CRAZY and then some
So, the crazy social networking/dating site OKCupid has a new experiment in thw works. This experiment is CrazyBlindDate.com. The concept is you sign up and upload a picture that they garble. Then you say “I want a date, on this night, in this area.” Then they try to match you up with teh sort of person you want. So you an say you are a man looking for a man, and they will find you a man looking for a man, and they also have a few other choices to make. Age range, body type, “race”. Normal stuff. Anyway, once they match you up, you get to see the garbled picture of the other person, along with a very short intro. Then you can either say yes or no, knowing nothing else. 30 minutes before the date, they will relay SMS messages sent to them to the other half of the date.
Upon learning about this, and finding out that the SF Bay Area was one of the beta test areas, I knew that I just had to try it out – if nothing else I could say “ok, I did this really silly thing.” But better, possibly, I’d have something really crazy happen. I can safely say BOTH at this point in time.
What I did was just block off all of last week as “I want a date this night” and picked the peninsula from Redwood City, as well as a few portions of SF – bernal, the mission, castro, noe valley – in other words, places that are pretty easy to get to via public transportation, or really close to me. I got two hits. First one for Saturday (last night) and then later, Tuesday actually, I got one for Wednesday. As it turns out I am glad it happened that way.
First, the wednesday date – this was a Peninsula one, and it was at the Barnes and Noble at the Hillsdale mall. This was pretty convenient to me. This was pretty tame, the woman was fairly normal, and nice enough. Nothing much to say about it. And truth be told, I might have stopped here, had I not had another one scheduled. I mean, what’s the point of this if the outcome is just normalcy?
So, the Saturday date was in the city, at a coffeehouse in the mission. I got up there early, and had dinner at Little Star pizza, which I had been meaning to try for a while. I recommend it! Then I tooled around the bookshops on Valencia before heading in to the coffehouse and started to work on nanowrimo stuff.
So, that out of the way, time to talk about the date itself. First, I will SHOW you who I met. Now this is what I signed up for! It’s a good thing I had my laptop and we were at a coffeehouse with wifi, otherwise, well, I dunno. It might have been a lot more boring. But instead, I got to hear about a lot of her whacky ideas and projects, as well as seeing some of them. I showed her Wish Bastard – which is clearly not the sort of thing you do within 30 minutes of meeting a normal person.
After we sat around chatting for about an hour, she realized that her car was parked in the middle lane, and was praying she didn’t get a ticket. Well, we went out to her car, and there was a ticket on the windsheild, but she assured me it was from yesterday. And the glove box was piled full of tickets. “If I get one more, I’m going to get booted” is what she said. We drove a block up and found a place right in front of the restaurant where she wanted to get a salad to eat at home. After she ordered we wandered around to the corner store, and she told me about some crazy energy drink. She wanted to go get some, but the stores that had it (we looked it up on her iphone – or rather the iphone she was borrowing and afraid of losing) were kind of far away. So we dropped that plan.
Anyway, after she picked up her salad, she dropped me off at the 24th street BART station. However, when we got back into the car, I noticed that something had fallen forward from under the seat – a mouse trap (the plastic sort of live trap). At her insistance I used my feet to toss it out of the car, in front of Herbivore, and she told me how there was a mouse in a it a few days ago, that she had released at delores park, and that is why it was in the car.
Long story short, it was nutso. She’s pretty ADD, which made for a fun evening. It was honestly near the best possible crazy outcome I could hope for. And that’s enough crazy blind date for now.