girlfiend

When I finished college and returned to Philadelphia I was bored and lonely. It was March of 1999 and most of my friends had moved away or were still at school. The only people I knew were my coworkers and customers at the bagel shop in Wynnewood- the same place I had worked throughout high school. Desperate for human contact that didn’t involve carbs, I turned to the internet.

I had no desk, so my computer rested on the carpet, the monitor precariously perched on an ottoman. For hours I’d sit with the keyboard on my lap, hanging out at the antisocial.com message boards, or searching personals on AOL. Most of the time was spent waiting for pages to load. Knowing that men can be scumbags, I didn’t post an ad of my own, I just browsed through the ads of others. Most of the personals at the time didn’t have photos. My internet dates were based upon my perceptions of the possible suitor’s intelligence. I’d read a personal then write the person if I thought they might be worth seeing. Depending upon their response to my email, I’d either ignore them, write back, or message them.

Eventually, two guys made the cut for actual face to face contact. I dismissed one of them immediately after our first meeting. He was an actuary and bored me to tears. The second guy was far more interesting. Tom was exactly what my late nineties sensibility was after- he was artistic, well read, well spoken, and a very witty writer. On the internet he was ideal, so I was convinced he’d be ugly. But he wasn’t. He was a 24 year old victim of male pattern baldness, but he was tall and muscular and he was hot. He looked like a cross between Matthew Modine and Woody Harrelson.

Tom lived in an apartment off of South St. with a woman he wasn’t sleeping with. He took me to dinner at Fork then we walked around the city. The conversation lasted for hours, leading us back to his apartment. He had art on the walls and books and magazines littered the floor. We watched a film he had made in college and I took home old issues of a zine he used to write. His book and music collection was ideal, full of classics and quirky items that gave him the indie street cred I needed in a man. I really liked him.

Our next few dates were as good as, if not better than the first. Interesting restaurants, films, ice cream and good conversation. There was only one problem. As much as I enjoyed his sense of humor, I could not understand the deal with the Canadian jokes. He worked at a local medical insurance company, in a large office with hundreds of cubes. Most of his coworkers were Canadian and he couldn’t stand them. Tom constantly mocked Canadians, discussing their ineptitude and stupidity. He bitched about having to work with them more than I bitched about having to get to the bagel shop at 6am every morning. I didn’t press the issue much, since he always seemed to be joking, but I couldn’t understand why his office had so many Canadians on staff. Don’t get me wrong. One of my favorite episodes of This American Life is “Who’s Canadian.” I enjoy a good Canadian joke as well as the next person, eh, but it started to get on my nerves.

Some time after our 4th or 5th date I had a startling realization. His Canadian jokes weren’t about Canadians! His Canadian prejudice was actually his way of letting me know that he hated black people. Of course I dumped him immediately. The racism was bad, but what was worse was the fact that he wasn’t even ballsy enough to be open about it. What a pussy. I was so pissed that I had been fooled by his indie facade, I never went on an internet date again.