronicity of the conversation was good though, as it got my imagination deceived, productively, into thinking it had an interlocutor. I wrote a grant proposal to pay for all those things I invented in the parallel worlds that crossed between that conversation & the parallel universe sponsored by the government of quebec.
So synchronicity point 1, is that K**** says, Sunday, he is working with the guy who is the ***** man at *****, who is this guy. Oh really, say hi for me. So, yesterday, Monday, synchronicity 2–I find out that I got the grant. 45K + 10K for equipment, sound & image editing stuff. I guess I owe that guy a beer some time. Even though he has a girlfriend, and protocol dictates we will probably never be in a together-drinking situation anytime soon, due to the blowback such an encounter in his single days would oh-so-predictably provoke. Moral of the story: you never really know, do you?
Chalk up another felicity for parallel, virtual lives, and the unpredictable directions they go…
a
[originally transmitted by e-mail April 15, 2003]