A Few Fishies Swim On By

Today I corresponded with two fellows in their mid-70's, ten years older than I am.

One -- I'll call him E -- lives far away in the wilds of the Jersey woodlands, or something like that. He reads sports magazines, considers himself pure country, and is looking for a "real lady." For some reason he decided I fit that bill, so he contacted me. I checked his profile: he's not bad-looking, but he seems to spend most of his time fishing and he hates the city. The truth is E could be fun, but I'm not going fishing with him anytime soon, and it sounds like coming to visit me would be torturous for him. So I said no. Too bad. It's one of those cases where in spite of nothing in common, we could have had a whale of a time for a while, to continue the fish metaphor. But I suspect this is mostly in my imagination, just as he had a fantasy of his own about me as a "real lady", based on no evidence at all.

The other fellow, F, looked almost as good as Rushed Lifestyle Man on paper, except older and less attractive than R.L.M, who was barely decent. In fact, if I am to be honest (as Simon Cowell used to say), F seems downright ugly and overweight in his profile picture. But the guy has the professions going for him: he's in psychology and teaches in grad school. So I wrote one of my come-hither letters, and he responded right away. Yes, I have an appealing profile, but he's "seeing someone more or less regularly. Good luck." That means Hasta la Vista.

This was food for another meditation about men and women and age and looks. Every man who has a high-status profession, no matter how repulsive or how old, seems to make out like a bandit, while high-status me, ten years younger than E and (excuse me for saying so) a lot better looking, lies gasping on the shore (to further squeeze the fishy metaphor). I'm not sure if this makes me hate men, or the women who choose them, or the whole sex-gender-age system. But damn, it's hard to hate a system: so abstract. Therefore -- irrationally, I admit -- I hate F instead. Don't worry, no actual men were harmed in the course of this emotion.