“Enjoy your meal” the waitress says placing a plate of lobster in front of me. Beside it on my plate is a strange knife and a nutcracker. I turn to the waitress. “So…um. How do you actually eat a lobster?” I fear ridicule. I fear pointing. I fear laughing. She looks down at my plate, not with pity, but with embarrassment. “Um. You. Er. You just…I think you…hmmm. Welllll…” She doesn’t know how to eat a lobster either. For a moment I wonder why she doesn’t know. She’s the waitress, surely she should know! But soon it makes sense to me. She’s the waitress, why would she know? To buy a lobster she would have to work for 4 hours straight. Nobody would trade 4 hours of their life for a lobster.
It’s been a while since I last posted and I’ve been slacking a lot recently for a few reasons. The main reason is that I feel I’ve hit somewhat of a peak in the challenge of Das Bloggen. It no longer seems like I’m going anywhere with the site and that I’ve got no goals to work towards. I’m finding it hard to happily pump out posts, because it doesn’t feel like I’m progressing at all, in any way, with the site or my writing.
With that in mind I’ve been trying to think up some ways to keep myself motivated and to make Das Bloggen an all around better, more successful blog. This brings me to my announcement.
From next week I will no longer be the only blogger writing for Das Bloggen. I’ve been searching for about a month now for some great bloggers to join me and to write for the site. After reading hundreds of terrible blogs I’ve finally found two amazing writers who I believe will bring their own unique qualities to Das Bloggen.
First up we have Crystal who currently writes a blog where for some reason she pretends to be a goldfish. The reason I’ve asked her to join Das Bloggen is that I enjoy how light-hearted and fun her writing is. Her posts make me smile and hopefully they’ll make you guys smile too! You can check out her blog here.
Secondly we’ve got Jamie, who writes a blog about her perspectives on romance and life. I’ve chosen Jamie for the site as she writes articles that really make me think and we share the same cynical views! I think she’ll give a great female perspective to the site (something I can’t do!) and she’ll hopefully be the female yin to my male yang. You can check out her blog here.
If all goes to plan, Das Bloggen should be updated three times a week, once by each blogger. I hope all of the readers that have been so encouraging to me will show Crystal and Jamie some appreciation too!
Check back next week when the writing shall begin!
Some Thanks
While I’m making this announcement, I’d just like to also say a big thanks to those of you who come back to Das Bloggen time and again, those of you that have commented on the blog, and also to those of you that have been sharing my blog on Facebook!
I link to my blog posts on Facebook, and it tells me how many other people link to it too. Often I don’t know any of the people sharing my work, and most of the time more people share my posts than comment! So a few of you guys out there are being anonymously awesome. I really do appreciate this and am flattered that you believing my writing has been worth sharing! Keep sharing and I (we!) will keep writing.
It’s a question I’m sure everybody has asked themselves at some point in time. When we’re unsure of where we are going, or why we have done something. It’s a question that is completely valid to ask, it’s only natural to be introspective. Unfortunately there is no valid answer.
To explain who a person is in a sentence, a word, or even at all, is impossible. No person is so simple. Yet we constantly seek a simple answer. An impossible answer.
From time to time people believe they have found that answer. They believe who they are is finite and fixed. We’re good or evil. Happy or unhappy. Black or white.
But they haven’t found any reasonable answer at all. Who we are is a complex thing, we change constantly. In different situations we are different people. Really, we are a lot like a rainbow (lame!). We consist of a range of different colours and different shades.
A lot of people don’t understand this though. They can’t comprehend that a person is made of many different identities.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld which perfectly illustrates this. George reveals he has two distinct personas. One is “Relationship George”, the type of person he is when he’s with his girlfriend. The second is “Independent George”, the type of person he is with his friends. But George realises that if his girlfriend becomes friends with his friends, then his two personas will be forced together.
We all act differently depending on the person we’re with, or the situation we’re in. We change ourselves to reflect our circumstances.
As technology improves though, our means of communicating have changed. Our circumstances are now almost as complex as our personalities. Which has lead me to ask another question:
Who am I online?
We now have a new persona: a cyber-self – who we are on the internet.
Unlike our real life persona though, our cyber-self is something we are in complete control of. We can be whoever we want to be. We can edit out the bad bits and leave in the best bits.
Reading this blog, I’m sure you’ve already come to a conclusion about what type of person I am. This person is Internet Dan. But the thing is, Internet Dan and Real-life Dan are completely different.
Which leads to a problem. What if you meet Real-Life Dan, when you expect to meet a real-life version of Internet Dan? Can both Dans survive together?
The meeting of Cyber Persona and Real Persona is never usually a problem, we can take into account that people will differ slightly in real-life from how they appear on the internet. But sometimes a real-life relationship might hinge on a relationship made online. Never is this more important than during online dating.
Now it’s time to admit the sad truth. Last year I tried online dating. I say I tried it, but really I never went on an actual date. I signed up to a few sites, and waited. And waited. And waited. But nobody knocked on my door. I started to wonder why. Perhaps it was the unflattering photo on my dating profile that showed how massive my nose is?
So I changed the photo. And waited. And waited. Still no knock.
So I took another look. Maybe it was because I mentioned I was an atheist? If a girl was into her God, that might put her off.
So I changed my religion to Other. And waited. And waited. No knock. Another change. More waiting. No knocks. More changes.
They say the most important thing in online dating is to be honest. Please. We aren’t even honest in real-life, so why should we be on the internet? Honesty doesn’t make a person attractive. Unless you’re the type of person who likes the look of somebody who’s profile says “mostly I just like to sit around in sweat pants and watch TV.”
The problem of how we present ourselves online, has another layer though. Even if we do decide to present ourselves truthfully online, we wont manage to come up with a realistic version of ourselves, because as I’ve said, we can never truly answer the question “who am I?” and whenever we do answer this question it is just our own perspective.
In presenting yourself online, you are making a document of your self-image, the person you see yourself as. But what you see, and what others see can be completely different. We’ve all met people who think they’re hilarious, who think that everybody is laughing at their jokes, when really everybody is laughing at how pathetic they are. If you asked them if they were a funny person they would say “of course, everybody thinks I’m hilarious” and their online-persona would reflect this. But if you asked others they’d say “that guy’s as funny as cancer.”
With all of this in mind, I attempted to make my online-persona more attractive to the opposite sex.
Internet Dan was a millionaire, he owned a small island in the Indian Ocean, his profile photos weren’t even of him, they were photos of a male model, stolen from a website. To top it all off his penis was huge, so huge it was worth mentioning on his dating profile.
Yet still nobody knocked at my door.
Eventually it dawned on me. The reason I was receiving no messages was because girls don’t send messages to guys on dating sites. The guys chase the girls. It’s like being in the playground at school, playing catchy-kissy. You have to catch the girl before you can kiss her.
So I started searching for girls to catch. I started scanning their profiles, looking for my perfect match.
Unfortunately, a lot of these girls weren’t as smart as I was. They were simply too honest in their profiles, or they didn’t understand what persona they were projecting online. Some had pictures of themselves where it was clear they had a double chin. Some couldn’t use apostrophes. Some thought it was a good idea to mention their love of taxidermy.
But eventually I found her. My perfect girl. She was intelligent, funny, she was into baking and Scrabble. To top it all off, she looked smoking hot.
I started to wonder. What’s the catch? There’s got to be a catch, right!? She’s perfect!
We arranged to meet. She’d be wearing a red silk scarf she said. When I arrived I wondered why an obese man had stolen her scarf. Then I realised that the obese man was actually her. I was shocked. She had a full grown beard and everything.
I’m ashamed to say, I snuck away and didn’t speak to her again. I would feel bad, but she’d sold me a lie. Maybe she was intelligent and funny. (She was definitely into baking, you could tell she enjoyed her cakes!) But her physical appearance was so different from her online appearance, that I knew it wouldn’t have been the only liberty she’d have taken in presenting herself.
I realised then, that it was pointless to make Internet Dan the most amazing man alive, because Real-Life Dan could never compete. A girl would only feel disappointed if she met me, because she wanted another guy. Just the other guy would be some freaky version of me. I couldn’t exactly fight myself in a duel, it’d just be suicide.
So maybe the solution is to be honest after all. To let people meet our real-life persona online, so that the transition from online to real-life is easier and harmless. Maybe it’s time Internet Dan became just a part of Real-Life Dan, instead of a separate entity.
Although Internet Dan, really doesn’t want to give up his huge penis.
I was travelling last year with a friend when for some reason we both became obsessed with the phrase “how d’ya like them apples.” When our obsession began we were in Morocco, a country with a large French speaking population. We knew very little French, both being terrible at it in high school, but somehow we remembered the French for apple – pomme. Pretty soon we had transformed the saying into “how d’ya like them pommes.” The saying followed us through 5 countries, whenever we somehow managed to one up each other in an argument the saying would float from our mouths.
At first the question threw me off. I’d never previously thought about an orange in terms of beauty. In fact I’ve always just thought of oranges as food. Something to eat and momentarily enjoy.
Over the summer I learnt the pleasures of eating a fresh, in season, organic orange. Whenever I went to a supermarket with another person I’d buy one, peel it and offer a slice. “Mmmm, taste this orange! It’s so good.” A lot of my summer was spent getting people to share my passion for organic oranges.
Yet, at no point did I ever consider an orange to be beautiful. I considered an orange in every way. I argued with a girl I’d barely met about how you MUST peel all the white stuff off the orange before you eat it, she retorted that the white bit was the tastiest part. All I could say was,”are you mental?!”
Nature has a great power to calm, it allows us to put our thoughts aside for a moment and to once more find peace in our natural environment. Instinctively when we’re out in nature, our senses open up and we start to act more like animals. We smell the air. Listen for sounds. Look for moving shapes within the trees.
Oh dear, I hate lists. They’re everywhere. I remember a time when you could go a whole day without spotting a list. But nowadays you can’t even roll out of bed and have a shower without somehow reading a top 10 list about something completely useless. I blame Nick Hornby. Nobody even knew what a list was until bloody High Fidelity came along. I’d be tempted to say Nick Hornby invented the concept of listing, but that would just be stupid wouldn’t it? How can somebody create the concept of writing down words one after another in a column? Instead I’m going to say he invented “listing”. You know “listing”? Writing a load of things you like together, in a list, then sharing it as though it’s meaningful.
Lists are completely objective. Everybody has an opinion, so everybody’s lists are different. Another person’s opinion shouldn’t matter to you, because they’re not you, they don’t think like you, they don’t act like you. They like what they like. That’s fine.
But then you read a list titled “The Best Drinks EVER! If You Don’t Agree You’re An Idiot.” You read the list and there’s no mention of tea. Where the hell is tea?! Tea is definitely one of the best drinks EVER! But it’s not on the list?! I’m going to get angry now and type a really angry message to this person about why tea is DEFINITELY one of the best drinks EVER and why this moron is a moron and their stupid list is stupid.
Finally, after 24 years, it’s happened. I’ve outgrown Christmas.
My best Christmas was when I was 5 years old. I still thought Santa Clause was real and would you believe it, he bought me a shiny new bike. I often wonder how I could have been so foolish as to believe in Santa, but when you go to bed on Christmas Eve, excited about the gifts that await you, and you wake up the next morning to find a new bicycle has magically appeared under the Christmas tree, then it’s quite easy. After all, how else would the bike appear if it wasn’t for Santa?
There’s an old sycamore tree where I live. It’s branches reach so high into the air that it seems to touch the clouds. In summer, shards of light creep through the tree to the ancient bark below.
The bus stopped. He stepped on. She noticed him. She’d seen him before, many times, but only now did she notice him. Only at that moment did she stop thinking of him as a blur in the background, a figure outside of her conscious thoughts. Only at that moment did he become real, a part of her world.
