Illiteracy is a problem.

How virginal!

Wait, guys, I'm a virgin - The girl has to say yes, right? I mean, right? And then I squirt my Capri-Sun into her, um, what does she have? A cup?

Don't try to out-weird me.

Yes, I planned this one.

Dedicated to someone who once drunkenly ranted about problems finding the lateral lisp key when typing emails.

I have never understood this.

I'm about to show you a pretty clear example of someone who should, by all accounts, realize that I have no interest and give up. I come across people like this in real life (and on this site) ALL THE TIME. I'll be straight up insulting and mean to them, and they'll STILL just keep coming at me. This example isn't even as mean as I'll be to people who do this to me in real life:

Like I said, in real life I'm actually much meaner, and I have never understood why the guys will just keep on trying. But last night I was chatting with an old high school friend about OkCupid, his experiences, my blog, and dating in general, and he did a pretty good job of explaining the phenomenon to me. Apparently, there's a technique used to get people to sleep with you called "negging." The definition, according to Urban Dictionary, is:

This friend from high school, who we used to jokingly refer to as SirHotBodHandsomeFace, thanks to his love of posting pictures of his abs on his Myspace in his younger days, told me that I was negging these boys. I disagree with him, because it seems to me that negging, by definition, requires intent towards the other person. If I was undermining the confidence of men in order to get into their pants with ease, that would be negging. Simply being mean isn't the same thing.

Nevertheless, according to SirHBHF, girls like me give off the impression that we're negging. Guys assume that because we are still talking to them, we must be interested, even if we're flat out telling them that we are in no way interested. They're hard-wired to think that they can accomplish things and get results. It's all about "validation," he says. By withholding validation, we make them crave it even more, and they just try harder.

Now, this still makes no sense to me at all. If a guy was cutting me down or refusing to "validate" me, I'd just cut him down right back or ignore him. Why would you be interested in someone who acts that way? But this is certainly some interesting and enlightening inside knowledge. Thanks, SirHotBodHandsomeFace!

I've developed zero tolerance for boring openers.

I've retained some of my high school French

I need a French Grammar Nazi to come after me.

Nobody likes a Grammar Nazi.

I never used to be much of a Grammar Nazi, but the combination of OkCupid and email duties at my main job have turned me into one recently. I mean, honestly, how hard is it to write as if you made it through high school? On this site, it just amuses me, but at work, it astounds me. It's a business environment!

I actually got into some trouble because of this newly developed pet peeve, but that's a story for another time. Plus, it doesn't involve men hitting on me, so I'm not sure it belongs here.

Second time's the charm?

This is not the first time someone had decided to message me again, weeks after being scared off for the first time. I do not understand them.

I've just been getting meaner with time

I like that they're willing to defend our country, but I have never met a guy in the military who wasn't a self-absorbed homo-hating douchebag. Which is not to say they don't exist. I just haven't met them.

I'm too pretty to be cool.

Another real life story!

This is the story of the Poem Guy.

Last summer, I was working a job in the city that was extremely intense. We didn't have weekends off and often worked 8am-midnight multiple days in a row. As a result, I spent large amounts of time that summer looking exceptionally crappy.

I think I've already pointed out that I have a tendency to attract seriously weird people. Apparently this tendency actually increases when I look like crap, which I might back up with circumstantial evidence later.

One late morning, as I'm attempting to either wake myself from lack of sleep or get over a hangover (we also did a fair amount of drinking that summer), I went to the Dunkin' Donuts on the corner and walked out some short amount of time later with a bag or drink or whatever it was I'd purchased. As I was walking back to work, I got stopped.

Guy: Hey! Hey, hold up!
Me: Um, yes?
Guy: I'm sorry, I just have to tell you that you are the most beautiful girl I've ever seen.
Me: .......
Guy: I just couldn't let you just walk away without saying anything, you're just, you're so beautiful, you got those eyes, girl, and that skin, and, and, I see you got your Dunkin' Donuts there, and I'd just, I'd like to be the one buyin' you that next time, you know?
Me: ......

He went on to mumble a lot more about wanting to take me out on a date, and how he was a writer, and he was going to write me a poem. I spent most of the time he was talking thinking about how crappy I looked that day and how bizarre this whole encounter was. He asked for my phone number, but I wouldn't give it to him, so he asked for my email address so he could send me the poem he was going to write for me.

I'm a curious person. And I knew I could have a good laugh at all of this later. So, obviously, I gave him my email address. I went back to work and laughed about it with my coworkers. The next day, this atrocity of a poem showed up in my inbox:

Maidens Green

                                                            Karen's
eyes a maidens green

Mysterious emeralds

Sparkling........... speaking softly a story of pain
                                                               These
greens have seen water many times
                                                            She
accounts the night and number of cries
                                                                What
happen to the child of light
                                                            I saw her
behind door................
                                                                 The
door Karen keeps closed.......was partially open

There........behind.....was a little girl smiling at me

I have not edited this at all. This is exactly how this showed up in my email. I would like to clarify that I do not have green eyes, and I do not cry at night (nor do I "account" such things). Also, when my bangs are tied back, as they were when poem guy met me, I look like I'm twelve years old. F'real, y'all. So I find the little girl comment a bit creepy.

The story pretty much ends there, as I never responded to the email or any of the subsequent ones ("Did you like your poem?"). A few months later, I received a phone call from Poem Guy. I still have no idea how he managed to get my phone number. I tried to stalk myself given my first name and email address to no avail. But after letting him down rather nicely, in comparison, he never bothered me again.


EDIT: It seems I have let my real first name slip. Oh no! Please don't hunt me down and murder me, if you're one of those five people that read this and don't actually know me.

This is just a fact.

Side note: A friend pointed out that it could show up as no longer having an account when you've been blocked by a person, but we tested it, and it's not true. I'll continue thinking I help scare people off this website.

Your FACE is bad at math!

I am a troll.

Paranoia is totally sexy, y'all

I'm shocked at how long it took to get this guy to give up. And this is practically a month into the experiment, too.

He never responded after that. I guess he's not the government after all.

INAPPROPRO

So, guys DON'T like hearing about your period?

I can't believe he stopped talking to me. What if I died from blood loss, and nobody found my body for weeks? It would be his fault.

I speak American.

And for tonight, a real life story.

I've decided to add a bit more of my actual real life into this blog. By which, I don't mean blathering on about my daily trials and tribulations, but delving into the vat of true real life stories I've collected over the years, many of which involve the affections of dumb men.

This is the story of the eighth-grade stalker.

There is some back story required here. My family moved to their current location from another one far away when I was twelve or so. This meant that in the middle of sixth grade, I entered a new school. A parish Catholic school where everyone was related and had known each other for life, to be exact.

Needless to say, I did not fit in, and this was middle school, so I obviously suffered plenty of abuse for that. I found a group of other rejects to hang out with, and dealt with being the weird ugly smart girl. It was hard, but I convinced myself it would make me a better person. There was even a "We hate Kathryn*" club. Seriously. It was started by the boy who'd been the smartest kid in school before I arrived and usurped his title. He and a group of cronies used to throw balls at my head during recess and play various other juvenile pranks on me. They even started a rumor that I was actually the devil (in fact, I think some of them might have believed this), and used to drop blessed objects and charms around me to see if touching them would make me writhe in pain or spontaneously combust.

I was also a singer. I'm no Alicia Keys, but I've got a decent set of pipes on me. Since we had to go to mass once a week, and there's a good amount of singing at a Catholic service, this was a well-known fact. It was also another prime source of ridicule, but I liked singing too much to care. When I was old enough (here meaning confirmed in the church, of which I am no longer a member), I became a cantor, which is the person who leads the singing from the altar. It was so tragically uncool of me, I'm not sure how I managed to survive. Incidentally, singing became a super popular thing roughly two years later at that same school.

I was clearly quite happy to move on to my private all-girls high school and leave that god-forsaken middle school behind. I was also quite vindictively happy that I swept the floor with the founder of the hate club at the graduation awards ceremony, but hey, we all have our petty moments. I kept cantoring at that church because I still loved singing, and was still a practicing Catholic at the time.

Shortly into my freshman year, the letters started arriving. The first one showed up in the regular mail, but without any stamps or a return address. The front said "To: Kathryn*. From: ????" It looked as if it had been written by a second grader.

It was the first of quite a few. After the first one, they usually just showed up on our walkway without warning. They always said similar things, all general stuff you would expect from a secret admirer. And then some. At one point, and I am not even exaggerating here, this kid told me that "I know I don't know you, but I love you." The general gist of the letters was that he had fallen in love with my singing voice, knew that I was absolutely perfect, wanted to get married and have children, etc. I was amused, flattered, and also highly overwhelmed. At fourteen, I was still 100% undeveloped, awkward, and generally not a good-looking kid.

He always ended his letters with clues to his identity. After a few, I was fairly certain he was someone from my middle school, but I didn't know who. Finally, he told me that "I once spoke to you, but you didn't know you were speaking to me." I used my acute deductive reasoning skills to determine that this was probably the explanation of the phone call I had received from a male about children's choir practice (I was the director for a bit, it did not go very well) and the noticeable lack of males actually at practice. I had finally figured out the puzzle.

And that was the weirdest part. Once I knew this kid's name (thanks to CallerID, of course), I still had no clue who he was. He was a grade behind me, and had actually never even once looked me in the eye. I had literally never interacted with this boy even once, and here he was convinced that I was the one for him, for the rest of his life.

The letters altogether went on for roughly two years, and then they stopped. I like to think he moved on, hopefully to someone he knew. Or at least affection based on some sort of reality.

This was the first encounter in my life with blind, obsessive love, and it wasn't the last. For a reason I have never understood, obsessive people are often attracted to me. Even when I was a seriously unattractive kid. Even now, I wouldn't even remotely consider myself attractive enough to garner that amount of fixation, but I still do. People often look at me like I'm crazy when I mention this as being a bad thing, but if you put yourself in my shoes, I doubt you'd like it, either. The undying "love" of someone who doesn't or barely even knows you is nothing to brag about. It can only end one of two ways: either they eventually get very angry with you for not returning their affections, or they get to know you and realize they don't actually love you after all. Neither ending is a good one.

I might have actually started to feel bad about these.

I don't often feel bad about any of the amusing but potentially awful things I do, but these two guys made my dormant conscience start to rustle in its sleep.

Guy #1 was just such an easy target. Honestly, I know sarcasm can be hard to pick up on when only seen in text, but I thought it was glaringly obvious in this case. As I so often have been on OkCupcakes, I was wrong.

I had no idea how to dig myself out of this hole, so I took a cop-out. I brought back little Ashley's stepfather.

Guy #2 might be the most gullible person on the internet, but he was still nice and polite, and I just can't really fault him too much because of it. It's possible that my standards are being lowered by this whole thing. Before reading, it's important to know that in my main picture, my hair is quite obnoxiously and not naturally red.

As far as I know, this person is in jail now.

 

Later on in conversation, he hadn't given up yet, so I gave in and took things to a new level. I mean, it's not every day a guy offers this kind of special treatment:

And now, no more account. I hear they discontinue your account automatically when you're arrested for soliciting.

I don't think he said it out loud to himself...

Or, you know, maybe he did, and that's why he likes it.

Turns out I know this person in real life.

I didn't know it at the time, but it turns out that's my best friend from high school's boyfriend. She was inspired by the blog and made her own profile to mess with people, and then he made a profile to mess with her. And decided to message me at some point down the line.

I really can't believe I didn't use this one sooner

It was just an objective fact, really.

A rather mean friend of mine tells me that my ability to be incredibly objective towards people makes me shallow, full of myself, and callous. The callous part I'll accept, but I see nothing particularly shallow or self-inflating in being objective. Apparently this guy is with my friend, though.

[Said friend, I know you'll eventually read this. You're a mean friend. Deal with it.]

Apparently I've been employing the wrong tactics

With this guy, at least. I started with the basic girl-rapist line, after a terrible pick-up line on his end:

Which, of course, did not deter him. We later got into my extreme stupidity about not particularly modern technology:

But he was a trooper. So I moved on to gold digging, formerly having a penis, AND the implication of death.

But no! Still not scared away! And now we're in weird backstory and ambiguous genitalia land.

Which is why am I just seriously confused that the line that finally got him to give up was this one:

That's right, folks. Apparently you can be the craziest mofo who ever roamed the earth, ambiguous genitalia and all, and it's all good. But if you hate music, stay the hell away.

This completely changes my outlook on some people.