The Persistence of Hyperreality

Dearest Rachel –

I don’t think I got enough sleep last night; Daniel and I were up past eleven (stop laughing, honey, you know that’s late for me!) watching YouTube videos and dealing with an interruption that I’ll get to in a moment. Then, as I tried to drift off to sleep, I found myself drafting lesson plans in my head for teaching kids about budgeting (never mind subjects like spreadsheet usage or theories about accounting). I don’t know how long I was at that before I finally lost consciousness. And then, as I was waking up in darkness (darn you, Daylight Savings Time!), debating whether to hit the gym or not on a day when I’m meeting Lars to walk through the woods, I was also trying to figure out what to talk to you about before then, since I won’t be able to write you once I head out.

So that was what my mind was working on after maybe five hours of sleep at best. Now, this may work for some people – and now that I think about it, I’m aware that, actually, I’m unusually energetic for a Monday morning, so it might have some value for me – but I’m pretty sure that this is going to cause me to crash soon enough, and I’d best get on with things before that happens. Granted, some things I’m doing today happen at certain set times, so if it happens before they do, it can’t be helped; I’ll still have to drag myself through them whether I have the energy or not.

Now, you might be thinking that this surprising amount of focus on my part first thing in the morning is where the title of this letter is coming from. Not at all; remember, I was working on what to tell you about almost before I raised myself to consciousness this morning. No, this has to do with the latest installment in my attempts at finding Megumi in the vastness of the internet ether, my refusal to believe a candidate when she appears, and her seeming refusal to take ‘no’ for an answer (not that I’m giving her such an answer, explicitly, but that’s beside the point).

Every so often, I’ll still get hits on my profile; frankly, I don’t know if they’re bots meant to keep me coming back every now and again or actual real people. I will say that it annoys me when I get an email from the service telling me that someone has sent me a ‘like,’ only for the profile to display a page that’s blank apart from a notice that it’s been removed for violating their terms and conditions. I would rather my inbox not be cluttered with notices from them about profiles that they themselves have removed; it’s a waste of time for all of us.

Dara, however, has not had her profile removed, even a week or so into our conversation, so maybe she’s real? I will say that I actually didn’t mean to click a ‘like’ on her profile in return; I was trying to scroll up to see a message I’d received from someone else, and clicked the “like” button, thinking it was the “see more” button. Ordinarily, this wouldn’t be a big deal, as I’ve clicked ‘like’ on the odd profile before, and nothing came of it. Maybe it was because I was responding to a ‘like’ I’d received, though, but she messaged me back shortly thereafter. And since I’m not one to ignore a message, I replied… and at this point, I’m not sure how to extricate myself.

Of course, given my intensive hunt, you’re probably wondering why I’d rather not be communicating with this person. After all, judging from her photos and profile (although, can you believe any of those these days), she’s relatively young (mid-40s) and beautiful, living nearby (in the town my old company used to be based in) and interested in me, for some reason. But that’s part of the thing that makes me suspicious; she’s too perfect, in fact. By all objective standards – except one – I should be out of her league. That she’s reaching out to me makes no sense.

There is one thing that, even setting aside the suspicious nature of her interest in me, I wasn’t keen on. I won’t say it’s a complete dealbreaker, like religious affiliation or having cats, but it’s really close: she’s a smoker. She actually admits to it, which was a first for me to see on this site. You, of all people, can understand why I meant to pass her up. However, now that we’re talking, I’m too polite to call a halt to the conversation.

I did, however, try to convince her to keep her profile up, when she asked me if I would take mine down, now that we’d “found each other.” She talked about destiny and the like, which strikes me as a red flag; the idea of isolating me from other potential mates before ever meeting doesn’t speak well for her. I countered by asserting that if I believed in destiny and soulmates, I shouldn’t be on a dating website in the first place, as I’ve been with you for nearly half my life. Basically, I told her I’d found my soulmate, and that you’ve been taken away from me; lightning isn’t going to strike me twice. It would seem that I didn’t succeed, though, as I just checked her profile in the process of writing this letter, and it comes back as having been “deactivated” – which, now that I think about it, puts the lie to Lisa Gayle and her claims to have shut down her profile voluntarily.

In any event, some of her other claims bother me as well. She talks about working as an HR manager for a major airline, but the airline doesn’t have a hub here (although in fairness, they have a presence at O’Hare – but what airline doesn’t?). She seems to spend a lot of time visiting seniors in a local nursing home, leading them through crafts (and she’s sent me photos of “her” seniors, which I won’t include for privacy reasons):

But the more pictures she sent, of herself and the things she was doing – interestingly, her selfies never showed herself in the middle of these activities, and the activities never showed anything of her but an unidentifiable arm – the more it felt like I was being courted by an Instagram model. It all seemed beyond real; hyper-real, if you will, and she kept sending messages and pictures while Daniel and I were hanging out watching stuff in the bedroom (and would have preferred to do so, to be honest).

However, the final couple of messages I got last night had to do with yet another passion of hers; apparently she’s big on investing in cryptocurrency in her spare time (she has spare time, I wonder, between a supposedly full-time job, her volunteer work and her cooking and photography pursuits?). They were long paragraphs on the subject, trying to tell me about the popularity of such investments… and now I see why she was pursuing me. While she hasn’t asked me to yet, she needs an investor to shore up her positions.

Ironically, I’ve been interested in the subject, but as a “buy-and-hold” investor as a general rule, this doesn’t work for me. Crypto tends to be a “get in, take the profits, and get out” type of investment that’s just not my style. However, if I ever got into it, it would be on my terms, not those of someone I have yet to meet. This may be the red flag that breaks the camel’s back, as I don’t appreciate a sales pitch from a would-be paramour. So I might have an exit strategy at this point – or at least, a justification to ‘ghost’ her, as the kids say.

So that’s where this stands at the moment. I wonder if you’d find any of this amusing to watch, honey. Then again, if you were here to observe all this, I wouldn’t be getting myself into these situations in the first place. For now, though, continue to keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m going to need it.