Thanks Again for Applying

Dear Dater Dave,

Thank you for submitting your application for the role of "Pole Hopper." After long hours of deliberation, the committee here at Cranium Jarrettum, Inc. has decided that your application has not met our standards of tact and sanity. This letter is to serve as a written confirmation of this decision.

The committee was impressed by your surveillance techniques, chiefly how you managed to confirm our representative's identity after watching him from a concealed location outside a bar. The committee was further impressed by your ability to identify our representative without ever having met him before and track him to his Facebook profile, though his profile image does not display his actual face. Unfortunately, these techniques do not fulfill the requirements of the Attraction Department, and we have just filled the last opening in Espionage.

You are clearly a bright and resourceful individual with many skills to give you a one-up in your career as a stalker. If you would like to apply for a position with one of our partner companies, we will forward your information along.

We wish you little personal success with your hump hunt and into the future. Thank you for your interest in Cranium Jarrettum, Inc.

Regards,

Kyle Jarrett
H.O.S. Cranium Jarrettum, Inc.

I Like to Hear Voices

I read an interesting book last night that prompted me to make some changes to break out of my Social Cocoon. In that post, I hypothesized that fear is partially responsible for the popularity of digital communication over verbal (e.g. the fear of interrupting, the fear of a Freudian slip, or the fear of seeming vapid or intrusive). So, on recommendation that I face a fear per day, I decided to cut back heavily on my text message conversations in favor of the verbal.

Apart from the facing of fear, there is a practical reason for favoring verbal to textual. It is more efficient to share information in a five-minute conversation than in a three-hour exchange of sporadic texts with character limits. It is additionally a more effective cerebral exercise to express oneself clearly and concisely without the luxury of a Delete button.  It is thirdly a more effective means of gauging a person's emotional subtext and meaning.

Practicality aside, I spent 90% of my social life online in high school and held more than half of my conversations over text throughout college.  As a result of these habits, I began to feel a profound disconnect from people, especially on the emotional level.  Texts are not emotional, no matter how many CAPITALIZED LETTERS and exclamation marks one can add.  At my low point I decided I had become too robotic to fit in with the human race, and I was miserable.  This was less than a year ago.

I don't think it will be easy to make this switch.  Phone and face-to-face conversations take time, which is a scarce and precious commodity, especially in Los Angeles.  Still, I am convinced that the return to humanity from the robotic will be worth the time and effort.

Thank You For Applying

Dear Dater Dan,

Thank you for submitting your application for the role of "Sugar Daddy." After long hours of deliberation, the committee here at Cranium Jarrettum, Inc. has decided that your application has not met our heart and magic standards. This letter is to serve as a written confirmation of this decision.

The committee was impressed by your résumé, your financial qualifications, your Mercedes, and your first-name acquaintance with no less than four dozen household-name celebrities. For this reason, you may wish to apply for the open position of "Friend" or "Professional Contact."

If you decide to apply for one of said positions, please call or E-mail the Head of Staffing to set up an interview at your soonest convenience. We are currently in the early stages of the interview process for these positions.

Thank you so much for deciding to interview with Cranium Jarrettum, Inc. It was a delight to meet you and discuss life with you.

Whatever you decide about the current openings, please feel free to apply for any future openings for which you may qualify.

We wish you every personal and social success with your mate hunt and into the future. Thank you for your interest in Cranium Jarrettum, Inc.

Regards,

Kyle Jarrett
H.O.S. Cranium Jarrettum, Inc.

Social Cocoon

I sat down to dinner.  Normally, when I preface with dinner, one can infer that I'm eating alone.  This is not necessarily out of necessity or a desire to avoid company, but at this stage of my life, my eating schedule rarely coincides with those of my friends.  Lonely as it used to make me, it has since given me a fantastic opportunity to observe people in their various stages of social metamorphosis.

The "social butterfly" is the most familiar of the stages, describing a gregarious person who flits among friends and groups, while not necessarily connecting with any of them on a deeper level.  However, I have noticed several other stages preceding the social butterfly.  There is the larva, who actively searches for more friends but specifically chooses friends who will help it grow and evolve.  Then comes the cocoon, a stage at which a person has a group of friends but has either forgotten how or chooses not to make new ones.  This is my stage.

The dining hall was not particularly crowded, and I selected a seat at the end of a long table to enjoy my gyro plate.  Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted someone walking over to my location.  Preparing for the onset of conversation, I looked up and made eye contact, which immediately led to the request to use the chair across from me.  I saw nothing wrong with that, and the fellow moved the chair over one table to chat with his friends.

I would have thought nothing of this if not scarcely two minutes later, someone else approached me and silently grabbed the next vacant chair, pulled it directly in front of me, and sat down.  He looked to his right once and called something in Hindi to his friends at another table, then proceeded to eat, never saying a word, eyes glued to his plate, as if I, like Medusa, could turn him to stone with a glance.  This continued for five minutes until I hastily finished my food and left, thoroughly uncomfortable about the whole thing.

I could have offered a friendly "Hello," or said pretty much anything, but the absurdity of the situation struck me to such a degree that it paralyzed me.  I literally did not know how to interact with such an individual so deliberately sitting in front of me yet blatantly ignoring me.  I call this the cocoon, and the more I observe people my age, the more cocoons I notice.  I see it at lonely tables, a feigned lack of recognition in passing on the sidewalk, the forgetting of a name the moment it is spoken.  Perhaps this is a natural stage of personal growth or a symptom of a larger social devolution, but I wonder what is at its core.

Having spent far too much time socializing online in high school, my personality quickly came to be defined by the Backspace button.  I could choose my words carefully before anyone could see them and judge them.  I could edit my face in Photoshop to remove blemishes and even the angioma on my right temple.  In short, online, I could be perfect.  I could be desired, sought after, a source of fascination.  Offline, however, I felt that I was the opposite.  Perhaps let us take a moment to consider the irony of my blog and website.  Moment taken.  Moving on.

I hypothesize that the digitization of socialization is fueled by a primal human emotion: fear.  We now live in a world where a computer program can remove every human defect, making the mirror itself an enemy for the self-conscious.   We live in a world where a personality can be honed by a single keyboard button, to the point where the very notion of making a real, human mistake becomes a catastrophe to be exploited by cyber bullying, which gives the aggressor the luxury of never seeing the pain on the victim's face.  The delusion of human perfection thrives in the digital world to the point where the real world starts to become unsatisfactory.

These insecurities may have plagued my mid-metamorphosis dining buddy, or he may have felt uncomfortable with his grasp of English, the California cultural clash, or a thousand other possible things, including basic eye contact and its many alleged implications.  These form the cocoon, and if anyone is to break out of such a cocoon, the perceived flaws must become the wings.  Learning to be human again without the guise of binary...  Therein lies the next challenge.