since my last post so much has happened. i connected with a few more bagels but none of them struck a conversation and so at the end of the eight-day chat window, we lost the opportunity forever. it’s just as well, perhaps.
i have also met two people in person. the first, i matched with on tinder after my last post. he immediately messaged me; i remember because it was at 8am on a sunday morning and i didn’t even wake up until maybe noon. by the time i said hi back he’d already been to church and had returned home. we talked for a week i believe, every day, before he texted me one morning and said he was free that night. i also happened to be.
he’s younger than me, a foreign language student at a nearby community college, an international student from Japan. he’s totally into the socal lifestyle, very active, surfing all the time. when we met, he was really charming but we had a hard time maintaining conversation, mostly, i think, from my immediate conversion to the most shy lily who has ever been seen as soon as i set eyes on him in person. we were walking across a street towards each other and his eyes kind of lit up in the sun and i just...had a moment. that lasted for two hours. though he’d been extremely direct in our messages up until then, he was also much quieter than i had expected. he paid for my dinner though i had told him a long time ago, when we first discussed meeting up, that i would pay for myself. i kept asking him questions right after he’d eaten something. i hate eating the first time you meet someone.
after this, we haven’t met again. but we’ve continued to text. actually today i was driving up a street i only ever take maybe once or twice a month to get to the freeway onramp and a car pulled in front of me, and i thought, ah! it’s him! but then i thought, no, it’s a pretty commonly driven car. but it had a dent in the back bumper and part of the right rear light was missing; he’d showed me last time, saying he backed up into some lady (meaning, her car) in a parking lot recently. then again, there are probably a lot of dented that-kind-of-cars around. later, though, he texted me and said are you driving? and we figured out we’d seen each other there.
i met another tinder match recently. he’s slightly older than me, and he’d messaged me the day we matched almost exactly a month ago--he’s one of the two from my last post. i was surprised he’d remembered wanting to meet up because it’s been so long since we really talked. we maintained a bit of contact while he was out and about, though there would be some periods where that stopped altogether. i don’t know exactly how to describe this without saying it this way, but he’s not an exceptionally skilled texter. sometimes i’d receive a message and have to translate what it said from a typo-language that i had never encountered before. other times, grammatical structures completely flew out the window and i felt that i entered some kind of language-neutral zone where rules were optional and everyone could express their truest, purest, most caveman-esque sentiments without pressure to adhere to any intelligible patterns. however, luckily for me (and him), i happen to be a language person. so i caught on. i had the feeling all along that he was probably a better in-person communicator, from some of the things he said or some ways he expressed a certain thought that looked peculiar in text but which would seem quite normal in conversation. rhetorical questions, for one, look odd when left untouched in texts, but you don’t think twice about them in conversation (unless you’re me, but that’s another story).
because he doesn’t live as close to me as the first one does, finding a spot to meet was a bit of a labor, but only a bit of one. since he offered to meet somewhere in orange county i ended up designating a sort-of-halfway-between-us brewery as a meeting point. i wasn’t sure what to expect because i had never been there before but it ended up being really nice; by the end of the night my throat was kind of sore from talking over the din, and so much, but it wasn’t loud the whole time and i never had to worry about conversation because, as suspected, this match was much better, actually exceptionally skilled, at in-person communication. he was also quite clearly intelligent, and sharp. he was really different than i expected him to be for some reason, though--perhaps a little more comfortable and confident than i had imagined. i say that, but i can’t say why, exactly, those things were different than i expected. part of it is that his photos on tinder are from college and i think it’s been at least two (probably three) years since college for him. he was also wearing glasses in person and not in his photos. i almost wasn’t sure it was him... i was standing at the bar looking over the menu when i felt someone lookin at me and turned and saw him and had to look an extra second since he was a bit different, but his smile was instantly recognizable. he’d already got a beer in his hand. he couldn’t have been in there for more than a couple minutes already. but i think that suits him.
i really enjoyed spending time with him. i felt a bit bad that i couldn’t return as many questions to him as he asked to me, and i feel we talked a lot about me and not a lot about him; but our ways are different, and he had a lot of things to ask, and i’m not as much of a people-person anyway. my engagement in a conversation isn’t necessarily an indication of my interest level, though there’s no real way to get this point across without talking about it... so i keep hoping that he doesn’t have the impression i’m not interested because i couldn’t keep up with him in terms of interrogation or vocal expression. conversation isn’t my strength--whereas i like to believe i’m excellent at texting. we were there for a couple hours. i was relieved the beer was good and the place was nice. i’ve thought a lot about the night since. i’d like to see him again. more than i expected to, i’d like to.
i feel in a way i lucked out with the guys i’ve met. my last experience with tinder was so wildly, almost absurdly different. and gloria’s hasn’t been like mine, either. my sister’s has never been like mine. part of it may be that we’re attracted to different kinds of people, but even then, i’m not sure why it is that i’ve managed to connect with really nice ones. i admit to having been quite superficial as i swiped my way through tinder--swiping right to cute people, attractive people, swiping left if they didn’t seem good-looking to me. i read their bios if i found them interesting, but i also admit that those were just another view of someone rather than being the part of the profile that sealed the deal, you know? and i think that actually my standards are pretty high in terms of looks. not that my own necessarily merit that kind of pickiness but i can’t help it. so i just wonder, how is it that this has happened so pleasantly and enjoyably for me?
and then i stop myself wondering, because it doesn’t really, i think, matter. it doesn’t matter why. having newly accepted a job offer for a position in Seoul beginning in the end of August, i’m determined not to think too much, not to overly think things (as is my m.o.), in these next few months, but just to enjoy what happens for what it is and nothing else.
