Come here, pretty please, can you tell me where I am?

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Originally uploaded by Rachel Ariel.

I have learned an important thing about myself in the last year and a half. I am not *good* at people. I take a book to the bar. I wear headphones on the train. I scribble in my journal during the free moments of my life. These things are not conducive to meeting new people, and certainly not for my dating prospects.

My efforts to learn how to meet people have changed who I am. Who is this person, who goes up to a complete stranger and strikes up a random conversation? She is certainly not me, although she has a tendency to wear my body.

In college it was seamless, everyone was new, it was like you got points for getting to know new people. Of course sometimes it would backfire, but for the most part college was an awesome experience. Made all the better for the myriad opportunities to meet interesting people worth dating.

Out here, in the real world? We all say that we don't play games, but really we all do. I can't tell him how much I actually like him, we've only been out on one date. I can't tell him the truth about why I won't let him closer, because it might scare him off. I am in the outside world, where I am not going to see these people again in the course of my day... probably not anyway. So what do I do? I troll the Craigslist personals, I put up profiles on social networking sites, I get drunk enough to talk to someone in a bar, or trashed enough to give them my number. And they are never all that interesting. And I start to wonder how many people end up going to graduate school because they are concerned that they will end up old and alone. And I wonder how many of them then find themselves, old, alone and overeducated.

Such is life, I 'spose.