So, sorry again for the delay... But I think it was only a couple of weeks or so, so at least I'm getting better? 😅
So, I've tried a couple of times to write a blog post covering 2023: The Year From Hell, in order to more rapidly update you, my loyal readers, on how much absolute chaos came in, tore my life apart, and then rebuilt it as something almost unrecognizable. Each time, I get to about March before the sorrow bogs me down and... well, it's basically this scene from The Neverending Story:
So, for the present moment and until I might possibly be able to summarize things, I'm just going to keep writing posts about relevant events or emotions in my current life and give the 2023 connection as the tragic backstory.
Here goes Attempt #1 at Life after 2023...
One of the biggest changes in 2023 was the end of my 26-year marriage. Things didn't start out on the best foundation to begin with, and just like in the biblical Parable of the House Foundations in Matthew 7, our marriage collapsed when the storms of life came roaring through (I'm not going to get into the details here in this post, or possibly ever in this blog. Then again, if I DO, I will try to be as careful as I can to be fair and to protect what needs to be protected, both for myself and for my ex. Because it's the right thing to do, that's why...)
My marriage officially ended on December 29th of 2023, after 13 months of separation and failed mediation. A couple of weeks later, just out of curiosity, I started looking at dating services to see what might be out there for the second half of my life. And Whooooo, BOY... The post-40 online dating scene is WHACK, y'all! 😳🤯😱 Not just because in order to actually filter matches by anything relevant, I had to sign up for a paid account (which is stupid and a pain in the Mikta from my perspective as someone who is "Just LOOKING, for crying out loud! Jeez!") And not just because most of the tentative matches looked and sounded like my ex... Though that WAS a definite roadblock to me actually creating any paid accounts on any of the dating apps I explored (Beautiful Letdown's Life Hack #1: "Occupation" should describe your generalized career pathway when you are working at what you trained for and expected to do until you retire... Please stop listing "Unemployed" as your Occupation, for the love of all things that are holy, unholy, and everything in between AND for your future hopes of ever actually meeting someone through a dating app 😬)
No, for ME, the absolute most whack thing about dating apps is this: Most of them want me to create a "Dating Profile" of some sort or another, so that I can introduce myself proactively to potentially EVERY SINGLE MALE USER OF THE SITE and let them decide whether or not to initiate contact. In theory, my profile would only appear magically to those who somehow have convinced the app's algorithm that we might make a good match... In reality, though, I think the "Currently-Dating" subsection of the general public most definitely needs a bit more of a heads-up before deciding whether or not to initiate contact with me 😅
Soooooo... Those of you who know me can already guess where this is going, and can choose to bow out gracefully now. For the rest of you, here is what I came up with for my potential "Dating Profile" 😄
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Dating Profile Sketch:
Personality: Sparkling. As in you could put me out for unsuspecting porch pirates and make a YouTube career out of the results, a la Mark Rober. I am a walking, talking Glitter Bomb. Or, to quote Glen Phillips yet again, I am a riot of color and light... See the end for the usual tangentially-connected-to-something-somewhere-in-the-post music video 😊
Looks: After seeing myself in the mirror every morning for several decades, I’ve grown somewhat immune to the effect. But you probably won’t need a Rottweiler to scare away solicitors if I happen to answer the door without my full makeup on. Or even WITH my full makeup on… I’m just that stunning, I guess.
Religion: Christian, but I was raised Jewish by a mom who honestly believed she was the reincarnation of Jesus’ sister Leah who was a druid-like cave prophetess. I kid you not, she honestly believed this. She also believed that America in the 1980s and ‘90s was heading for it’s own Holocaust, so she raised my sister and I as “undercover” Jews who celebrated Christmas and Easter so we might not be swept up in the raids she was sure were about to happen. I embraced Jesus Christ as my Savior when I was 20 after 2 decades of struggling to not keep hitting rock bottom, and have found a way to honor my Jewish heritage and my Christian faith by blending them into the way I live and the choices I make each day. I currently attend a Baptist church because they accept both parts of my faith and have never asked me to renounce my Jewishness in order to become a “new creation Christian”. (Not a single word of this is hyperbole, unlike many/most of my other responses in this profile.)
Occupation: Yes. I am very occupied most of the time. I currently work as a substitute teacher at the high school level, but I also work as a front-end manager at a small grocery store on the weekends and over the summer. Basically what I do is supervise grown adults and adults-in-training, make sure that they are doing what they are supposed to be doing at that moment, and guide and train them if they don’t know how to do what they’re supposed to do. I’ve found over years of trial and error that I don’t have the patience for large groups of small children, but that I’m really good at working with teenagers, young adults, and customers who want to know if they can return the 16 packages of hemp seed that they bought last week for $2.97 apiece and then re-buy them for the current clearance price of 4 for 97 cents. (Again, not hyperbole… I told Hemp Seed Lady that the ONLY reason I was going to do the “exchange” for her was because she was totally upfront and honest about it, and that it was a refreshing change from the usual do-the-return-at-one-register-and-then-rebuy-the-same-item-at-a-different-register sketchiness.)
Hobbies: Portrait photography, reading, jewelry-making, digital art and clothing re-design (basically buying clothes at Goodwill or on Temu and then altering them to make them look like I actually want them to look). And also ping-ponging between trying to get my generally unflappable closing manager to finally lose his schnozz over my shenanigans and apologizing profusely to him for making his job harder than it needs to be.
Family: Divorced with 3 grown kids and a whole bunch of “adopted” kiddos from over the years. Mom passed away this past summer, and Dad is in a memory care facility, so the upshot is that you won’t have to worry about impressing (or even meeting, unless you want to bring your own Ouija board) my parents.
Music: All of this is my own personal opinion, of course, but… Jazz is the best instrumental music there is, period. Nirvana is extremely overrated… Dave Pirner and Doug Hopkins could both write Kurt Cobain under the table. “New Miserable Experience” is pretty darn close to a perfect album, with not a single skippable track on it, as is “And the Horse They Rode In On". So are Switchfoot’s “Nothing Is Sound” and “The Beautiful Letdown”. And if Nirvana is overrated, then Toad the Wet Sprocket is equally underrated, and have only improved since “Fear” and “Dulcinea”. So, basically, my playlist is a collection of 1970s comfort music, 1980s pop, 1990s alternative, and 2000s Christian rock, plus some of my kid’s jazz band recordings and other random stuff that I just like.
TV: Not a huge TV watcher, but my favorite shows are Agents of SHIELD, Stargate SG-1, Arrow, and Firefly. Plus I actually made myself watch all 9 seasons of The Flash AND the entire Inhumans series, so that counts towards endurance in the face of agony and utter "WTH is THIS, now?!?"-ness, in my book.
Movies: Unless a movie is really, really good, I find myself losing interest and checking the remaining runtime by about the halfway point. Some movies that DIDN’T have me checking the runtime at halftime include “Life Is Beautiful”, “A Beautiful Mind”, “The Greatest Showman”, “O Brother Where Art Thou”, “The Princess Bride”, “Knives Out”, “The Book Thief”, and 3 of the 4 Avengers movies (feel free to guess or fight me on which one I was peeking at my phone clock during) There are a lot of other movies that were good enough to keep watching after checking the runtime, but these are probably my favorites and always worth a re-watch.
Looking for: Someone who is willing to put up with my shenanigans and accept me for who I am, not who you think I might become in time. There is no doubt that I am difficult; the question is whether or not I am worth it.
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So... There you have it. I never actually signed up for any of the dating apps after the "free" trial or whatever they offered... And that ended up totally being OK, because I actually DID end up meeting someone online in a completely different format. And if you think dating apps are whack, just try dating ITSELF after 40 sometime (potentially more on THAT topic in future blog posts, depending on how things go from here 😄)
Also, here is the promised music video... This is currently one of my favorite songs, and has been for almost a year now. It's just kind of me and my current hopes in a 4-and-a-half minute nutshell 😍
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