The dating wars over in LIT have me thinking about one of the reasons I wanted to escape the U.S. and seek greener pastures (so to speak) in Taiwan: getting away from American women.
I could go on and on about my most recent ex-girlfriend (I’ve been thinking of her as “my last American girlfriend”, in every sense of “last”), but that could get bitter real fast. But there was one, who is practically emblematic of what is wrong with American culture and American women nowadays, whom I can write about while merely laughing: a gal I met on a personals-ad date.
This was back when websites were driving traffic by giving away free services – free ads, free to respond, just view a site to drive up traffic and make their advertisers want to pay. So, like, 1999.
Anyway, I emailed her, she emailed back, and we called and talked. Turned out she was a friend of someone I knew, and her political leanings were similar, so we decided to meet.
I knew it was destiny when I saw her. I was destined for one hell of a memorable evening, one I would never be able to forget no matter how many drugs, psychiatric sessions, and annihilation-ECS treatments I took.
She had picked a hotel restaurant for some unfathomable reason – bad food at high prices. But the waitresses seemed to know her, so perhaps she was a regular at this dating game. She probably had a lot of first meetings there.
Her picture didn’t do her justice. She was five years older, perhaps 150 pounds heavier (she hadn’t been a lightweight back then, either), and had lost most of her hair since the photo was taken. Dressed in what originally could have been either a tablecloth or a tarp, but which was now probably best categorized as a muumuu, she smiled cheerily at me. Inwardly, I recoiled in horror at what I knew would be an hour or so of polite conversation before I could politely escape.
So we got to talking. She was into “New Age” stuff, notably Wicca – not witchcraft, it was morally wrong to cast spells on people after all, but Wicca. Well, ok, that’s pretty standard for Seattle.
She enjoyed long walks (oh? man, she must eat a lot to maintain her, uh, physique) in the woods, where she would undress and commune with nature and her fellow naturists – they don’t like the term “nudist” any more, it seems. Truly a scary thought. I mentioned that this must explain the photos of naked men in the directory of her personal website – only three or four of them; it looked like the guys were asleep and didn’t know she was snapping the photos. She blushed (how girlish!) and hemmed and hawwed. She was surprised I’d been able to dig up the pictures, and had a thoughtful expression for a moment. She explained that these were good friends of hers from the naturist group she belonged to. She had recently bought a digital camera, and was having fun with it.
It was a bit of an expense for her, especially since she was considering quitting her job. She didn’t like it at all, and her boss, who was also her sister-in-law, was very demanding of her time. As in, show up on time, don’t take a fourh-hour lunch, don’t leave early. She didn’t really want to look for another one, though, so she was looking into her options for going on welfare.
She’d need the welfare to support herself and her cute little girl. She wasn’t getting any child support; the father was a Mexican drifter who had fathered at least four other half-siblings – his modus operandi was to get a woman pregnant and then move on. He didn’t have a job, ever, it seemed. He’d just called her from Hawaii, and had asked her to send some money so he could get a plane ticket back to the mainland, but she’d refused to help him out again.
A few other minor revelations surfaced along the way, and by now we were getting near the end of our dinner. I called for the check, figuring that paying was the fastest way out. But she had one final surprise for me.
Since I’d found those photos on her website, and I seemed like a smart computer guy, umm, did I know how to break into websites and remove things?
Well, it depended on the site and its security, I explained to her. Could she tell me more about what she needed?
Er, well, that digital camera . . . she’d bought it because her boyfriend had broken up with her. And to torment him, she had been taking pictures of herself, in lingerie (the mind boggles) and in the nude (urgh), and emailing them to him to, uh, show him what he’d been missing (???!?!?). And she hadn’t known that he could save the files out of email and then post them on the web. Did I think I could break in and remove them?
I told her I’d have to take a look at the ISP and see what their security was like, but she refused to give me the address, since she didn’t want me to see the photos. I breathed a sigh of relief.
At this point, mind reeling, I bade her a good night and never, ever called her back.
So, will I find anything like that in Taiwan?
