Project Koi: The Bachelor (Part 2)

And now onto the conclusion of Project Koi. Part 1 is over there for those who haven't read it. Basically, I'm a lonely University student who has been dumped and am now trying online dating sites. While most people I tried to contact on said sites didn't respond, today we'll take a look at those who did.

Also on an interesting note, it's always funny to find someone you know in real life. I took the time to message said person but they never replied back to me.

I guess they were just embarrassed?

Only two sites had people within my preferences: OkCupid, and Plenty of Fish. Actually to be honest, only Plenty of Fish had a decent number of "matches" (aka, more than 5). I had roughly 3 conversations going out of the ~dozen people I contacted. 1 girl didn't seem all that interested in the entire online dating idea, never updated her profile, and took weeks to reply to my messages. I wrote her off fairly quickly.

On Plenty of Fish, there's a function called "Meet Me" in which you are given pictures of users and asked if you'd be willing to meet them in person. One woman said yes to my profile and so I started a conversation with her that quickly died. I don't know what I said wrong, maybe she thought I was too boring or asked too many questions. She was willing to meet me in person but not willing to talk to me? Weirdo.

The last and final person was my best hope. She was fairly attractive, quirky, and actually responded. Well, she responded when she had internet. Apparently she could only use the WiFi from her phone from work. Our conversations were enjoyable, at least it appeared that way from my end. Then suddenly her profile disappeared. I'd like to blame finals (she claims she's also a University student) but a small part of me feels like she deleted her account because she gave up on online dating.

0/3. I was ready to throw in the towel and call it quits.

And then, someone named Cheryl messaged me.

Hello, what is this?

Someone contacting me? This was an unexpected surprise and it seemed innocent enough. Two words "You're cute". Maybe I was still feeling lonely, disheartened by all the failure I was getting. And yet here, someone had found me physically attractive enough to send me a message. I was so flattered that I messaged her back thanking her.

The conversation initially started off fairly standard. Exchange of some basic personal information, etc. etc.. Turns out she lived in a small town several hours away from the city. That immediately eliminated any chance of a date. But that was alright, I was content to talk to someone who enjoyed my company. At least someone was interested in me after all these lonely months.

But before I continue, does anyone here watch Archer? It's a great show.

Funny how the crazy secretary is also named Cheryl.

If this were a book, this would be called "foreshadowing".

The signs were small at the beginning. Little quirks that you, didn't pay much attention to. For example, after the first conversation, she said she wanted to move in with me. Or if she came up to the city, she wanted me to move in with her. Not a big deal, i took it as a joke. I humoured her and then laughed it off.

Red flag #1.

After the second conversation, she told me she was having fantasies of us getting married.

Red flag #2.

Then she started messaging me fairly frequently, asking me why I wasn't online, why wasn't I responding to her, why was I so busy? She missed me and was lonely and wanted to talk. Then she would start getting mad and passive aggressive. Remember. This, was after 2 days of us coming into contact with me.

Red flag #3.

Because I insist on having my blog worksafe I can't mention some of Cheryl's other fantasies. Needless to say I was fairly disturbed and by that point you may as well have thrown me into a pool of red flags. I am very glad that she doesn't live nearby, and has no way of moving to city anytime soon.

ABORT. ABORT.

I am also very glad that I had minimal information about myself there. I used a fake name, my profile picture has my face partially obscured, dummy email, etc. etc.. I slowly stopped responding to Cheryl (much to her dismay and confusion) in hopes that she'll eventually give up and move onto another target.

And so, I think I have to end Project Koi. It was an uh, interesting experience but ultimately a failure. Looks like I'll have to find a new girlfriend with a different method.

Project Koi: The Bachelor (Part 1)

I've been single for nearly 4 months now. It's been an uncomfortable and fairly painful road to walk on but I think I came out mostly in one piece. But I still craved the companionship of a significant other, something that I couldn't get with normal friends. But my circle of friends had diminished, most of the single people had hooked up with someone already, and now I was all alone. I needed to expand my social spheres if I wanted a chance.

And so, I decided to try my luck, at online dating.

Hey there single ladies!

I knew the chances of success would be slim, and it became more apparent the further I looked into the entire process. They did a study once where men and women were asked what they looked for in potential partners and everyone said personality and all that good stuff. But, turns out the men rated women who are younger and attractive more highly and women rated men with money and power more highly. The study has been replicated many times and while this is a generalization, I would consider this to be an important detail to remember if any of you consider online dating.

But just because you're rated lower doesn't mean you still aren't going to get interested people vying for your attention. In fact, I think as long as you're a woman you will almost always will get messages and chat requests from interested guys. As a joke, people have created online dating profiles of the most unappealing and unattractive adult women they could conceive. We're talking pictures photoshopped to have them physically unattractive, shallow and vapid personalities, STDs, if you can think of an undesirable trait, they made a profile with it.

And all of them, ALL of those profiles received requests from interested men. One person I think even took a picture of a lamp, declared the profile gender as female, and put one line of text in the description. That profile still got messaged by multiple men who were interested.

Yes, men can get bombarded with messages like this too. But you're probably going to have to make it look like you're loaded. And like Joe said, do you really want a woman who only wants you for your wallet? Well, I guess being a sugar daddy is good enough for some guys.

Now, you might think that women have the advantage here. But in reality, it may not be all that much of an advantage. You see, most guys on these online dating profiles, are perverted creeps. So now, the woman has all the fun of sorting through all of these messages.

But at least the women are generally going to have people coming to them. There are normal, nice, and friendly guys on these sites too. But these men have to try their best to tailor his message to differentiate himself from the perverted creeps. It's not easy trying to come across as friendly, in the hopes of starting a conversation without being labelled as the complete opposite.

I don't bite, I promise.

Perhaps I'm too picky as well. Is it too much to ask for women who are my age who can spell properly and use proper grammar? I don't want to start a relationship with a person who has the mentality of a 12 year old.

I hoped around multiple sites and in the end only two sites had anybody with my preferences. I messaged close to a dozen different people, and barely any of them replied. One of them didn't even qualify as a conversation if you ask me. It was getting a bit depressing really.

But that's where things get interesting. This is also where things go bad for Damian. The more observant of you will notice that this is part 1, simply because this post would get way too long otherwise. Part 2 will take a look at the people who responded to my messages.

And the girl who messaged me first.

The Disappointing Cupcakes

Theresa isn't too fond of cupcakes. Which is unfortunate seeing as there is a cupcake craze going on. But one day we passed by a bake sale on campus and got a red velvet cupcake with cream cheese icing on it. Which she strangely loved. It may have been just due to the cream cheese icing but that's not the point.

There was a type of cupcake she liked, cupcakes are "easy" to bake. I need to learn how to bake this thing. Simple as that.

Unfortunately, I couldn't find Lizzy's red velvet cupcake recipe on her blog. Only a red velvet brownie. And after the results of this particular recipe, I think I'll try the brownie one next time instead.

Pretty much.

Now for those unaware, I'm Canadian and I have a preference for the metric system. So when I saw a recipe that offered ingredient amounts in metric I gladly followed it.

Until I realized most of my tools were in imperial.

So that's the first possible reason why my cupcakes didn't turn out so great. Switching from metric to imperial probably caused some discrepancies. And I was making a half recipe so again, more math. Math is bad. I know I'm Asian and I'm supposed to be good at math, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

I also reduced the recipe down to 12 cupcakes, so if I failed, there would be less failure. So imagine my surprise when I poured the batter and got this:

Something seems wrong here...

In case you can't count, that's enough batter for 9 cupcakes apparently. Not, 12 like I had planned for. So, not only was I unable to do conversions properly, I didn't even make enough batter for the converted recipe.

So I dump the cupcakes into the oven. Think nothing of it. Start working on the cream cheese icing.

And then oven starts smoking.

This is probably bad.

Fortunately, it wasn't my cupcakes that were burning. No, someone else had cooked something in the oven recently and it had got all over the place. Said person also didn't clean the over afterwards so now it was being burnt into the sides and bottom of the oven.

I'm also fairly certain the smoke wasn't doing much for the flavor of my cupcakes.

In the meantime, I continued trying to make the icing. Who remembers my curry brownies should remember the icing I made. Watery, kind of gross looking and not that tasty.

My cream cheese icing was exactly like that EXCEPT replace watery with gritty. I think I'm improving. Well, not to the point of actually using it on my cupcakes. Not that the cupcakes were amazing either.

If you ask me, it looks the same as the first picture.

They didn't taste that great, they weren't that red and the icing was going into the garbage. I later realized that using salted butter for icing is probably not a good idea. And you know what? Maybe it was a good idea that I didn't have enough batter for 12 cupcakes. Considering how good these 9 were.

I'm also going to assume the recipe I used wasn't that great. If anyone can directly link me to a good one, that be great.

Theresa is not going to see these failures in person. Hopefully the next batch turns out better.

BONUS PICTURE: DELICIOUS ICING

A Change of Plans

Well, I finally heard back from the job interview and as it turns out, I didn't get the job.

Oh well.

They were nice about it though, and even sent me an email apologizing for not accepting me but guess what they were looking for? Someone who already had a considerable amount of experience/education for the position.

And what was my reason for going after this job? To gain experience in an area in which I had none. So obviously I'm not going to have any experience to start with. I was kind of screwed before I even applied.

Herp derp.

So I'm a bit of a bind here, I'm heading off to another year of classes, with limited funds, limited work experience and then to graduate with barely any idea of what to do with my degree. The job was to delay all of the above for a year as well as alleviate some of them but we saw how well that went.

I'm currently trying to get into either an Organic Chem or Economics course to fill up my schedule and I don't care which one I get, I can always take the other one in the winter term. As embarrassing as it is I managed to get my parents to pay for my tuition this year because I wasn't able to find a stable summer job this year either.

It's hard being a student.

So this will be kind of exciting and hectic I guess. I have even less time to figure out what to do with myself on top of attending another year of classes. For the first time in years I have to restrict myself to a budget and watch every penny I spend (normally I have a decent surplus from a summer job to spend during the school year).

So I'm just going to charge in to the next school year and hopefully work something out. Again, not sure what I can really do with just a Science degree so maybe Grad School is a possible solution? Any suggestions are welcome, I'm really open to anything other than becoming a bum.

Meredith

It's about 10 months after I find out Lisa is actually a lesbian. I had moved on long ago but it still wasn't pleasant to think about. I mean, those 2 years of waiting could have been put to better use on someone who may have returned those feelings.

Like Brandon and Byran noted, the part where I may have gone wrong was getting in touch with an old friend from way back. Who knows what they're like now, they may not be the same person as they are today. You think I would have learned but Meredith, an old friend from Junior High got in touch with me.

And again and again.

Meredith was Caucasian, even shorter than Lisa with light brown hair that extended beyond her shoulders. Pale skin with freckles and green eyes. She loved to laugh, had a fiery personality and was passionate in whatever interested her at the moment and only that moment.

At first it was idle chit-chat and "How are you/your day" sort of conversations but eventually we ended up talking about her. She wasn't going through the greatest time of her life and I was there to to listen. Whether it be family, personal, trivial problems, it didn't matter, I was there.

And eventually she confessed that she had a crush on me since Junior High, and probably still did.

Naturally I was taken a bit by surprise.

Come on, who wouldn't fall for Younger Damian?

And obviously I began to consider things. Someone else initially interested in me? This could be interesting. Maybe this could work. And eventually I asked her out and we started dating. Life was good, I was going to get out of High School soon, I had a girlfriend who was interested in me, things were looking up.

She dumped me 3 days later.

No I'm serious, I log onto MSN and she was acting strangely before finally telling me it was over. Her friends didn't approve of me (because I wasn't part of their inner circle) and she didn't think her Grandma would approve of me either simply because I was Asian. So to make things easier she just broke up with me right there.

No, no she wasn't.

I took this rejection a lot better. Simply because I was more pissed off than upset. I remember thinking to myself "Screw it! I'll be single and I'll enjoy it." And I did, but only for 4 months until Theresa became an important part of my life and well, you know the rest.

Lisa

Not all my attempts at a relationship have been successful like the one with Theresa. Once upon a time I was searching for that special someone. Most people aren't attracted to nerdy and kind of weird Asian guys so I didn't have any success in Junior High. Plus, I was kind of shy and socially awkward back then so even if I did get a girlfriend I probably wouldn't have known what to do.

Younger Damian in his natural habit.

That changed in High School. I managed to get in touch with an old friend from Junior High by the name of Lisa. She didn't go to the same nerd High School that I did but we ended up sharing complaints about life, school, family, etc.. And it was nice to have someone to turn to at the end of the day. Guys are supposed to suppress all their feelings and worries and have a stoic face. So when they do find someone they can confide it, it's pretty nice. And in my case, I started to develop feelings.

Lisa was half-Caucasian and half-Asian. She was significantly shorter than me, but she was still cute. I think she had short, brown hair. Maybe cropped at the time? I didn't see her as often as I would have liked due to being from different schools but we talked a lot over MSN. She wasn't above crude and stupid humor but at the same time she was able to have an intelligent and engaging conversation if you wanted. I also remember her being extremely artsy, with a love for literature and music.

I also realized that I would have to begin changing myself if I wanted to have a chance with her.

And probably my fashion sense too.

I pushed myself out of the socially awkward shell and learned to better interact and talk with people. I tried to be more outgoing and confident. I think I even tried going to the gym more often while my schedule allowed for it. I was making large improvements but it still wasn't enough for me to ask her out. I mean, I suggested and hinted a lot of things and I was making it pretty obvious that I was interested in her. In a way I sort of friendzoned myself I guess, kind of pathetic but I think it's kind of funny now.

And it would continue for about two years.

Not that I minded. I was content with where I was. I had the illusion or hope that something could someday happen and that was good enough for me. The Damian of today would have pushed for something more concrete but that's neither here or there. The following conversation would occur however and change everything.

I still remember it rather vividly. I was sitting in the basement on one of the older computers running around in Ragnarok Online, chatting with people. It was Easter Sunday and we were going to our Aunt's for Easter dinner soon. Lisa sends me to following message:

Lisa: Speaking of interesting things
L: Damian, I have something to tell you.

My heart pace quadrupled at that point. Had all my waiting paid off? No longer to be single? Despite the lack of physical contact could a relationship work? Maybe she finally picked up on one of my hints and felt the same way? I waited eagerly for her next message.

L: I'm currently seeing someone.

Sh*t.

L: It's a girl.

Double sh*t.

Two years of sitting, waiting and hoping sure did me a lot of good. She had been dating someone for the last six months and didn't bother to tell me. Didn't want to "break my heart" or "dash my hopes"? Something along those lines. I would have preferred it if she had rejected me sooner and saved me all that heartache. But I wasn't upset with her, more upset with myself for hanging on for so long. I remember going to that Easter dinner utterly depressed, everyone thought I was ill or something. I didn't tell them what actually happened.

I stayed miserable for about 6 weeks, wallowing in self pity and all that other nonsense. No one to really turn to now and confide in, it was just too awkward right? I also stopped looking for potential girlfriends.

But that didn't stop Meredith from coming after me. I'll share her story in another post.