The Dark Side of Kruncha

Now we’re getting closer to a balanced representation of me, but we’ve still got a long way to go. One glaring issue is that all of my entries still read like an advertisement: “This is why I’m awesome.” That seems to be good enough for everyone else on this site. And why shouldn’t it be? Nobody wants to admit to his/her shortcomings and reduce the likelihood of receiving messages, even the girls who are inundated with dozens of them every day. In any case, it’s not good enough for me, and I’m going to correct it right now.

 

The preceding entries have all made me out to be someone who embraces his introversion and his selectivity with his interactions. And the vast majority of the time, that’s true. But there are times when my frustration with people descends into desperation, and I start to feel like the pathetic basement-dweller that I’m sure many people perceive me as.

 

The following entry is another one from my private weblog, but it is not like the one I used for this journal’s debut.  It is the story of how I came to be on OKCupid.  This entry is neither glamorous nor well-written, and it portrays a side of me that I am far from eager to reveal. But recently I’ve heard a lot of people throw around this quote by Marilyn Monroe: “If you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.” I don’t believe in deserving, but I do believe that you need to understand and accept everything about a person to truly love him/her.

 

—–

 

I went to Cache Creek the first night back into Berkeley with Jose and Larry. It was a fun night. I lost 100 bucks in no-limit and made it back playing 3-6 limit with a few bucks in interest. I should probably stick with limit from now on, at least until I have enough money to play seriously with. But that’s not what this story is about.

 

That night, we were almost back to Berkeley but since we had skipped dinner, and it was getting close to midnight already, we were all starving. We went to the first In N Out we saw, which was in the middle of nowhere. As we sat down with our food, I noticed Natalie out of the corner of my eye. “Natalie!” No answer. That happens a lot with me. I really ought to learn to call people louder. “Natalie!” Still no answer. Jose and Larry started to debate the likelihood of my actually knowing this person.

 

Finally I caught her attention. We talked a little. She asked if I was still living with Andy and how he was doing. I told her he still spent most of his time hanging out with Animage. “Oh, yeah, he would,” she said and smiled, while I smiled back.

 

She was with a guy friend whose name I can’t remember. Jose and Larry both thought he might have been gay. They sat at a booth separated from ours by a glass railing. The glass was mostly soundproof, so we had to stand up if we wanted to say something to each other. We opted instead to exchange looks and smiles repeatedly. Jose was anxious to get back to Berkeley to hang out with his girlfriend, so we weren’t around for more than ten minutes. Jose and Larry gave me shit about it when we walked back to the car. It was a good night.

 

It didn’t take long for my high to end. It took less than a week for me to become disenchanted with Berkeley again, and I began spending a lot of time inside on the Internet again, especially after getting sick.

 

Perhaps it was partly as a result of this lifestyle, which I believe must promote obsessive behavior, that I started thinking about Natalie again. I went back and reread what I wrote more than two years ago now about her, lamenting the fact that she had a boyfriend she was probably going to be with forever. I remembered that about a month or two before leaving for Hawaii–not long before I broke up with Naomi, actually–that her Facebook status had been set to “Single.” And, naturally, since I was desperate for a story, for a sign to point me in any direction, all I could think was, What a strange coincidence to see Natalie again on my very first day back in town, completely randomly in the middle of nowhere at midnight, after a vacation that was just what I needed to get past Naomi, and just a couple months after Natalie had become single.

 

I commenced Facebook-stalking, as per usual for me. One of her latest status updates complained about OKCupid, a dating website that was matching her up with free-spirit loser types. She blamed it on her listing of video games as an interest.

 

It took a lot less curiosity than I had at that moment to create my own profile and check out the site. Before I worked on my profile at all, I searched for Natalie. With OKCupid’s search engine it was the easiest stalking task I’d ever undertaken. In fact, all I had to do was search for video games, and hers was one of the first profiles that came up. I looked it over eagerly.

 

The consensus these days seems to be that there’s no such thing as love at first sight, and that there’s no substitute for time when it comes to getting to know someone. That said, it’s funny how accurate first impressions can be sometimes. How well did I really know Natalie, after all? Even now I’ve only hung out with her a few times in my life, and always through Andy. In any case, Natalie had exactly the kind of profile I expected she would have. To summarize it, she was everything I wanted in a girl (video games and all) without any of the annoying hangups that I didn’t want. She was what I was looking for.

 

I thought about contacting her of course. I went as far as to think about how we would be dating weeks later, and I’d have to confess to her that I only got an OKCupid profile so that I could “accidentally” find her on it, but she wouldn’t care because by then we’d be so enamored with one another that she’d think it was cute.

 

But then I decided I was being rash. First of all, wouldn’t it be conspicuous to contact her a couple of days after she mentioned OKCupid on her Facebook status update? Actually, no, of course it wouldn’t be, because no one else is a fucking obsessive freak who would notice shit like that, but really I was just making up excuses not to contact her because I was afraid. Because as soon as I contact her, shit starts getting real, and you can’t live in Fantasy World anymore.

 

In the meantime, I developed my OKCupid profile. I mustered a self-introduction that I find mildly satisfactory, which I consider a grand achievement, and answered a few match questions. OKCupid put me and Natalie at a 94% match, with the highest possible match for my set of questions being 96%. Still I trudged on, and actually started to enjoy the site, and appreciated the fact that it was geared more toward college students in my age range. I probably browsed through hundreds of profiles overall. Some were interesting, others less so. I talked to a couple of very attractive girls briefly, but for some reason or another they tended to lose interest. As I read more and more profiles, I began to lose interest too.

 

And then, perhaps a week and a half later or so, on a day of no particular importance, I sent the message. “Wow, I haven’t seen you in like, two whole weeks. How’s it going?” I was at Damon’s apartment in Santa Cruz when I read her response. She expressed embarrassment about being discovered on OKC and talked about her classes. At the end she said, “How much would it cost to hire you to sing for me, and would I get a discount?” And all I could think was, that’s exactly the kind of thing I would ask a girl that I liked. I spent the weekend at Damon’s completely relaxed, and decided to wait on a response until I got back.

 

I sent the response that Sunday night. For days nothing came back. Frustrated, I browsed through her Facebook profile again. The feed mentioned that she was no longer listed as single as of Friday, hours after I’d sent my original message over OKC. Hm. You’d think I would have caught that sooner with all of the stalking I do.

 

The next day it was official; she was listed as in a relationship with some guy named Tristan. Back to wallowing in depression. I thought about how it was poetic justice that I’d waited too long, and let opportunity slip away. It was my own damn fault. Except she listed their anniversary as being in late December. Before I even got back to Berkeley.

 

Then, finally, I clicked the profile and lo and behold, a FUCKING MOHAWK. Really? I had to rub my eyes and look again to make sure it was still there. Ugh.

 

Why couldn’t you have just stayed with Tyler? Tyler I liked. Not that I knew anything about him, but he just looked like the kind of guy who you would have been happy with. That was the worst. You won’t let me have my sick vicarious fairy tale that you knew what the hell you were doing with him, that you were going to be with him past college. You won’t even let me have my poetic justice, which is practically all that keeps me going these days. You give me nothing but more anticlimax. You leave me with nothing to show for this agony except this lame-ass Xanga entry and the IMAGE OF A FUCKING MOHAWK BURNED INTO MY VISUAL CORTEX.

 

After that there was nothing. I don’t log on to OKCupid anymore. There really isn’t any point. My girl’s going to stay a sick, pathetic fantasy in my head for a long, long time.