one to infinity

at the age of 30, i feel like i am the last single woman standing in nyc. very few of my friends have married, but they are most definitely speaking the "us, we" lingua in blissful union with their boyfriends or fiances. i am almost always the only single girl friend at all of their parties, for as long as i can remember. then come all the nudge nudge wink winks, "why don't you talk to a very pregnant bill over there carrying around his 9 month beer-belly or tom over there with the nervous twitch..."

my mother begs me to start freezing my eggs. "dahlin' it's fine if you don't want to get married, marriage is not something you should rush into. but you should freeze your eggs. the older you get, the harder it is to conceive and a marriage without children is rather lonely in your later years." my mother then proceeds to rattle off the names of all of my aunties and uncles and the hairdresser's daughters who are in various stages of being a singleton, childless, or going in to get their earwax removed professionally.

i became really curious about the world of on-line personals just about the time i started grad school. here i was, writing a paper at 4 a.m. and the only people i had any communication with were dead white males telling me about power structures in society, via seances that were weakly disguised as graduate classes in political science. to find comfort in those wee hours of biorhythm chaos, i would peruse all the people in the personals. it was so reassuring to see the glow of a yellow smiley face indicating that the person was on-line and a severe insomniac. it was like the christmas lights were finally lit and the anticipation of the presents to be opened were up to the hilt. for those few minutes, i would boldly sneak out of the house of post-development theory with teen-like boldness and drown myself in the green eyes of "green-eyed in brooklyn" or pretend to smoke cigarettes and talk about beatniks and the demise of the democratic party to "jazz fan, 35, divorced".

originally, in my ephemeral moments of dating, i believed that on-line personals were for unattractive people with severe halitosis, more comfortable sending lovenotes in code "00110100111010" than buying a hallmark card for all occasions. so i tried it out for a week.

dear me, that was probably one of the most overwhelming experiences i ever went through. within one week, i had over 89 messages from people that professed that i was the one they were looking for...it was weird for a girl like me with serious space issues to let these strangers into my virtual space. of course i could serve as the fictionalized character of their dreams, whether it be the nice submissive asian so often found on the back pages of the village voice, or be it this superstar of a woman: successful, witty, intelligent, independent, but tired of meeting the same types...i was whatever they constructed me to be. i was their capsela, the motorized building systems toy that my elder brother had in the '80s.

in the world of on-line dating, we are all fiction writers. desperately erasing the ruled margins of the fictionalized realities of our daydreams, and the truths that speckle our expository fictions. when will the moment come that the "mathematician who loves his grandmother" breaks the emergency glass and seeks out jessica, the red-headed pastry chef, in 3-D? to find her in a multimedia presentation devoid of genetically modified photos and heavy-handed spell-checks? how do we package ourselves in 1200 words or less, proclaiming ourselves to be THE generation's zeitgeist and come away with a better sense of vulnerability and $50 poorer?

i got a great glimpse into the ticks and tocks of people. the online dating scene is a very egalitarian tool, where the wallstreet boys list with the tv repair men. (by the way jason, my cable is out and you promised to look at it for free...write back!) despite their different realities everyone wanted to share their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches with a special someone. and i guess i realized that i was not there yet, ready to embrace my role as demeter and exist as the girlfriend, wife, mother.

so my mother is right yet again, i will have to freeze my mojo after all.