Where's My June Gloom?

Happy summer! Holy crap. How is it summer? Well apparently somebody cancelled nighttime and told the sun to emerge at 4 a.m., so I guess that's how. Online preschool has one more week (gulp - Allan really really likes that class as it's the "Activity class" and by far the one she always hopes she's having). And then it's park-camps, and day camps, and family visits and ... dang... barrelling back to anticipated (ab)normality: Allan in school. Andrew on site at work. Me doing more work (fingers crossed) and definitely more work from home. Hopefully with a more ergonomic set up because I'm slowly destorying my wonky tendons here on days I do have work. 

As you can see, it hasn't been all sunny skies here, but sunny's actually been the norm this very strange June (um excuse me did somebody misplace the June Gloom? Since when is Juneuary Jungust? You get the gist). Yeah yeah, it's beautiful out a lot this year. Enough to just HAVE to be outside a lot. Right??

 It's just, well, remember the giant welts on my back and the "severe" grass allergies?

Whoever designed our neighborhood (and it is a designed one) thought that stuffing the landscape with as many different kinds of highly allergenic grasses as humanly possible, and then  letting them get tall and flower next to the regular lawn-grass next to EVERY walkway and playground and everything was the best idea EVER:

This is fescus grass, which produced one of the bigger-than-pure-histamine responses on my back. It lines the bee park and Allan's favorite playground. 

I believe this is orchard grass mixed in with some rye grass (biggest allergy of them all). Not sure I was specifically tested for orchard, but it is known for being "highly allergenic" 

This is most of the rest of the park. Also all around the duck pond. And pretty much every walkway. 

Anyways, it's mostly been sunny with a nice pollen-spreading breeze. And it's also been high grass pollen season, so Allan has found other people to take her out. I suspect this will occur until that minor summer break between grass pollen season and smoky forest fire Armageddon season (so like a week in July?). 

But when it rains, I do get out there as fast as I can to breath the fresh air. Because, it's not like I'm not allergic to the dust and cat dander indoors either. I used to really enjoy our outdoor walks in the winter when everything was dead out there and my eyes momentarily de-puffed for a spell.

Anyways, we've had a good June overall, shut-in status aside. 

Couple weeks ago, we took a nice little trip to my home town and off to Fairhaven. 

I didn't take pictures, but we did get to see my oldest friend and ex-roommie, Dan, and his wife Madeline. Madeline who is super cool and has the sexiest voice of any woman I've met in person. And whom I constantly call "Gwen" in my head because she strongly resembles an old acquaintance named Gwen. Hopefully I don't actually say Gwen out loud too much even if it's meant as a high compliment, having rather liked the Gwen in question. Anyways. Dan is cool too. We have a lot of history together. It's amazing to see him all grown up.

They live in DC now, but were in Bellingham visiting Dan's mom, so we headed out that way after picking Allan up from her Shangri-gramma-la. The muffins were pretty burnt that time, but we still took the leftovers and had them for pre-soccer brekkie. 

Soccer continues! Or resumes, I should say. Allan had a break last weekend between the Spring and Summer sessions. To celebrate, Andrew took her on a little daddy-daughter get-out-of-the-house-so-mommy-gets-a-break-adventure. Actually he was practicing some hiking in anticipation of their trip to Tahoe. There's a hiking pack she still technically fits in. He wanted to see if a 5 mile hike with some serious elevation would be a good idea for them to do. 

He got his answer pretty quickly... 

Good to know. They'll be using the van option, I believe. 

But this coming weekend, summer soccer begins in earnest. 

This is Allan's time to shine. And/or maybe just stare off at fairies in the goal box and occasionally run around with grit and determination and somebody else's soccer ball. Or water bottle. Or a cone she got off the field. Hard to say. But it will be earnest, that sideways scamper she's doing. 

I love how little she worries about doing soccer well. With drawing, it's a maelstrom every time a single line is not how she conceived it. With soccer... meh whatever. There was one moment where another boy kicked the ball into her goal where she let out a primal yell, but the rage dissipated quickly and she was back to giggling and laying down on the field in no time.

As for me, well, I hope that my last entry was more of a "you gotta laugh" sort of tone than "poor poor pitiful me," but either way I'm not dead yet! Allergy testing was indeed survived.

 I was able to wear shoes and even underwear again mostly within a day and a half. So that's been nice! 

My work with CHADIS is expanding in a variety of little ways, largely due to the fact that they can't produce enough testing product quickly enough to keep me busy. Even though everyone else is crazy busy, I'll go long jags without any work followed by a few couple of emergency days of a lot of work and on and on. So having more regular work will at least keep me in working shape. A lot of it is drudgery but it's vital drudgery and I'm excited to be useful anyways. And eventually I will be part of the producing of testing materials and then everything will be much faster. 

I'm slogging hrough learning how to author programs (in other words become a niche programmer who can kill it with one very specific system that may not transfer over to any other). Michael, the coworker assigned to train me, is incredibly patient and I enjoy his general humor/style/dryness. Authoring is data management, which is ok for me. It's organizing, which I can learn. It is logic and I get good with logic once I get my bearings. The fastidious nature of "everything in its right detailed place" should be a continual challenge, but well, I'll work with it. In a few years I might even be good or something. 

And now for something completely different

Inspired by our anniversary (which was nice - read further)

SO Andrew and I met via OkCupid many many years ago. In honor of this, sometimes (like maybe around our dating anniversary) one of might go back on OkCupid and write the other's profile a "hey hottie" message. And then we'll generally flirt like we don't know each other and are gonna ask each other out on their message site for a while.

 We're adorable, yes, yes, well known fact.

 Anyways, it's been a while, but I found myself - as I often do - logging on and getting dragged into all the questions you can answer this year. There are *a lot* of questions on OkCupid. It's sort of their thing. And it's cracktastic.Very Myspace 2007 or so. 

And then, being still a bit isolated out here in West Seattle, I browsed through the stacks of people looking for friends, which a decent number of people claim they are looking for. I usually get too shy to actually write anyone, but I have a few hearted people in a little dream chest of having-friends-in-West-Seattle whom I may someday write.

 So, yeah, I was on there a bit this week poking around. And I had a couple conclusions. 

First, it's making me want to get into photography. The online dating game is increasingly dependent on pictures for any and all decisions, and I find myself going around deciding which pictures I like and don't like and getting obsessed with composition and color and lighting and ... makes me want a nice camera and some actual skill.

Second and more to point: I would like to say that modern dating has gotten kind of brutal!

Where are the good old days when you'd meet a prince at a party and he thinks you were that swan he ran into that other night when he was lost and pantsless, and so he challenges you to a dance off to show his love? (Then after you kick his ass he realizes you're actually evil and runs back into the woods to kill your dad and make out with a swan,but dance off!) Is there no romance left in life?

 Within about 24 hours of being active on the site again, I received 200 "likes" and a handful of "intros" (likes mean that somebody will be matched with you if you like them back; intro means a little note to somebody you like attaching your profile for their liking or passing; matched means that you both clicked a heart by somebody's profile indicating interest and now can write each other freely).

This is with a profile that starts out explictly saying I don't want dates, I only want friends, and I repeat not "friends" but actual friendships not the benefits plus kind.  I continue on that vein throughout the anti-profile of beauty and doom that is still fairly thorough because I am solipsistic to beat the band and it's the only socially acceptable place to build a shrine to oneself. 

 So I imagine for women outright and openly looking for a bit of the old SandX, well... 

Lemme load up my lecturing goggles

I bet pretty much ALL women on a dating site get SWAMPED with likes and intros and whatnot. And probably not nearly as many men get legit likes or intros from non-bots on any given day. 

This dynamic creates kind of these self reinforcing cycles in which women are bombarded with too many messages and men are drowned out by all the other men clamoring over men for women they're frankly not even that interested in. 

I looked it up. On Tinder, 70% of users are male. On OkCupid, it's "only" about 1.5 men for every woman, but I swear half the women I've seen on OkCupid are in between dating or experimenting with bisexuality, so... maybe not really the true ratio here.

All this in turn makes men try to increase their odds by limiting their investments in any one option and liking/introducing themselves to as many women as possible in as short a time as possible on the off chance one woman might accidentally respond (I find it way too easy to accidentally match somebody because all the finger motions are pretty similar on the swyping screen) and then maybe feel too polite to outright reject them once they've made contact or something like that. I'm not totally sure. Just get confused and accidentally date them too?

 Meaning women get an even greater barrage of cursory, uncompatible, and unpersonalized attention that they have to sift through to find any potential match. 

Meaning women probably get crazy arbitrary at times. "Oh no no, thank you, I don't look at men who would consider wearing blue on a Thursday."

 So they don't find the matches they might have liked. Men, even great men, get no matches. Meaning... men invest even less in quality and more in quantity. And women get more and more bizarely picky until everyone just gets drunk and goes to a bar. 

Yeah it's an age old cycle of evolutionary strategies that well predates the internet, but it's magnified so much here it's kind of staggering.

Meanwhile OkCupid as a platform has changed. When I started up that profile in 2004, it was largely because all my friends were treating it like the next Myspace (Facebook didn't really exist, so bear with me here, we were all looking for the next Myspace). We were all on there to find out and share our lover test result. I was the Naughty Nurse, incidentally. If I'd been male, I would have been the Pool Boy. If i were mascara I would have been blue.

There were a million other quizzes on there of varying quality and everyone messaged freely. It never dawned on me to use it like a dating service. Think I used The Onion personals and Match.com (and once eharmony - shudder - and lavalife - actually not that bad but not my thing) to accumulate my handful of traumatic stories about emotionally strange men who were definitely not over their exes. Dating back then wasn't a picnic either haha. I might have realized I tended to meet a lot more people in person and gave up internet dating shortly after. But I kept my OkCupid until Facebook did become the next Myspace. 

When I got back on there in 2009 and started using it to date, I still didn't take it very seriously. There were still quizzes I think. Definitely questions. I got a fair number of usually polite and semi-personal messages from software engineers and the like. I didn't feel very strongly like writing people back meant all that much, so I'd have brief casual exchanges semi regularly with a variety of people. I didn't have to "match with them" in order to tell them an answer to a single word question so the stakes seemed less high. I had mostly blah dates with nice guys who just weren't my type, and then met my future husband, so all in all, a good run for OkCupid. 

Since then, Match.com has taken over. Currently, just about everything is monetized. Wanna see who wants to match with you? Spend - I kid you not - $30 a month for a premium profile. For a guy - who likely has been liked by several bots in foreign countries but maybe just maybe with a real person he's already rejected in his own swyping - it'll cost $60. It's extra to get a "boost" (be seen earlier in the potential matches queue), extra to see who's recently joined, extra to get read receipts for your messages (up to five different people, but if you're a guy do you actually ever match with that many people?), extra to filter out people whose features don't match your specifications. This one is valuable because it means they can't see your page and boost up your meaningless likes and intros... everything is extra.  Well the questions are always free. I might pay for those. They're impossible to resist.

Anyways, I'm not really going anywhere with that except "man there must be a better way." I know. I know. There are tons of dating app designs so probably there is. And I'm sure many singles still manage to just like meet in person or something. Maybe will again once covid is over. Meantime, there are questions to answer and people to vaccinate. And I'm happy to say I am still matched with the same hot ticket since 2009 and I bet I can flirt with him again come next anniversary. 

Hot Ticket with his OSO

More importantly, we had a nice little anniversary. My mom took Allan off our hands on Thursday, so we had two unadulterated (and/or exclusively adulted) evenings together. We caught ourselves up on Loki on Thursday, which is impressive for us since I usually don't start a show until it's been cancelled for a couple of years. This is actually keeping up with pop culture! What?? And then double servings of the Pacific Northwest Ballet on Friday. I'm digging it. 

Allan and Andrew both returned from various northern excursions on Sunday (he went to bike, she was still at Pam's) and I had the day to myself to read a book (seriously, an entire book, it was awesome) and not accomplish all the other things I had on the list. I may never accomplish them. I'm enjoying not being productive. Well, to an extent. Some things really need to be accomplished. Like turning on the air conditioning, because it's getting scorching these days. Anyone else think it's weird that running our multisplit increases humidity in our house? Little weird? Yeah it's due for service, but I'm waiting for grass season to be a little chiller so whatever horrible chemicals they track back in can be properly aired out as needed. 

Happy Summer! Have some ice cubes!!