Meditation on a Mantra

It's been a while since I posted anything.  Here's what I've been up to:

About a year ago, I adopted a new mantra.  I'd never had a mantra before and I'm not sure where it came from, but it's helped me to be a relatively happy me for that length of time.  The mantra--I will cultivate a life I love.  There's something about the word cultivate that really gets my juices flowing.  It brings to mind images of planting seeds with the hopes of reaping a good harvest, pulling weeds from time to time, and getting my hands dirty but having a feeling of contentment.  Cultivating isn't something that will be easy, but it is something that will be rewarding.  

And it has been rewarding.  In the last year, I've played volleyball on several teams, played pub trivia with new people, bought myself a Fillaseat membership to attend cultural events around Austin, set up monthly quirky activities with a group of friends, attended book club meetings, and maintained meaningful relationships with good-hearted people.  I reorganized my entire apartment over the summer so that I know exactly what I own, which means that I no longer feel the need to shop.  I created a new budget for myself with the idea that I will purchase a house in the near future.  I made a new career plan and took active steps to meet the goals I set for myself.  All good things.

But there is one important parenthetical that always went along with my new mantra: (and if I meet a man who wants to be a part of it, then great!).  Initially, this parenthetical was probably the main reason that I formulated the mantra.  I wasn't having any luck with the internet dating and I really wasn't meeting any men out in the world and it was starting to get me down.  I kind of had a "come to Jesus" talk with myself--"Lisa, it is possible that you will be on your own forever.  Or at least for a long, long time."  So instead of doing what I'd done for the last decade--putting all big life decisions on hold because of the possibility that I might meet someone--I decided to create the life I wanted to have, even if it meant I would be on my own.

I think the problem with parentheticals is that they really are always in the back of your mind.  So even as I was meeting up with friends and pursuing the things that I thought would make my life better, I was always hoping a guy would come along and we’d hit it off.  Honestly, in this one year, I’ve met more single men than I probably have in a decade.  There are single guys in my volleyball leagues.  There were single men at parties and outings with friends.  There are single guys at trivia.  Cute ones.  Smart ones.  Funny ones.  Kind ones.  All good qualities.  But it’s so hard to find someone with the right mixture of qualities who also likes your mixture of qualities and then for there to be enough of a spark to get the ball rolling.

So here I am.  I really am enjoying life so much more these days, but there’s still something missing.  I guess without completely deleting that parenthetical from my manta, I’m never going to be rid of that sensation.  But do I really want to delete it?  Do I really want to believe that I can be completely fulfilled on my own?  I think that’s the sort of thing we all tell our single loved ones to put a patch over the holes they have. 

The thing I dread the most is the idea that it might be time to give internet dating another go.  I guess that's part of getting my hands dirty...

At Least My Mom Thinks I'm Hot

I am an only child of divorced parents.  I was raised by my mom, and she believed the sun rose and fell at my feet.  She told me I was smart and special and could do anything I wanted.  One of the most difficult parts of life after college was realizing that a lot of what she’d told me only contained a sliver of the truth—I would not get any job I applied for, I wasn’t necessarily meant for great things.  Like most people, I am destined to live a mostly average life. 

The mom-lie she told me that is only really sinking in lately is the lie about my appearance.  If the rest of the world saw me the way my mom does, I would not be single at 31.  My mom believes I am beautiful.  When I’m having a conversation with her about cleaning my apartment, she’ll interrupt me to tell me how pretty my hair is even though it’s frizzy and up in a ponytail.  When we go out to restaurants, she believes that every man is turning his head to look at me.  And when I have talked with her about men I’ve been interested in who wanted nothing to do with me romantically, she never believes it has anything to do with my extra fat cells or big nose or squinty eyes.

I’ve never believed I am hot.  I’ve always been humbled by the beauty of my friends and the attention they received from the opposite sex.  Growing up, it let me know, at the very least, that I was not destined to be a model or to date the hot guys.  And this was good.  Because I didn’t garner male attention, I focused on my studies, learned how to be a great friend, and cultivated my mind, a rich inner life, a fierce independence and sense of humor.  I think I’ve turned into a pretty awesome person to know, if I may say so myself. 

Even though I never believed I was hot, I never thought I was ugly.  At least not until recently.  After many years of not really hanging out with single women at all, or at least not with single women in a larger group of people, I made a single lady friend.  This friend is tall and skinny and tan and blonde—very pretty.  People are always telling her how pretty she is, too.  They talk about fixing her up with their single friends.  They wonder aloud how it is possible that she is still single.  Men clearly are giving her the eye.  As for me?  No one makes mention of their single male friends to me or comments on my appearance at all.  I might as well be invisible except for a few silly comments I throw into a conversation here and there. 

It’s started to make me wonder just how unattractive I actually am.  I think because of my level of security with my personality and intelligence I have body dysmorphia, only instead of believing I’m much fatter than I am, I think I’m thinner.  Maybe my hair is scragglier than I imagine.  Maybe I have more than just the 2^nd chin I see in the mirror.  Perhaps people can barely see my eyeballs at all for how narrow they are.  Is it possible that my lips are actually so thin that I just look like some old lady without her teeth in every time I talk? 

I’ve always wanted to find a man who appreciates me for who I am inside, but is that even possible without a pretty package to lure him in?  I don’t have any answers, only dateless nights.  All I can do is tell myself my own lies and hold out hope that I can find a man who sees me through the eyes of my mom.

The Internet Dating Chronicles: Eh. Just OkCupid

Before I dive into more dating stories, I want to pause and talk about OkCupid.

OkCupid embodies the phrase: you get what you pay for.  (It's a free site.)  

I've had an OkCupid account for about 4 years now, though I've activated and deactivated it so often that it's probably only been available to the mens a total of one year.  I find the site appalling but feel compelled to look at it often when my account is active for reasons that I do not understand.  

I'm a fan of lists.  Here are the benefits and detriments of OkCupid:


Benefits:

• It’s free!  When you inevitably do not find the love of your life through the site, you don't feel bitter and dead on the inside because of how undesirable the opposite sex seems to find you.
• More creative freedom.  The questions asked when creating your profile are much more open and allow for a greater word count in the response section than eHarmony.  This means it’s possible to get more of a sense of someone’s personality from looking at his profile.  Check out the bulleted list (my favorite kind of list!) I made on my profile.  Plus, you know that if he really didn’t fill in anything at all, he really doesn’t give a shit.

Bulleted list within a bulleted list.  I'm so meta.

• You can look at anyone’s profile.  With eHarmony, I can only look at the people the program has matched me with at the rate at which they decide to deliver them to me, but OkCupid lets you look at anyone in the world regardless of age, match status, gender, or location.
• You go straight to the messaging.  There’s no multiple choice question section.  Once you start communicating with someone, it’s often within a week that you meet up at some bar around town.
• Fun quizzes and questions!  The part of me that is still a 15-year-old girl loves that there are all sorts of personality quizzes on the site.  When am I going to die?  When I'm 78.  What is my dating persona? The sonnet (whatever that means).  What type of man turns me on?  The mystery man.  Quality stuff for procrastination.  Once I answered a series of sex-related questions in a row and forgot to answer privately; my activity was posted on OkCupid and I was extremely popular for about an hour...oops.

But does the way this person answers about kids correlate to how much privacy they'll give a partner?  Tricky.

Detriments:

• It's time consuming.  There’s a lot of sorting that has to happen if you’re taking a proactive approach. Since it’s free, it seems that everyone and his brother has signed up for the service.  Some of these guys are super active and others create a page and then rarely come back to it.  It’s also just a larger pool of users and you can access them at any time. 
• It makes you feel unworthy. OkCupid classifies its users into leagues according to how many people have rated your looks or personality highly.  This doesn’t mean that you can’t search and find people in a higher league than your own, but it does take more work.  And it’s kind of depressing to look at the matches on your list and realize they’re a reflection of how the opposite gender views you.  From what I can tell, I’m about a 4 on a scale of 1-10 in the world of OkCupid.  
• Less monitoring.  OkCupid isn’t always great at monitoring uploaded pictures the way eHamony is.  I’ve seen a few penises in my time on the site…
• Kockamamy matching and labeling.  The algorithms used for creating match percentages is flawed, in my opinion.  OkCupid uses multiple choice questions created by users to who is a good match.  Users are presented with a question like “How willing are you to try something new in bed?” or “Would you ever get an abortion?” that they answer.  Then, you decide which answer selections would be acceptable from a possible match and select how important that question is to you.  Are these really good indicators for a love connection?  The tricky part is that anything you rate as being really important or mandatory, often shows up in a tab called “personality” on your profile.  Something I answered led to me having a “more kinky” label on my personality tab, which led to a bunch of weird dudes sending me messages.

Here's my personality, according to OkCupid.

• Serial daters and dudes just looking for hookups.  OkCupid is not necessarily the place where people looking for serious relationships should flock.  Yes, it does give you the option of stating if you are looking for new friends, activity partners, casual sex, short term dating or long term dating, but people lie.  I went out with a guy who was supposedly looking for new friends who only wanted to get in my pants, and I went out with a guy who was supposedly looking for long term dating who only wanted to get in my patns.  There are also, clearly, guys spamming the inboxes of the women in their match list.  Why in the world would I reply to someone who cut and paste the same message into several messages and then maybe added one little P.S. that related to me as a human being?  Gross.  

Through OkCupid, I've met some of the worst, most disrespectful or awkward men and also some of the most interesting.  I don't think this is where I'll meet my ultimate match, but it's absolutely a good place to find a date.    For anyone looking to get back in the saddle of dating after a divorce, break-up or long ass dry spell, I highly recommend the site.  It allows you to wade in slowly by browsing profiles and ignoring messages or to jump into the freezing water all at once by meeting the first person who contacts you.  

Less Good than Goodall

Photo Source:
http://www.southwestern.edu/livewhale/content/images/
30/11006_goodall_photo_web_cstuart_clarke_36ceccb23d6d0a9b0817e9531a6a8708.jpg

When you live alone, you have a lot of time to be alone with your thoughts.  And when you get tired of being with your thoughts, then you must find other activities to fill your time.  One of the things I like to do with my time is attend lectures.  It's nerdy, I know, but I like that this type of event gives me more to think about when I'm alone with my thoughts.  See how that works out for me?

Austin, a university town, is a great place for this past time.  Most people just think about UT when they think of Austin, but Southwestern University in Georgetown, my alma mater, also offers some quality events to the community, many of which are free (at least they are to alumni).

One of the events Southwestern holds every year is the Shilling Lecture.  I've only been to it three times.  The first was when I saw Desmond Tutu while I was still a senior.  Last year, I went with friends to see Thomas Friedman speak.  And last night, I saw Dr. Jane Goodall give her speech called A Reason for Hope.  Of the lectures, hers was the one I was most looking forward to, even though all I really knew about her is that she's "the monkey lady" in my head (I actually even confused her with Dian Fossey, the gorilla lady--oops).  I've always loved animals--I used to sing songs to my dog Peaches in the back yard when I came home from kindergarten--and even thought of studying animal behavior when I was at Southwestern.  I went into the evening, expecting to hear stories of monkey socialization patterns, but I came away with so much more.

Something that strikes me about the people who are brought in to speak at the Shilling Lectures is how determined they are and how much conviction they have about what they're doing in their lives.  Dr. Goodall had a scientific curiosity about the world from a young age.  She had an interest in Africa as a child.  She always loved animals.  Through a series of personal connections, her own intelligence, and luck (or divine intervention?) she met Louis Leakey while she was living in Africa with a friend from England.  At the time, she did not have more than a high school education, but he was so struck with her auto-didactic knowledge that he hired her to help with one of his studies.  From there, she proved herself quite the scientist, obviously, and only went on to get her degree once her work started to become famous.

She spoke of attending a conference in the 1980s that changed her focus from living in Tanzania and studying chimps to doing what she's done for almost 30 years: traveling 300 days out of the year to raise awareness about what we are doing to the planet with the Jane Goodall Institute and organizing groups of teens to create change through a program called Roots and Shoots.

First of all, I think it's incredible that a woman who just turned 79 today travels that much.  I'm only 31, and I drag my feet trying to leave the apartment to go to the grocery store.  But it's even more amazing to me that she gave up something she loved so dearly to do good work for us all.  Her gifts led her to success; her success led to fame; fame led to an increased awareness of other issues; and awareness led to her own selflessness; her selflessness, through giving her time and giving up the work she loves, will hopefully make the world a better place.

Listening to people like Jane Goodall, knowing that they exist in the world, evokes a range of emotions for me.  The first are inspiration and awe.  It's incredible that people like her exist.  The next is gratitude.  We are so lucky to have people like her doing work like this.  A little jealousy. How do I find that same level of conviction in my life? And finally, like the good Catholic girl I am/was, guilt.  What the hell am I doing that is remotely close to this?

Looking at the faces of the college students attending the event, they still have that bright, shiny glint in their eyes that says I can change the world, just give me a chance.  I can see them sitting there, thinking about what they will invent to make our lives on this planet more sustainable or what organizations they will found that will solve the problem of poverty in Appalachia. 

I used to be like them.  I thought I could change the world.  That's why I became a teacher.  I saw myself making a difference in the lives of students--through teaching them The Canterbury Tales?  Perhaps I'm too entrenched in the day-to-day frustrations of the job at this point to see the good I do, but I have to say that I feel I've used The Teacher Card for too long when it comes to contributing to the planet.  I let it make me believe that I'm doing enough when I see commercials about starving kids or hear requests for donations to the Red Cross.

Maybe I'm too hard on myself.  I do give money to Radiolab when they ask me to text for a $10 donation.  I give any time I have cash and I see a Salvation Army Santa.  I buy one overpriced box of Girl Scout Cookies every year.  Why, just yesterday, I gave $100 to Pasta for Pennies at work.  Of course, I only did this once I found out that the school was just $100 shy of reaching our $1500 goal that would lead to our principal having to wear a crazy costume to work.  But the money still goes to Leukemia and Lymphoma research, right? \

My questions are these: how much is enough?  Is it enough to give money to different organizations?  And does it matter which organizations?  Is the money I give to NPR or PBS less good because they provide programming I enjoy?  Is donating to the arts less good than donating to the Red Cross or The American Lung Association?  And do our motives matter?  The money I give to attend a charity event still goes to charity, even though I'm having a great time, right?  Is that $100 going to be less effective because part of the reason I donated it was the vision I had in my head of my principal dressed like a clown?  Or should we just forgo the monetary donations altogether and donate our time and talents?

This is what happens when I'm alone with my thoughts.  All questions.  Not even the beginning of an answer.

My hope is that people like Jane Goodall felt as lost as I do even though they appear to have planned it all out from the beginning.  I hope that I will be able to recognize the moments of luck or divine intervention should they ever drop in my lap.  I hope that the things in my life that feel random are somehow leading to something greater, not for my own good, but for the good of those around me.  And I just hope to do a little good here and there in the meantime.