Meeting Potential Dates

Meeting potential dates

(a slight gay perspective ahead, but not exclusive)

The way I see it there are four ways to meet potential dates (I'm slightly cheating with the fourth)

  Online is the most common and most mechanical of all. It feels a bit unnatural because it's very "goal oriented." You end up reading someone's profile and calculate how well you think the two of you would fit each other before you even bother sending a message. Or you just send messages to every cutie you can find, hoping the good one will answer.

In a club (or similar) is a different kind of "goal oriented". Usually you're drunk and horny and mostly interested in a quick fuck… Sometimes it end up lasting more than a hookup, but this is rarely the case. (Although when it is, it tends works well!)

Through friends is a weird one. In a sense it's similar to online dating because you're still over-thinking it, but your friends are the ones that do calculate the match potential. They know the two of you pretty well and since they're a third party they're less influenced by the hot and cute factors.

Randomly, such as meeting someone at the gym, on the bus, in knitting club, etc… This one is my favourite; Because I like randomness, and because it always makes for an interesting story. The unexpected nature of this first encounter already connects you in a deeper way than any of the above.

  Unfortunately, we can't plan for randomness.

Dear video game designers who think it's totally legit to have a main story event that's tied to the real world calendar (e.g., a mission that you can only start on a Friday the 13th, or when it's a dark moon, or when the minutes and hours hands are synced) How about I ban you from using Netflix and online music services. You can still watch all the TV shows and listen to all the music you want. You'll just have to wait for some arbitrary point in time. Sometimes without even knowing exactly when. Doesn't sound so fun now, does it?

The Inn for Chronic Wanderers

Chronic wanderers are those who are never happy with staying in the same place for too long. They must experience working in one place, studying in another, exploring the endless urban jungles of the world… I started to feel this itch as well, which is one of the reasons I've decided to take my life in a new direction and move to Vancouver.

Vancouver seems to be a city of chronic wanderers. Most people I meet here came from another place: Some from just around the corner, some from the other side of the world, some locals who went and came back. Many of them are already planning their next venture.

When I was chatting with new people on dating sites before coming here the regular questions were "What do you do for work?", "Where do you live?", "What do you like doing for fun?". Here another question pops up: "How long are you staying?"

I've asked this question myself, especially after someone tells me that he came from afar. Or sometimes they just answer the question without being asked: "I'm moving to Toronto to jump start my career", "I'm going to travel the far east for a year", "I'm going to Amsterdam to learn how to speak Dutch".

I've been asked this question as well; "At least two years" is my standard reply. I'll be studying for a masters degree in Computer Science. What will happen after that is anyone's guess. Will I find someone here that would make me want to change my plans, whatever those will be after a while? Can this beast be tamed by finding the so called "one"?

I've often wondered how chronic wanderers handle love. Although I have met a few chronic wanderers who are in a relationship, I could never find a pattern. Sometimes their love is swift; ending just as fast as it started. Sometimes it's persistent; Keeping the relationship alive with Skype and facebook and expensive bi-monthly visits. Sometimes it's exclusive and sometimes open. Sometimes it's delusional and hurts one or both sides more than either are willing to admit. Sometimes it's more real than any other love.

“One of the few benefits of the fall of civilization as we know it,” he says, “is that there are private cellars with fine vintages everywhere one digs. It is not theft. It is archaeology.”

— From The Rise of Endymion (1997), by Dan Simmons

“If our society ever opted for Orwell's Big Brother approach, the instrument of choice for oppression would have to be the credit wake. In a totally noncash economy with only a vestigial barter black market, a person's activities could be tracked in real time by monitoring the credit wake of his or her universal card. There were strict laws protecting card privacy but laws had a bad habit of being ignored or abrogated when societal push came to totalitarian shove.” —Brawne Lamia

From Hyperion (1989), by Dan Simmons

That other R2D2

Have you noticed how all droids in the Star Wars universe have a 4 letter/digit name? Seeing how they used standard English letters and decimal digits, this means that there are exactly 36^4 = 1,679,616 droid names. Droids are cheap and ubiquitous, given that impoverished farmers in the outbacks of the galaxy own half a dozen droids. Coruscant at its peak had a population of 1 trillion, meaning that there were definitely more than 1,679,616 droids in the galaxy far, far away, so droid names were not unique. The same droid name was used for multiple droids, perhaps thousands or even millions of droids.

This means that during the events of Star Wars episodes IV–VI there were other R2D2′s and C3PO’s in the galaxy that were constantly harassed by the authorities because they were unfortunate enough to share their name with the empire’s most wanted.

Somewhere out there is an R2D2 teacher-bot that gets arrested mid-class every couple of weeks by an overzealous stormtrooper. Somewhere else there is a C3PO decorated soldier-bot that got dishonourably discharged for crimes it never committed by a commanding officer that’s afraid of unwanted media attention.