January 12, 2006 :: A pig in a poke

Remember back in the height of the dotcom era boom, circa 2000, when BlackPlanet was popular and still somewhat cool and trendy? Everybody I knew was meeting people in real life that they had first met on BP, even if they didn't admit it to their old brick & mortar friends. It was like a black candy bazaar... with aisle upon aisle of people to whom you would not normally be exposed or get the opportunity to meet. Of course, that meant all manner of different classes of people, from highly educated to the most ghetto... I think back then a WebTV system was $199. But they were all there, ripe for the picking, with pictures and profiles. You could search on any criteria you wanted, and risk was reduced because you could profile people before you spoke to them. It was better than any personals website, because people could post profiles without actually admitting to themselves that they were looking, yet be open to the opportunity. I even had a running joke about "spring visit season", because when I lived in California, I used to get a series of visitors just about every other weekend in the spring (some romantic, some not), and probably half of them were BP folks flying themselves out to Cali. Ahhhh... stories for another time.

At any rate, the time for BP came and went. It got overrun by the butch lesbians and swingers and jailbirds, swamped by spam, and permanently altered (and not for the better) by the need for the company that made it to start turning a profit somehow. Then people started denying that they were on BP, that they were ever on BP, and turned back to other venues.

I was reminded of this experience recently, by virtue of a somewhat unusual manner in which I was approached by a woman. When I hosted my birthday party last month, I invited as many people as I could find, and my cohosts also added many names, so that the Evite stretched out to 400+ invitees. I didn't know many of those people, but as the author of the Evite, they could all see my profile and picture. A woman I did not know and who did not attend the party emailed me afterward, essentially saying she liked my picture (which was an unrevealing headshot) and wanted to meet me.

On the one hand, I was flattered. On the other hand, I kept thinking, this chick doesn't know squat about me, not even really what I look like, except for one fuzzy headshot, so she must be desperate. But encouraged by my friends, I decided to talk to her. She sent me a couple of pictures of herself, and she turned out to be cute. I sent her a couple more pictures of myself. We've emailed and chatted on the phone. She lives about 60 miles away, so honestly I had not been pressed to drag myself out there to meet her, but I figure, if circumstance happens to find us in the same neighborhood, why not?

So we're supposed to meet this weekend, and even though I have done this before (the meeting of Internet people, back in the BP days), I am somewhat hesitant. I understand now why she was eager to meet a black man she figured was halfway decent looking based on a grainy thumbnail headshot, even thought she seems cute and reasonably sane... she lives in a county where not many black folks live. Still, I keep wondering, how could this possibly turn out well? Even in the best case scenario, I might actually end up liking this woman (and she liking me), in which case the 60 mile distance will quickly turn into a big pain in the ass. And there are worse scenarios... But I'm going to do it anyway. I'll let you know how it turns out. Hopefully I'll at least get a good story out of it.

P.S.: You'll all be glad to know that I finally got the part I needed to finish repairing my shower, which turned out to be a 39 cent nylon O-ring, and I have restored my master bathroom to full service. Now I have to see about replacing that faucet...

posted by Rainmayun at 2:31 PM -