Personal, Or Maybe Political, Blogging

 Like a lot of people, I have slowly stopped talking to my parents over the course of my adulthood, owing in part to political disagreements. My parents are divorced, and my reasons for not talking to my dad involve him not answering the phone and being impossible for me to contact, but my mom has become more conservative over the course of her subsequent marriages, susceptible to the influence of the men in her life to a degree I'm not sure she's aware of. I do not wish to attack her rationale in a way that would make it seem like I am trying to make her choose between her child and her husband, and so in choosing to pick my battles, have elected instead to barely converse with her about anything. It's not a great system.

I am Jewish, ethnically, meaning I inherited this from my mother, who inherited it from her mother. Although my mom converted to Christianity when I was in elementary school, after my parents' divorce, we are pretty inarguably Jews, and this ethnicity has been written on my facial features ever more baldly as I've aged. I'd also argue we are culturally Jewish, me perhaps especially, even if it's largely owing to a fidelity to a secular Judaism of stand-up comedy and inculcated love of books. Although not a Zionist, I did go on a Birthright trip, and while I don't consider Palestinean solidarity antisemitism, I do consider actual antisemitism, of the Nazi variety the Republican party is increasingly comfortable with, alarming. So when, at my grandmother's funeral in early 2024, my mom said she was leaning towards supporting RFK Jr. for President, I walked out of the room, knowing it was not the time or the place to ask if she was retarded.

For over a year, the resentment lingered, as RFK moved away from the explicitly antisemitic conspiracy theories to stick ever-more-firmly to his lane of being anti-vax, and joining up, as so many other grifters had, with the Trump campaign. I read Naomi Klein's Doppelganger, partially in hopes that it might be a book I could lend my mom, but for all that book's skill at evaluating what is going on with the anti-vax mindset and the reactionary impulse, it is not attempting to do the work of cult deprogramming which is what I think my mom actually needs. (My brother and uncle have seen what my mom reposts on Facebook, and know the rich tapestry of her not thinking about things better than I do. My brother has left the site in part due to the discomfort of seeing this material, although ex-girlfriends of his still engage my mom when the content is particularly hurtful.)

The emotional core of Doppelganger is when Klein explains that she herself has an autistic son, that she loves very much, and she contextualizes the pain of the parents who blame vaccines for their children's autism on this narcissistic impulse of the influencer, who want their children to be a "perfect" child, as an extension of their brand, often one of wellness. RFK's anti-vaxxer logic is implicitly genocidal - it posits it would be better if children died of preventable disease rather than be autistic. My mom's becoming anti-vax after COVID and RFK support is particularly galling to me because she has suggested in the past that I might be autistic: High-functioning, of course, but "on the spectrum," having Asperger's Syndrome. Hans Asperger, the pediatrician for whom the syndrome is named, diagnosed autism as a spectrum while working under the Nazi regime, with those he would qualify as having Asperger's Syndrome essentially being "the good ones," who could go on to being productive, and so people don't really say "Asperger's Syndrome" anymore. Still, the reason I called my mom today, with Thanksgiving looming as a dinner invitation, was to confront her with that her own logic was essentially genocidal against her own bloodline.

I should clarify that I am not autistic, just a Jewish person who reads a bit more than the average and thus is alienated from the general culture which often expresses its fellow-feeling through the crypto-fascist pageantry of professional sports fandom. Either way, what I wanted was for her to think about her own logic, its implications, and why that would be a problem for me, that she, without really thinking about it, had basically publicly wished me and people who have personalities like me dead. Maybe this sounds overblown or oversensitive. I maintain my interpretation of the logic, and again, only would want her to think about it, which is to say, be able to recount the points of my argument and how they relate to each other, and if there was some actual flaw in my rationale, point out where it would be.

I wouldn't say the conversation went well, obviously. I got what I would consider a few non-arguments: the non-apology of "I'm sorry you see it that way," "I don't think you have to worry about my beliefs," calling her support of RFK moot because she wouldn't vote for him if he ran for President now (seemingly neglecting the fact that he is in power as the head of HHS), and an assertion that I should still come to Thanksgiving because Thanksgiving is about family and not whether you agree or disagree. I knew going in that her thinking about it, if it is going to happen, was not going to occur on the telephone. I didn't expect I would get the satisfaction of hearing "oh wow, you're so right, I'm sorry" today, or even at any point in this lifetime.

Which raises the question of what exactly did I expect, or what I can reasonably want. This was a conversation I'd avoided having for years. I would like to have a functional relationship with my mom in the years between now and one or both of us dying. In my mind, this requires us to occupy the same plane of reality, which requires agreeing to certain facts about the world as it is so that we be able to relate to each other. This, then, is the great problem of our age, really: How much can two people disagree, and not be pushing worldviews on each other, but not actually be in conflict about the basic facts of what is going on, when there are huge systems of propaganda effectively siloing people into incompatible models of reality? It is the sense that my mom is fully a resident of what Klein calls "the mirror world" that is my bigger problem. That her logic should be understood as something that could be weaponized against me (and of course, the people I love - trans people, leftists, assorted racial minorities - all will be targeted as "enemies from within" by a fascist regime) is something I pointed out largely in an attempt to use a personal appeal to bring her back to common ground. That the conversation should deteriorate into thought-terminating cliches is entirely predictable.

I made the phone call, after so long going without talking, because I felt like a hypocrite. In all of my advice I would ever give to someone else, I would advise people talk through their conflicts. Partly, I see myself as a confrontational person, as this is the way I was in my youth, although I think I have mellowed with time, as so many others have. But it's also true that when I was younger I had more of a relationship with my parents. That's part and parcel of youth, of course, but it might also be something that only exists, for me and my Jewish family, if I am continually confrontational.

An Admittedly Embarrassing Thing I Hope To Never Do Again

 I am not alone in hoping to never use an online dating app ever again. Despite their normalization, many of my friends have come to the same conclusion, even if the reason for their reservations are different. Whether it be a lack of interested parties, making you feel bad about yourself, or an overabundance of superficial interest from people who are merely treating the numbers as a game, but who have no interest in any particular person, hence making you feel bad about humanity as a whole, or the apps themselves becoming increasingly predatory in their monetization schemes, the way the mercenary has infected intimacy leaves a vast swath of eligible people alienated. Similarly, many of the people I am closest to, both in age and in temperament, no longer are interested in going out to bars, spending money on overpriced drinks. Whether they be actively sober or simply no longer fond of the company of the active drunk, the companionship of the barfly, especially as a romantic partner, does not appeal.

So when we chat with each other, my friends and I, there is a certain tenor to the conversation of having given up. These are the two main ways people meet each other, and they seem bad: Is there no alternative? While some might hope to meet someone normally, or have someone in their extended circle of acquaintances reveal themselves as a romantic prospect, the people that you meet through the ways that people meet each other do not appeal, at least in the abstract. Again, these feelings seem pretty widespread, at least among the people that I talk to, be they men, women, or queers of one stripe or another. They might live in different cities, or in isolated suburbs. They are, generally, older; I don't think the people I know in their twenties feel the same way. But age comes for us all, and coupledom does not, presumably some people are just a few years off from joining us in the ranks of the unsure what to do with oneself.

So it came to be that I started saying to people, what about speed dating, that's a thing people do. And one married friend said oh yeah I did that once, did not meet anyone, but had a good time. So informed, I continued to iterate, maybe that could be a thing that might work out. Most friends voiced disinterest, or academic interest in learning how it would be, were I to make such an attempt. And so it came to be that I put my money where my mouth was and did the thing everyone else was skeptical about. For them I write this blog post, to report: Yeah, that doesn't work either, I don't think.

I will do my best to protect the anonymity of the organizers by refraining from any embarrassing details that might in fact be their proprietary blend, even though it might be some of those factors that in fact made it worse than others. So it is that I cannot dismiss the enterprise completely, as much as I would like to. The basic premise, that you can realize you like someone in a really short period of time, and that the people that have this immediate appeal might differ from the purely superficial strengths as seen on a dating profile, is sound. The question of what then goes wrong is interesting: You have a smaller pool of options, but what goes awry is in the self-selection.

The best way I can put it is that that the people who are willing to participate in a speed dating event are primarily interested in the experience. They will congratulate themselves for putting themselves out there, even though the whole experience is designed to minimize risk. You could characterize these people as boring people, and maybe that would be fair, but I'm boring too, albeit in different ways. Arguably even more boring, because I don't have this interest in "experiences" for their own sake. My interests in the arts make me very much a homebody, despite what I would think of as a good amount of intellectual curiosity.

Back in the day, the dating website OKCupid had a blog, where they would make blog posts analyzing the data they discovered over the course of running a dating website. One of the things they found, that I think makes a lot of sense, is that men and women evaluate attractiveness differently, when asked to do so using a scale of 1 to 5. Men's ratings fall under what I would consider a normal or expected distribution of value, a bell curve, wherein most women are considered average, or a 3, with less people being given a 1 or a 5 judgment. Few are considered extremely beautiful, but few are considered hideous. Women's evaluations, however, are inverted, with very few men being considered merely average: It is more likely that someone will either be viewed as extremely attractive or completely unfuckable. That anecdote is not really germane to my larger point, that's just an example of a post they made that I remember. What's more important is that they determined that, of all the questions they had on their quiz, to assign a percentage to determined compatibility, two questions ended up being far more relevant towards if a relationship actually worked or lasted than any of the others. One of which was, do you like watching horror movies, and the other was, have you ever traveled outside of the country by yourself.

The best way I can describe the population sample of the speed dating event is that it self-selected for people who had traveled outside the country by themselves. There was a brief "introduce yourself and say a fun fact about yourself" that revealed this pretty explicitly, as travel destinations were pretty much the only thing that anyone had to say for themselves as a fun fact. Except for me, I explained that I had chosen this event over others because of its proximity within blocks of my house. This marked me as an outlier, and I commenced to not connect with anyone at the thing, which is fine. I suspect that this interest in "travel" as an activity or end to itself corresponds with the interest in "dating" as an end to itself.

The other part of meeting a lot of people one after another is that you realize how boring a lot of people are, and how many of them can barely communicate, or are sort of disinterested in doing so, and that being articulate to any degree might register as "intense" or "intimidating" to the general public, even when you are doing your best to be friendly and welcoming and ask questions or whatever. Many people don't want to answer questions, they just want to vibe vaguely. But look, I'm well aware that making any sort of criticism of people in general reflects poorly on me, so I don't want to dwell on that stuff. But suffice it to say, you might lose track of what most people are like when you exist in your own little self-selected world of people who share your interests or some personal history. The idea of meeting strangers holds appeal if you have begun to feel that you live in a small bubble. Still, certain laws of statistical averages explaining what the general populace is like will make a person come off as misanthropic if they break it down for you.