why can't life be like the movies?

A guy I went to college with tells me a few weeks ago that he always had wanted to kiss me. He never tried, he tells me, because he felt he was “too simple,” he imagined I’d prefer a more “complicated dude.” I was surprised by how astute this was.

The thing is, he’s confessing all of this over IM. I’m flattered, kinda, but it feels cheap. He asks me if I ever thought about it, and I tell him I think I considered it once, but I liked much better how we would just sit on my bed not talking, wasting the late afternoons drinking 40’s of Golden Anniversary and mooning over Morrissey. I don’t want to hurt his feelings, so I explain that I was pretty bonkers back then, and only liked dudes that made a living out of hurting my feelings. This isn’t a lie, but I don’t tell him the part about how I didn’t consider him a prospect because he was just too dumb for me. That’s the mean part.

I think about how this would have gone down if he had told me over the phone, rather than IM. He gets bold and says he’ll be in town next week, and that I “owe him a kiss.” I read the text over a few times and imagine some grizzly Sam Spade-looking bastard pushing me up against a wall and telling me that. I get turned on. Then I deflate again looking at the screen. I start to feel hot and angry. Am I supposed to be charmed by a dude who tells me he wants to kiss me over the internet? Am I supposed to be charmed by a dude telling me he want to kiss me at all? Why doesn’t he shut up and kiss me? I’m totally bored by his cowardice all of a sudden. “I don’t owe you anything,” I type. I close the window.

Most of my girl friends are hard bummed by how wimpy our dating pool is. My sometimes-lover B. says it is the result of a “feminized” society, that masculinity is denigrated in mainstream culture, and you only have to look to the catalog of limp-dicked fathers from any American sitcom for proof. Masculinity is increasingly recognized as something to be feared, and thus mocked, he says. I think.

Even though it gets my feminist hairs all in a bristle, I think there’s something to his theory. How much, I’m not sure, but sometimes it starts to look like all of what we ascribed to traditional masculinity, the yang, is more applicable to the "empowered female" than any 20-something dude. That can make for some messy identity politics. But no matter how much of a "man's man" the ghost of your lusty dreams is, it's never a good sign when they ask you out (whatever that means) via text message, e-mail, or IM. If you've ever enjoyed the unparalleled crazy to come out over these mediums, you can't help but consider the separate psychic space communication without physical presence takes us to, a realm that's patently PoMoRo--meaning unstable.

All this hyper-connectivity of the modern age seems to be ushering in a pretty brutal death for the art of seduction. Am I a bad girl for wanting to play that game? Can I be a feminist and still want to be ravished? Was Robert Evans really such a bad guy? And should I feel guilty for being such a jerk to wimps? All I know is, there ain’t no steamy film noir starring the internet. It's all about being there.

I was a murder suspect until semiotics exonerated me.

That's the short version of the story. The bartender at my local found himself in Gainesville FL suspected of committing a series of murders. His big haired blond date pushed away, his feet kicked apart and head slammed to the hood of a police car, only a notepad could save this Englishman from wrongful incrimination. It was just a simple coincidence that he had been standing at the very intersection, drunk, with a drunk woman where at least three women had last been seen. Welcome to the You Ess of Ay. The policeman decided, in good form, to give my friend a ride to the address he was staying, so conveniently written in the notepad amongst drunken scribblings insulting various aspects of Americana. One word didn't make sense. Semiotics. "No, it's the study of signs." The police car came to a stop.
"Like that sign there?"
Yield.
No.
Stop. Fucking stop.
No one should have to explain semiotics to a cop at four in the morning.
"Yes, like that. It's like urban planning. I'm studying urban signs."
"Oh, my cousin is an urban planner. Let me give you a tour of Gainesville and her signs."

As my next effort in pomoro, I've decided to take out a personal ad. No, it's not very original. I was thinking of spicing it up with some new acronyms but confusion is a turn off. No, my ad is pretty standard.

SWM, 23, ISO SF 20-45 4 FWB maybe LTR, into random fits of dancing, 3rd person omniscient jokes, walking fast, peoplewatching. Let's have a drink together.

I always assumed people who wrote personals did so out of shyness or ignominy. Continuing this would be an exercise in existing conventions of romance. Therefore I've decided to take out a personal in the Gainesville school of semiotics manner. Affording myself neither the confidentiality of a personal nor the luxury to express myself in more than fifty words, I will be holding up my personal ad in high volume centres of traffic. If you're around East London over the next few days and see a skinny kid with a sickly hunger for booze and company holding the sign described above, I suggest you join him.

PoMoRo "Success" Story.

So the "friend date" turns into "just friends" and then you have a friendship with a really awesome member of the opposite sex (or same sex depending on what orientation you thought you had going into the "friend date"). That's great! People who may have been superficially sexually attracted to one another at some point can have very fulfilling platonic relationships. Would any collective living situation work if people our age couldn't be friendly to people they know they will never fuck? Perhaps that's a rhetorical question requiring a later post, but you get the idea. Anyways, one minute during some day in your very pleasant platonic relationship you will look at that person you've seen urinate next to a brick wall and think to yourself, "we'd be so happy together." So you profess your love and they confess their reciprocated feelings immediately. Immediate in pomoro means the next day at 7pm, but still, your heart is filled with joy the second you hear the text message beep. Eventually, both of your Myspace profiles feature pictures you've taken together. Next step, moving in to the same loft space. Then, even though you swore it could never happen to you, you've taken on the final sign of eternal bliss: the couples food blog.

The New Age explanation to PoMoRo.

Based on the position of Pluto during the decade or two when current 20-somethings were born: " For your entire generation, this is a time of radical changes in society's attitude toward marriage and interpersonal relationships. There is a general fear and awe at the power inherent in making emotional or contractual commitments -- they will not be entered into lightly."

The "Friend Date"

When was the last time you went on a date? Sorry, that's a trick question; you may have gone on a date recently and not even realized it. That's the way po mo romance goes.
I asked this to a friend last night and he said, "oh, people don't go out on dates, they 'hang out with their friends'." This was the first time I had heard this, but it was a theory he assumed everyone knew about and lived by. The "friend date" theory is one that a lot of people fall back on in these days. The pressure is off when you're just grabbing a beer with a friend to get to know each other better, but what if that "friend" is a member of the opposite sex who you wouldn't mind ending up at their place at the end of the night? Does that turn into a date the next morning and how much responsibility do each of you have to discuss what happened? Po Mo Romance strives to answer these and many more questions. Stay tuned.