Cost-Benefit Analysis

So. Anyone who knows my name can find my blog. This has made me hesitant lately.

Nevertheless, if I don’t write, you people are all gonna leave, and it’s like therapy for me anyway. So I’ll get on with it.

I’ve gone on two second dates this week. Both of them were movie dates. One of them included dinner beforehand. One of the movies was “The Royal Tennenbaums.” One of the movies was “Black Hawk Down.” Both movies were good. Neither date involved handholding or the least bit of physical contact. Neither guy even made an attempt at physical contact.

Well, okay, there was some. One of the second dates ended with a hug. The other second date ended with a goodbye handshake. Both guys expressed interest in third dates, though.

I’m frustrated.

To get to Union Square, I exit the PATH train at 14th Street and Sixth Avenue and walk along 14th Street for two or three long blocks. That stretch of avenue has such a high concentration of hot guys.

It’s frustrating.

I want a boyfriend. Lately. Lately I’ve really wanted a boyfriend. And I look at those guys walking along 14th Street, and I sit and watch “Black Hawk Down” and see all these hot guys with military haircuts, and then we say goodnight and I walk back to the PATH and I see more hot guys, and then I look at myself in the mirror and I think to myself, I need a haircut.

Oh, and I fell off the wagon the other night. If you want to call it that.

I’d changed my chat room profile. I’d added the line, “Not looking for insta-hookups.” But consequently, fewer people were talking to me. So I removed the line, hoping that at least more people would feel like chatting.

And some people did. I was approached by a few different people. Horny people. And after weighing it in my mind and telling one of the guys, “Lately I’ve been trying to get to know people first before having sex,” he told me that in all honesty he was horny. And I decided, argh, dammit, no, yes, no, yes, no, well, okay, I guess I’m sorta horny too. But I wasn’t. Yeah, my body was. But my mind didn’t want to have sex.

I was walking over to meet him and I was telling myself that I wanted to turn back. I didn’t want to do it. I wanted to go home. But my feet kept moving. It had been so long. It was like part of me needed to do it.

So I did it. And it wasn’t very exciting. It wasn’t even all that extensive, actually. And there wasn’t even any kissing. There was a very satisfying explosive ending on my part, but I went home feeling unsatisfied, emotionally and mentally.

A couple of people have told me not to be hard on myself about having done this. So I won’t be. Or at least I’ll try to move on.

I’m frustrated though. I’m craving a companion lately.

So.

Anyone who knows my name can find my blog.

So it may be detrimental to me to be writing about these things.

Yet I’m doing it anyway.

Cost-benefit analysis.

I guess I’ve decided the benefits to myself outweigh the potential costs.

Right now, at least.

Live, from the Bell Jar

Looks like I’m going to have to go out and read me some Sylvia Plath, seeing as how I’ve just been voted her soul sister. I was thinking to myself, wow, cool, I’ve won something! Then I surfed on over to the category descriptions. Ouch. Thanks, I think. Well — I’ll just try to keep a good sense of humor about the whole thing. And congratulations to all the other award recipients!

Neurotic and self-obsessed little drama queen that I am, I’ll move on and describe my weekend.

First of all, I had absolutely no sex with Wes last night.

That’s not particularly unusual. On most nights I have absolutely no sex with Wes. But last night I actually hung out with Wes, and hanging-out-with-Wes always leads to hooking-up-with-Wes. Except for last night.

Because I have a three-day weekend, I was going to go to Splash last night. But one friend came down with “stomach issues,” and then I realized I was all barred-and-clubbed out after two nights in a row at Barracuda, so I decided not to go. Then I ran into Wes online. We hadn’t seen each other in about two months, so he suggested we go out to Uncle Joe’s, Jersey City’s neighborhood gay bar. I’d never been there, so I decided, sure.

Pretty empty. Brightly colored walls with framed abstract paintings. Pool table. Jukebox. It was bring-your-own-vinyl-records night, so some random guy was spinning these random trance-like records for an audience of three. We played pool and had some drinks and talked for a couple of hours. More people trickled in. He started to yawn. He was tired and he mentioned heading home to “sleep like a baby.” So we left. Walked back to our neighborhood. Got to his apartment first. I managed to invite myself upstairs so I could reclaim a videotape (ahem) he’d borrowed from me a couple of months ago. I got my tape, but no sex. He gave me a quick smooch and we said our goodnights. Oh well.

But even if there was no sex, it was nice to hang out with him, as it usually is.

Perhaps this is God’s form of punishment. You wanna have less sex? Fine. How about I give you no sex at all? Ha! How do you like them apples?

Those apples are okay, but could I have some meaningful sex to go with them?

The rest of my weekend has been nice. On Saturday night I went to Barracuda with a friend, and we enjoyed all the nice scenery. It was productive in that I actually managed to talk to some of the scenery, which I’m usually too petrified to do.

See, my friend and I watched one guy introduce himself to another guy. Then we watched them talk for about an hour. Then we watched the second guy go off to another part of the bar by himself. I thought the first guy looked a little bit cute. Then we watched a wacky hunched old man with a fedora go up to him. He was making it clear he wasn’t interested — mostly by looking away, nodding half-heartedly to the old man’s muttered comments, and so forth. I figured this was my chance to intervene and rescue him, so I walked past him and we made eye contact and said hi. But I stupidly walked on without stopping.

Fortunately, the old man left him alone — and a few minutes later, after several deep breaths and some contradictory thoughts, I went over to him and said hi and smiled.

“Sorry about my lame attempt to rescue you from that old guy,” I said.

“Oh, that’s okay,” he said.

We talked for about 20 minutes. A university librarian who just moved to New York. Nice guy. I wasn’t particularly into him, though. Eventually I smiled, said “well, it was nice talking with you,” and excused myself.

I was proud of myself for talking with the guy. Because my problem isn’t conversing. My problem is actually going up to the guy in the first place. It’s nearly impossible for me. But I did it. Hooray!

As for this week, I’ve got two second dates, starting today. Should be nice.

Well — one neurotic and self-obsessed little drama queen, over and out.

An Insider’s Take on an

Outsider’s Take on Blogging

I’ve come across an interesting critique of blogging. It was written by a friend of mine. I think the analysis is pretty accurate and interesting and worth reading.

I should point out that I think it’s applicable only to blogs in which an author discusses his or her personal life. There are plenty of blogs out there that deal only with current events, or media happenings, or linkage, or whatever, and reveal next to nothing about what’s going on in the author’s life.

And yet there are low entry costs to blogging. Go to Blogger and you can set one up in minutes. Those low entry costs encourage a wide selection of people to create blogs. Anyone can do one. And most people like to write about what they know. And the things that most people are most informed about are their own lives. So a majority of blogs probably do serve primarily as personal diaries.

The piece raises several issues I’ve thought about before.

“Blogging sets up an incentive to create and overanalyze issues.”

I happen to know that that that sentence was prompted, at least in part, by some of my recent entries. So I’d like to comment.

I’m not quite sure the statement is true, at least not with respect to me. I don’t create and overanalyze issues because I blog; I blog because I create and overanalyze issues. If I didn’t blog, I would still create and overanalyze issues. It’s just that the blog gives me a public forum in which to do so.

But on the other hand… hmmm. Publish or perish, right? We all like having readers. And the best way to draw more eyeballs (and, more importantly, to keep those eyeballs) is by making sure your blog becomes a habitual read, which you do by updating your blog regularly. And this creates pressure to write — even when I may not have anything exciting to say. And it’s possible that in recounting my day in a way that makes it accessible to my audience, I’ll come up with things I hadn’t thought about. And that I’ll write about those things.

But is that bad? Well:

“I believe these ruminations ultimately do the primary author a dis-service. I’m all for analysis. But sometimes it’s good to stop and let the world go by. I would argue that a number of bloggers get so caught up in the very practice of blogging that they prevent themselves from enjoying any one day too much… I often wonder how paths would change if a compulsive blogger simply took a vacation for awhile.”

Okay. As a compulsive blogger, I think that’s a valid point. Again, though — if I weren’t writing about these thoughts, I’d still be thinking them. At least with a blog I’m exposed to some alternative viewpoints instead of thinking my thoughts in a echo chamber.

Also, I get to meet new people.

I can’t say I haven’t thought about it, though. Sometimes I try to remember what things were like before my life had a glass wall (or a translucent one, anyway). I like the interaction it’s brought me, though. So I’ll keep doing it.

Here’s a great issue:

“What happens when bloggers do things with people in real life, especially those who don’t blog but nonetheless know the blog exists? What happens is that the outsider starts reading about him or herself on a Web site. Social engagements become akin to those anxious meetings with journalists—you’re never sure what exactly will be on or off the record.”

Excellent point, one I’ve worried about. If I meet someone who reads my blog, will that reader feel inhibited when we hang out? If the reader starts to worry about being written about, that could get in the way of natural human interactions.

And it causes problems not only for the written-about reader, but for the writer, too.

It’s something I didn’t think about until I started meeting some of my readers. Until then, the barriers between blog and life were relatively watertight. When I started to meet my readers, I needed to create rules.

I’ve made it a practice not to write too much about the readers I’ve met. I once met one of my readers and thought he was totally cute, but I didn’t write about it here, because I was afraid of what he’d think if he knew.

(And yet, I haven’t heard from him since I first met him. Perhaps he just doesn’t want to read about himself here.)

Also, I rarely use a person’s real name here — reader or otherwise — unless the person is a fellow blogger, or unless it would be pointless to protect the person’s identity. For example, Mike and I know some of the same people, and he’s already used their real names, so there’s really no more identity-protecting I can do there.

In general, though, I try to avoid embarrassing a reader. I try not to reveal something that the reader wouldn’t want other people to know. If I had sex with a reader, I don’t think I’d write about it here.

This non-embarrassment clause also applies to people I interact with through e-mail or Instant Messenger or whatever.

Blogging is a power. It is a power that must be used wisely. It is a power that can fall into the wrong hands. (Cue “Lord of the Rings” theme music here.)

It is a power that can be used as a cop-out. If you want one of your readers to know something, and it would be embarrassing or awkward to tell that thing to the person directly, it could be tempting to tell the person by writing about it in your blog instead.

That isn’t something I’ve done yet — I don’t think. But it’s certainly possible. Because it’s easier.

And of course, there’s another danger in blogging — an obvious danger. A danger you can’t protect against. It’s the danger that someone in your life reads your blog regularly — and you, the writer, don’t know it.

Yikes.

And there’s a paradox inherent in quasi-anonymous personal blogging, too. On the one hand, I like getting more readers. On the other hand, I get nervous that some of those new readers will be people who I don’t want reading my blog: employers, parents, elderly relatives, or people who are mentioned here. For instance, when I agreed to be interviewed for an AP article about blogging a few months ago, I was thrilled by the possibility that it could bring in more readers. But it didn’t — and now, because of that article, you can find my blog by typing my name into Google. That was a big mistake on my part.

We bloggers — those of us who write about our personal lives, anyway — often adhere to the fiction that our blogs are unconnected to the real world, that what we write about doesn’t affect anything outside the blogging universe, that we can write whatever we want, that we don’t have to worry about how our words might affect others.

It’s important to remember that the walls are not watertight, that we don’t live in a parallel universe.

Only in a postmodern one.