Catfish Me: Part IV, The Ted Perrin Test If English Is a Second Language

My online relationship with Natalya—may she rest in peace—was different from all my other catfishing experiences in two ways. She never asked me for money, and she didn’t try to maintain the ruse that she was an American. She was up front—well, “up front”—about being from a foreign country after we’d connected outside the dating site.

Usually, after connecting via email or Google Hangouts or whatever, they try to maintain that they’re US citizens. Some have said that they’ve gone to Africa for work or family, like my Nigerian Girlfriends. Lately, catfishers have been, uhhh . . . “reaching out” to me via the Facebook or Instagram messenger services. Some will try to add me as a friend on Facebook or follow me on Instagram. I try not to connect with people that randomly via social media, but the messenger service is fine.

However, early on, probably around the same time I was first using Match.com and being catfished, I did accept one random woman’s friend request on Facebook. She’d chat with me sometimes. She said she was a “porn star,” but I believe the line of work she was in is what the kids nowadays call a “cam girl.” She’d try to get me to log into the webcam service, but I’d politely decline, telling her my card didn’t work to get her off my goddamn back about it. (That’s right. I lied to her. I’m a liar!!) I’d joke that we could just use Skype, and we’d go back and forth, just chatting about random stuff. I once entered “BFF?” into the chat, and we had a laugh. So that’s how she’d start our conversations, “BFF, you there?” She moved on to a new name and a new profile after a while, but it was kind of funny chatting with her.

My BFF was exceptional. She was openly trying to get me to subscribe to her, um, services. Most random women who want to communicate with me on Facebook or Instagram generally want to start communicating on another service. Their profiles don’t last very long—definitely not as long as my BFF’s—but we’ll keep talking through Google Hangouts or WhatsApp or email. A few have said that they’re from the US, but they’re in Ghana for work or family. Most, lately, will say that they’re from somewhere in the US—or “USA,” rather. They’ll say things like, “I’m from New York City, USA,” or “I originated from the USA in North Carolina.”

Does anyone in the US say “USA,” other than when chanting for the Olympic Team or during a World Cup Competition? I, personally, can’t thing of any other such usage—conversationally, anyway—Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” notwithstanding.

There’s also quite a bit of clearly non-native language use. “What is your bad and good experience of meeting a lady on the internet?” Who says “lady” like that? And sometimes I’ll see the word “foodstuffs,” which I can only recall seeing used in an academic sense, like in a pamphlet on budgeting.

Now, these may seem like they’re clearly non-native uses of English—at least to me—but I wanted to be sure that these women were actually foreigners—and likely catfishers—rather than merely stupid Americans. I had to come up with some sort of test of knowledge of the American vernacular without it seeming like a test. It had to seamlessly integrate into the flow of conversation. It also had to entertain me. (Well, testing someone’s knowledge of American English doesn’t literally have to entertain me, but this is my life, man. Back off.) Was there a single word I could slip into a text conversation to see if they understood it?

After a few months of exhaustive research, I narrowed the language down to a single word that Americans would, generally, know the meaning of but which was probably not covered in a foreign country’s English textbooks. That word, ding-dong, has been shown to be an excellent indicator of one’s knowledge of American English. Additionally, one’s response to and tolerance of the testing format has been shown to have a direct correlation to one’s intention to obtain money from me. (Yes, just me. There hasn’t been widespread use of this method yet.)

I know what you’re asking yourselves—and what many of you are probably already dreading the answer to. How do I use the term “ding-dong” to assess a person’s understanding of American English? I simply ask them if they’d like to see a photograph of one. Usually, I ask if they’d like to see what my ding-dong looks like. (No, I’m not especially proud of this, but also, I am incredibly proud of this—and entertained by it.)

First, I do not send “dick pics” to these people. I knew when I endeavored to devise a test of catfishers’ knowledge of American English that I would one day write about it, so I knew I couldn’t tell the world that I was sending “dick pics” all over the place. Oh, the shame! That’s why I coined the term “low-angle selfie.” Sounds a lot better, doesn’t it?

And don’t worry, there’s currently no formal testing process to see if people know what I mean when I say “low-angle selfie,” so I just explain it to people—not that “low-angle selfie” ever needs much explanation. I also have no idea how I would test someone’s understanding of the term. I’m at a complete loss.

Second, this may seem like I’m sending unsolicited low-angle selfies to women. This is not true at all. I’m asking if they want to see one. Also, I may be sending some of these to men. Who knows who’s on the other side of these catfishing accounts?

I have a pretty firm “No unsolicited low-angle selfies” policy and an ever-narrowing interpretation of the word “solicit.” That being said, I do send low-angle selfies as a reply to spam texts that try to sell me Viagra or Cialis or Enzyte or whatever. It’s just a simple what to say, “Thank you, but no.” Is all this necessary? No, but as the great Patches O’Houlihan said in the film, Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story, “Necessary? Is it necessary for me to drink my own urine? . . . No, but I do it anyway because it’s sterile, and I like the taste.” So, there you have it.

You may also be concerned that this is really a form of extrajudicial punishment, and that I’m not observing these catfishers’ rights to due process. My response to that is simple. You call my low-angle selfie a punishment? That’s hurtful. And they do say they want to see it. If they ever declined, I would not send the picture. I’m a fucking gentleman.

I tell friends about the testing process sometimes, and recently some were a bit incredulous about me sending my low-angle selfies to catfishers. I do really send it. Now how, you may be wondering, did I ever get the idea to send them at all. Well, and this may seem a bit personal, but when two consenting adults care about each other in a special way—and they’re also banging—they sometimes share intimate pictures of themselves with each other. During the Renaissance, Leonardo would have had to paint a picture of his low-angle self to share with his special someone. Nowadays, we just use our mobile telephones.

Now, I gave a lot of thought to this—and I was on the fence about it—but I’m going to share with you a sample conversation of how such photographs may be sent between a loving, consenting couple. It will help many see how all this—“all this”—works. Who knows, this sample may form a template for two consenting lovers to add a certain spark to their intimate relations. Picture the following as a text dialogue between a beautiful, yet unnamed, non-current lover and myself:

My beautiful lover: Hello. How are you doing? I was just this moment thinking about some of the times we have had sexual intercourse.

My beautiful self: Oh, hi. I am doing fine. How are you doing? I like thinking about the times that we have had sexual intercourse. Indeed, I often do, and now that you mention it, I am, as of now, also thinking about the times that we have had sexual intercourse.

My beautiful lover: Well, is that not something, that we are both thinking about the times that we have had sexual intercourse? All this thinking about sexual intercourse has brought about in me a state of sexual arousal.

My beautiful self: That is, indeed, quite the coincidence, for all this thought of the times we have had sexual intercourse has also brought about in me a state of arousal.

My beautiful lover: This is very interesting, that we are both in a state of sexual arousal from thinking about the times that we have had sexual intercourse. Indeed, and I hate to be a bother, but could I trouble you for a photograph of what your current state of arousal looks like? You could take your photograph with your telephone.

My beautiful self: I would be happy to oblige. Here is a photograph of my low-angle self during my state of arousal. And, by the way, while we’re on the subject of thinking about the times we have had sexual intercourse, would it be too much to ask . . .

And then it goes on. I’ve had several text conversations that parallel this one pretty closely. Hot shit, huh? I should totally write an erotica.

That’s how I originally got the idea to share a low-angle selfie with anyone, let alone my catfishers. Imagine if I hadn’t a history of such titillating text conversations with women. I would have no idea how to formally gauge catfishers’ knowledge of the meaning of the word ding-dong nor of American vernacular in general.

I don’t take a new low-angle selfie each time I administer the Ted Perrin Test if English Is a Second Language. New ones are for that special someone or someones down the road. Hell, there are times when I’m sending the photograph out so frequently—mostly to spam texters—that having a new photo session each time might be, well, problematic for a man my age. So, I just download it from the most recent thread where I’ve used it and send it again. Then I delete it from the downloads in my phone.

Is that a cumbersome process? No, it doesn’t take long at all. I do have some weird picture files saved on my phone, and my low-angle selfie wouldn’t be too far outside the norm in there. I just don’t want to scroll past it when I’m showing people some of my hilarious and inappropriate memes. There is a picture that looks like it’s my low-angle selfie in there, but it’s just my knuckle sticking through my fly. I once took a picture like this and sent it to everyone in my army reserve unity (and this was before I went off the rails). They were upset with me.

So anyway, I just download the pic and send it. I’ll ask if they’d like to see a picture of what my ding-dong looks like, and they’ll say “Sure!” or “Of course!” Then, they’re responses are just hilarious—if only to me. “Why you show me your dick?” or “Why you do that?” “That’s my ding-dong,” I’ll say. “I wanted to show you what it looks like.” “Oh,” they’ll reply and get right back to the business of catfishing me. Sometimes they’ll compliment it after I tell them why I sent it, but it doesn’t come across as heartfelt appreciation.

You may be wondering if there’s any additional benefit to the Ted Perrin Test if English Is a Foreign Language beyond confirming that I’m dealing with non-native speakers and entertaining myself. The short answer is “no.” Indeed, anecdotal evidence appears to show that there isn’t much of an educational return on the testing process. The one English term used in testing doesn’t seem to be something that test subjects are actually learning.

I recently got a message request on Instagram, and she quickly wanted to bring the conversation to Google Hangouts. I gave her my id, and soon after I got a message from a profile that had already tried to catfish me more than a year before. I was delighted. I just kept sending messages as if our history didn’t matter. I just acted like hadn’t a care in the world. (Relatively easy for me to pull off. There’s very little I really care deeply about.)

She mentioned something along the lines that we had already been through this before. “At least you already know what my ding-dong looks like,” I replied.

“I don’t know this,” she said.

So, I downloaded the pic from that same thread to re-send it to her. Hilarious, right? But also, disappointing. I realized that much like the problems in our primary and secondary education systems in the US, testing isn’t teaching. All I’ve been doing is seeing if these women knew what the term ding-dong means. That has actually gone incredibly well. None of them knew what a ding-dong was. The test worked. You can question my methods, but you can’t argue with my results.

If I want real results, if I want to make a difference in the world beyond merely entertaining myself, I need to teach these women what ding-dong means—along with other euphemisms for male genitalia.

I reached out to Educational Products, Incorporated, out of Carrolton, Texas, with my plans for flash cards to teach prospective catfishers about American slang terms for male genitalia. I included some prototypes (ding-dong, of course, and pecker, among others). I was up front with them that I want to promote diversity through the TedCards® process, but I currently had only one person’s low-angle selfie to use, my own.

Well, from their response, you’d think that I’d threatened an attack on their offices. I was so excited to get a response from their legal team, thinking it was a contract. (I’d be set for life!) But it was a cease-and-desist order demanding that I stop sending them—and this is their word—“obscene” material.

Fine. They don’t see the future as I do, but was it necessary to threaten legal action? I don’t think so.

While it’s a bit disheartening to have such a setback in a project that I’ve put my heart and soul (and then some) into, I can hang onto my vision and keep trying. For now, I’ll just keep testing catfishers’ knowledge of American English.

 

 

There are two more stories of my catfishing adventures in the hopper. Up next, my online love affair with Clara.

Catfish Me: Part III, From Russia with Love

I’ve been thinking about my post about my Nigerien girlfriends, and it’s made me take a close look at myself. (Socrates would be so proud of me.) I’ve realized that the continent of Africa gets a bad rap. What, with the Nigerian princes who owe me well into the millions of dollars, my Nigerian girlfriends, and the yet-to-be-told tale of my Ghanaian lover, I can kind of understand why. But I don’t want to pile on Africa.

There are, indeed, other regions of the world that are also seething hotbeds of internet perfidy—and this isn’t just white guilt trying to make up for what could be the appearance of trying to make Africa look bad. Indeed, I would be remiss if I failed to discuss Eastern Europe, Russia, the home of Guccifer 2.0, Fancy Bear, and the infamous troll farms. Those are just the best-known Russian internet malefactors. I won’t even get into the hacking of the Democratic National Committee servers in 2016 nor the support of Wikileaks. Russian misinformation campaigns to subvert elections aren’t even on my radar.

As I’m sure you’ve suspected, I’m talking about Natalya, the Russian Temptress—and liar. Oh, haven’t heard of her? Allow me to fill you in.

In the fall of 2010 when I was falling in love with Mills and Rita, my Nigerian girlfriends, I also met someone online from Russia. Her name was Natalya. At first, she was using another name. I can’t remember what it was, but I’m sure she was blonde. Pretty sure. (And I’m not second-guessing myself in an “I’m not sure if the carpet matches the drapes” way. I mean it in an “I’m not sure if I remember the color of her hair” way.)

So, this blonde woman—almost 100 percent sure she was blonde—reached out to me on the Match.com messenger thing. I was all, like, “Wow. She is very attractive. I think I will send her an email at the address that is, for some reason, hidden in this other message,” you know, as one does. Then I sent her a message. There was no reply.

That’s always a disappointment. For a while I was kind of apprehensive about sending messages. “She’s out of my league,” I’d think, incredibly inaccurately in retrospect. I often felt that. It’s weird to me now because I’m much more confident. Indeed, now, I believe that a lesser me would probably make these women stand in line, perhaps even wait around until a line formed. But I’m not a lesser me. I’m a fucking gentleman, so I give ‘em a chance.

This blonde woman’s lack of response didn’t break my heart. I was just a little disappointed, but—to paraphrase a saying attributed to Kobe Bryant that I’m far too lazy to try and verify the provenance of—you miss all the opportunities with attractive women on dating sites that you, uhhh. . . don’t try to have an opportunity to meet with? Something like that, anyway. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. No big deal.

Pretty quickly, I was moving on, for soon thereafter, I received a message from a very attractive redhead. (I’ll spare you the dissertation on whether or not she was in my league, then or now.) I have a fondness for redheads. They aren’t my “type.” I don’t have a type—other than “has nice butt.” When I spoke of my passive fondness for redheads to a friend, he stated that, in his opinion, sometimes redheads aren’t attractive. Yeah, no shit. There are people who love guys with mustaches, but no one is suggesting that they love all guys with mustaches. Two people aren’t going to see me walking by and have a conversation like this:

 “I love guys with mustaches.”

 “Gross,” the other will reply. “Hitler had a mustache. You want to have sex with Hitler. You sick fuck.”

 No, indeed. The first person, obviously, just wanted to have sex with me.

Anyway, types are overrated. There are so many things that can be beautiful—a lady’s bottom, for instance. It seems silly to rule out a bunch of women just because they don’t meet one silly, superficial criterion. (A nice butt is absolutely not a “silly criterion.” Butts are serious business.) One thing that I find, um, “appealing” in many women is a genuine interest in getting with all this [gestures at all this to indicate what I’m talkin’ about]. Am I going to dismiss a woman’s interest in all this just because of her hair color, her height, her figure, her ethnic background, or her accent? No, I want her to be smart and funny, and have a nice butt.

All that being said, I like stylish women, not necessarily a certain style, but stylish. It’s kind of a moving target, though. I once met a woman who had been described as a “t-shirt and jeans girl.” T-shirts and jeans are fine. I had pictured a woman with subtle makeup, tasteful jewelry—whatever fit her mood—her hair up. Her t-shirt would be a cute top, perhaps with stripes or maybe with a vintage map of her dream vacation spot. Her jeans, a darker rinse, maybe with some wear—this pair would have been there for her through good times and bad and would help her feel comfortable as she ventured out to meet this Ted guy with the cool mustache and, reportedly, a nice ass—they would accentuate the curve of her hips and thighs, the roundness and strength of her calves. She wore a cute pair of sandals or some Chuck Taylors.

And yes, I do like cute things, on women. I’ve known women who’ve made automobile purchases with a deciding factor of whether they looked cute driving it. They did, and I loved them for it. I don’t really care about cute—unless the context is babies or kitties or women. I do like to joke with guys about cute things sometimes. “That’s a cute tie, Steve,” or “That’s a cute Tom Brady jersey, Mark.” Most guys aren’t fans, but I do like cute things on women. That’s something you can take to the bank. (I wouldn’t try using that to negotiate your mortgage, though.)

You may note that I didn’t mention my imaginary t-shirt and jeans girl’s bottom. This is on purpose. As much as I’d love to marvel at another imaginary lady’s butt, I don’t want to fall in love like that again. I don’t want to get depressed about never being able to meet another magnificently bottomed, if imaginary, lady. I also don’t want to stop time again. If time and space are, indeed, enmeshed, stopping time would also mean that the expansion of the universe also stopped. I would worry about affecting the pace of universal expansion and slowing it to a point that it could start prematurely contracting—if it will eventually start contracting. That could mean that the universe would end billions of years early, if not still billions of years in the future. I don’t need that kind of guilt. So, yeah, like somebody got in the way of me watching her butt as she walked away.

Anyway, this woman, this real “t-shirt and jeans girl,” when we met, she did not meet my expectations—my very, very grandiose and unrealistic expectations, I know. I didn’t literally expect her to meet the description I, uh, described a few paragraphs ago. I also didn’t figuratively expect her to meet any high bar my imagination set. I mean, I wouldn’t have been upset, but I just—I don’t know. (A fella can dream, can’t he? Don’t judge me!) So, she had some shapeless old jeans on and an even shapelesser t-shirt from some nearby construction company—or whatever. Look, I don’t want to say her outfit was disappointing. (It totally was, though—man, I was way off the mark!)

I didn’t’ get a look at her butt, either, but that’s fine. It wasn’t going anywhere. Well, her butt did, in fact, go elsewhere, I’m sure. She and I just didn’t really connect. The conversation wasn’t anything special. No sparks flew. And I’m not going to say that she was the problem there. I’m sure she wouldn’t have been thrilled to learn more about me and see that I’m such a stuck-up, elitist prick. (Note to self, work on that, Ted.)

She was a redhead, though, I think. Maybe I’m just making that up as a way to transition back to the redhead on Match that messaged me right when I was getting over the bitter disappointment of being ghosted by that blonde who’d given me her email address but never replied to me. (Are we on the same sheet of music again?) That was a tough loss, though, that blonde—not that blondes are my type, unless, of course, they meet all my other exacting criteria.

So, I got a message on Match from the redhead, too! That was cool. I was really getting my confidence back after this blonde situation. The redhead, for some reason, had her email address hidden in the message. This was always fun. It was like the New York Times crossword puzzle, except it was much, much less challenging and in no way intellectually stimulating. But I sat down with pen and paper, carefully removing the words “at” and “dot” and replacing them with the appropriate punctuation.

Luckily, the ID or screenname or whatever it’s called didn’t have an “a-t” or “d-o-t” in it. Otherwise, I may never have been able to decode it. (I just now wondered if “atgmaildotcom@gmail.com is available, not enough to actually look, though. I just wondered. Feel free to check.) But when I had pulled the address from the message, I felt the cold, stabbing wound of betrayal. The redhead, my would-be lovebird, had given me the same email address as my lost lovebird, the blonde.

I was new to the engaging with catfishers game, and this kind of irritated me. Hell, I didn’t even know that “catfisher” was the term for it. I understood that these women—if, indeed, there were women on the other side of these accounts, but a boy can dream—I understood that they weren’t being 100 percent forthright with me about who they were. Still, I had that tiny, innocent piece of my heart overoptimistically holding onto that itsy-bitsy one-in-a-million chance that these were women who just possibly might be real, even though in my head I knew that there was a zero chance in a billion that any of them were real. The pictures were pretty hot, though, so I had to hang on to that one-tenth-in-a-trillion chance, that sub-atomic glimmer of hope that one day I might meet one of these beautiful women. If we met, maybe we’d hit it off. Maybe we could love each other.

The same email address from two separate profiles of two obviously different women, that was a slap in the face. It was a kick in the groin, and I’m on the fence about mentioning that along with the sciatic nerve pain radiating down the back of my legs, I have an impingement in the root of my ileo-inguinal nerves that radiates pain into my testes regularly. I sometimes—as often as daily—have the sensation that I’ve just been kicked in the balls when I’m merely sitting alone, minding my own business. I’ve had to have a couple of testicular ultrasounds to make sure there was nothing testicularly amiss down there—there wasn’t—and during the second, around 12 years ago, it felt like they were being crushed. I whimpered in agony and almost passed out as the good gentleman technician assured me that he was being as gentle as he could, and he absolutely was.

Imagine, if you will, my feeling of being kicked in the balls by the everlasting, vast and empty infinite nothingness of time and space and wonder not at my animus toward—indeed, my profound disdain for—the very idea of a benevolent god. That being said, I am not above giving the right sexy faith healer an opportunity to lay her hands upon me.

You know, this has probably been a bit too much, all this about the ileo-inguinal nerve pain radiating into my testes. I don’t think I’ll mention it. TMI, Ted! Merely saying it was a kick in the groin is enough to show what a hurtful insult it was. Any gentleman will give his solemn assurance that such a kick is, indeed, a grievous insult and injury, physically and emotionally. I need not demonstrate that I experience that grievousness so much more grievously than the common man. The garden variety of such a kick more than suffices to show my meaning. Please disregard the above description of my gonadial woes. It is, as mentioned, rather too much information.

Anyway, there I was, staring at my screen, mouth likely agape. I can’t say for sure, having long ago suppressed the traumatic memory, but with my wounded heart and pride, I took the step that I likely would not today. I reported the profile, and it was taken down.

Am I proud of snitching? No, but in my heart, I felt I was acting on behalf of the public good to prevent this likely criminal—if not in action, at least in intent—from scamming me or my fellow lonely gentlemen online. I do not regret this act. And though I may not do the same thing if put into the same situation today, I absolutely would not change what I did back then. . . if only because of what happened next.

That very same day, I believe, I received an email from the address that had been hidden in both the blonde’s and redhead’s messages. I had sent an email to it after getting the message from the blonde. So, the person who was behind the profiles must have figured out that not only do I have at least half a brain, but that I had used that half to induce that there were strange things afoot when both profiles had sent me the same email address. Elementary, motherfuckers.

Admittedly, I was momentarily apprehensive about opening this message. Was it going to be a warning from some international crime syndicate? Had they planned to use the redhead’s Match.com profile to carry out their evil plan to bring the world to its knees? Would they have gotten away with it if it weren’t for this meddling Ted? Was I a marked man? (Well, I was a marked man, but not a “marked man” marked man. I was simply a mark.) Did I even want to open it? Should it just go right to the spam folder?

A smart man would not open it, and I am a smart man. Hell, I often feel like I’m smarter than everybody, too smart for my own good. No, a smart man may not open it, but would the smarter man’s hubris bring him down? Fortunately, my vast intelligence didn’t really play a part in the decision. It was overruled by my greater quality. (No, not my handsomeness. I wasn’t quite feeling my amazingly good looks back then.) My sense of humor ruled the day, though, and knowing that there would be greater opportunity for a good laugh, I opened the suspicious email, foolishness notwithstanding.

There was no threat. Its message was quite simple.

“Do you want to see pictures of me in my underwear?”

That was a very good question, but I had questions, too. Such as, who might be asking me if I wanted to see pictures of them in their underwears? I certainly hoped it would be a lady in her underpanties. That’s usually pretty cool, man. But I wondered if the “me” asking about the underwear pics was the blonde or the redhead. I’d certainly have appreciated—wholeheartedly—a gander at either woman in her fine washables. I mean, I’m not going to get into the weeds about blondes versus redheads. That’s not my thing. What’s important to me, superficially, is that she’s stylish, not that underwear can be really indicative of one’s overall style. The, ahem, bottom line—aside from her bottom, itself—is whether she’s smart and funny and, of course, tolerant of my foolishness. But an even bigger question on my mind was whether it would even be a “she” who would be sending me underwear pics.

I couldn’t be confident that the sender would be either the blonde or the redhead. Either of them, or a third party, had been using these dating profiles to attract gentlemen such as myself. I only knew that someone was trying to use them, but who was it? Could I be about to set myself up to see a gentleman in some sort of banana hammock? Perhaps that would teach me to be such a wise guy, reporting the damn profile and ruining the plans that had been in the works for months, maybe years. Now, I would not necessarily enjoy getting a picture of some fellow wearing tidy-whiteys, but it would be very funny. I had no idea who was setting up these profiles, so it was a gamble on a variety of levels. Still, my interest was piqued.

“Sure, I’d love to see pictures of you in your underwear,” I replied.

I would love to say that I wasn’t disappointed when I got the next message, but there was so much going on for me by this point that I’m not sure how I would put my feelings about it into words. I certainly wasn’t not disappointed, but I guess I would have appreciated it if the pics had come from either the blonde or the redhead. Again, both were lovely, and I didn’t have a preference. I just wanted to know which one was the real person—or would be presented as the real person. It was neither, and no, it wasn’t a gentleman in Hulk underoos.

The next email was from a lovely young brunette. Her name was Natalya, and at 24, she was rather too young for me. I mean, it’s pretty cringe-worthy for a 40-year-old man to date a 24-year-old, and I don’t feel at all hypocritical saying that because when I was 24, I was seeing a woman who was a mere 39. Nonetheless, as a 51-year-old, I don’t think it would be as weird to date a 35-year-old. Someone who’s 35 can run for president, the most significant of Constitutional age requirements. That’s how I like ‘em.

Naturally, I wouldn’t turn away a woman who was running for Congress. I’m no executive branch snob. I would just prefer that she’s eligible—age-wise—to run for president. Obviously, Natalya can’t run for President of the United States. She hasn’t been a permanent resident of the US for fourteen years nor is she a natural born citizen nor was she a citizen at the time the Constitution was adopted. If I’ve done my math correctly, though, she’s 35 now.

Anyway, she wasn’t 35 then. She was 24 and a bit too young for me. I told her so, several times, and if I were to judge her based solely on her responses to my clear statements that she was too young for me, I would say that she was rather dense. I’ll talk about our correspondence soon, but I feel it’s important—before I got too far down the rabbit hole of Constitutional age requirements and whether age is an accurate metric for the maturity to run for office or to share one’s life with me—that I talk about the elephant in the room: the promised—as inferred—underwear pics.

As I said, I was offered—if not promised—pictures of, as it turned out, Natalya in her underwear. Now, I’m not one to complain. I prefer the verb “to bitch.” I feel that it captures the essence of my overwrought sense of entitlement, especially in this case—when I literally had no reasonable expectation of anything, at all. Yet, here I am, about to bitch about the number of underwear pictures that a complete stranger was sending me. A complete stranger, by the way, whom I had reported as having a fraudulent dating profile, but who still found a place in her heart to offer me a glimpse of her physical self, clad in naught but her underthings.

I am 100 percent that bitch, for, you see, there was but one picture of her in her underwear. She lied to me when she offered “pictures” of her in her underwear! And it could have been a bathing suit. (Do I really want to split hairs that finely? Yes, but I’ll spare you.) She wore a thong in the picture, so it could have gone either way. I’m certainly not upset that it was a thong—be it underwear or bathing suit. I, as I believe I made clear in my previous piece, I’m rather a fan of ladies’ butts. This particular butt was fine. It wouldn’t defy any of the laws of physics, but it was fine. Motorboatable? Sure.

Now, don’t get me wrong. Thongs are okay. One might think that with my personal affinity for bottoms that thongs might be my favorite type of women’s underwear. They’re not. I mean, they’re fine, just not my favorites. I like a little left to the imagination. Indeed, I do have quite the imagination, but I also don’t want my imagination to do all the work. I am but one man. And don’t get me wrong about not getting me wrong, this has been just an excuse to write about butts.

(By the way, if one were to Google “women’s underwear styles” to get the name of a style of women’s underwear that one likes better than thongs, one might decide that it doesn’t matter. Also, if one scrolls far enough, one might see a link for devices that one may insert into the undergarments to approximate the contours of either a camel toe or a moose knuckle. . . Might, indeed. It turns out that those search results could not be duplicated. The internet is a fascinating place. Browse responsibly.)

Seemingly lost in the shuffle of my ruminations on butts and my bitching about the quantity—and, dare I say, quality—of underwear photographs, you might be wondering if there were any other pictures and what they might have shown me. There was one of her dog, Grey, who looked like a good doggie. There were a few from her travels in Moscow. There were some of her hometown of Podgornoye. (Frankly, if I’d done my research, I’d have made note of the significant red flag that wanting to leave this place surely was.) There were also several pictures of her in jeans and a parka—just jeans and a parka—and boots, of course.

How could I tell she was wearing just jeans and a parka? I got these eyeballs, duh. But now that I think about it, it is possible—even likely—that she had one or more layers beneath the parka. One of those potential layers definitely wasn’t a bra, and however many layers she had under it were clearly opened along with—and completely obscured by—the afore-mentioned parka.

And no, she didn’t show me what her boobs looked like. Her parka, along with however many layers, was opened between her breasts and spread to expose her midriff. She said that she had only one “N A K” photo, and that was the thong pic, which was fine. I did not reciprocate with a low-angle selfie—nor even offer one—for I had not even coined the term yet.

Now, you may wonder why I’m bitching about getting these pictures instead of pictures of her in her underwear. Mostly, it’s because I love bitching, but I’m also rather fond of women in bras and panties. I was looking forward to pictures of her in them—whoever it had turned out to be. When she offered pictures of her in her underwear, I took her at her word. I was expecting underwear pics. I don’t think that was an unreasonable expectation. And believe me, I’m not complaining about getting pics of her with her parka opened between her breasts and spread out to show her midriff and one pic of her in a thong. No. My beef is that there were no pictures of her in her underwear.

Fortunately, over the past decade, I’ve been able to find peace in my heart. I’ve come to accept that I won’t see pictures of Natalya in her underwear, and that’s okay.

I’m also okay with the, initially, confusing use of multiple women’s pictures. While it may have been concerning, she explained to me that you can’t send an email address in a message from a Russian profile, at all. (Damnit, Putin!) She was using a friend’s profile, and she didn’t know how to use the site. Simple. And what’s really odd is that this is about the only time any of my catfishers explained why they were using a profile that wasn’t, you know, real.

While I’ve been bitching about pics, you may have been asking yourself what this Natalya may have wanted from me. I still wonder. She didn’t ask for anything up front like money to start a bespoke nesting doll shop on Etsy or a money for her father’s liver transplant or any money at all. The only thing she really asked for, directly, was the nearest international airport.

Apparently, Natalya was among may young Russians who were in “. . .a special program for young people who wants to work abroad.” There weren’t many opportunities in Russia. (“It is very terrible. The economic crisis will reach apogee...!”) So, this program would help “. . . to register documents and gives suitable work in any state(town)of USA, Canada or Europa (or other big country).” Since she’d never been abroad, she needed to make a friend outside Russia to be some kind of sponsor (I guess).

Then again, I don’t think she wanted a sponsor. “I would like to be sure that I have a man who waits for me there. . . I just don't want to be alone in the evenings, and I want to be sure in advance that somebody waits for me!” I assured her that she was a bit young for me. I wished her luck, and I offered to answer any questions she had about the US. I also told her that Maine had two international airports, in Bangor and Portland.

Earlier, when I said that she came across as “dense” when I was telling her that she was too young for me, shit like this is why: “. . . have you heard a saying The older the violin the sweeter the music?!” Are you kidding me? That only makes me want an older violin, too. Why would I want a new violin, that probably just lays there, leaving it up to me to be the good music. I want a nice old violin, too!

And even though I had gently dismissed her, she was going to go tell her parents about me. She was “. . . sure they will be happy that someone is waiting for me over there!” She asked for the international airports near me, again, and she told me she was going to Moscow in a few days to get ready to come to the US. I tried to gently dismiss her obvious lust for all this and told her that she should wait—and again that she was too young for me.

She came right back at me with that violin garbage again, and she said she thought an older man could teach her things and take care of her. I probably should have just told her that I can barely take care of myself, but I don’t think I was that self-aware yet. I don’t want a goddamn new violin, either. She also suggested that a younger man might eventually find her unattractive as she ages and then go after someone younger. . . So, she expected me to die before I found her unattractive enough to go look for someone else? Nice, Natalya.

Anyway, I kept telling her she’s too young for me and that if she came to my area, I’d be happy to show her around and help how I could. She kept moving us forward. She told her parents about us—“us”—and said that “. . . now they don`t worry about me as before because now they know you are a kind man and can help me if I will need your help.” Which would be fine (you know, if any of this were real), but even with my dismissals she kept asking about things like, “is it normal if we will like each other may be it is possible to live together?”

She just kept moving forward, becoming more suggestive with each email, and getting ready to pack her things and leave for Moscow and then the US. She kept asking me about the international airports near me, and I kept telling her that I’d already told her what they were. She was ready for me to, ahem, get to see her (and obviously play shitty music on that crappy new violin).

In the last message between us, I told her that she should probably look into this program. It was possibly some kind of scam. I never heard from her again. Likely, she went into the program to ask questions once she got to Moscow, and they killed her. Is there another reasonable explanation?

She gave me her address, so someday, when I go to spend a week or so in Podgornoye seeing all the sights, I can visit her parents and pay my respects. “Hi, I’m Ted, the American that got your only daughter killed when she started asking questions about that program.” And they’ll thank me because they knew I was a kind man and that I could have helped her, if she needed help.

 

 

Up next, The Ted Perrin Test If English Is a Second Language. 

Catfish Me: Part II, My Nigerian Girlfriends

In late 2010, when I was “putting myself back out there” after my divorce, I had a slight problem. I hadn’t much of a social life. I was driving 90 minutes, one way, to work each day. That ate into my free time. I was being reborn as an atheist, so I wasn’t really spending time with my friends from the old church. And most of the friends I was spending any time with weren’t exactly what I would describe as cooperative when it came to setting me up with hot chicks. I was on my own.

Not that being on my own in the dating environment is a bad thing, and honestly, I am pretty dubious about being set-up with someone. If someone knows a person who would be “great” for me, it’s a woman who thinks I should meet her nice friend. Nice is, well, nice, but it isn’t everything. Like, does she have a nice ass? What does she think about emotionally abusing cats? I have questions!

It’s difficult for me to just meet someone out there, even in bars. (Well, that’s not entirely true. I meet people all the time in bars, and we become fast friends.) I’d love to meet someone in a bookstore when our hands touch as we both reach for the last copy of Somerset Maugham’s The Painted Veil, and then our eyes meet. We smile.

“I love Maugham,” she’ll say.

“Me, too,” as I show her my “Maugham” in a heart tattoo.

Then we talk for a bit, and I suggest we get a cup of coffee. We talk some more, and we agree to go see Rock on the River on the Hallowell waterfront on Tuesday. “The Scolded Dogs are playing,” I tell her.

“Oh, I love them,” she says. “They’re so much fun!”

Then I tell her how Jake, the keyboard player for the Dogs is one of my fake adopted sons. She gives me an odd look for a moment, but when we meet on Tuesday, it’s like our conversation never stopped. There’s no trivia at the Liberal Cup that night, so I suggest we go there for a beer after dancing to the Scolded Dogs’ funk on the river.

She’s never been to the Cup, so I tell her about the beers on tap. When I tell her that the Milleni-Ale Double IPA has hops that grew in my yard, we both order one. She asks where the restrooms are and excuses herself. I take note of her ass as she walks away—as I’m sure, she already has of mine—but everything has stopped. There isn’t a sound. I feel all the butts of my life flash before me, from that moment in fourth or fifth grade when I noticed a girl’s Jordache-covered butt for the first time. “Nice,” I had thought to myself back then, not understanding why. I saw all the butts, both the notable glories and the thousands unremembered, in pants and shorts and in a bathing suit or two. And even in some dresses, butts I couldn’t make out well, but I just knew were nice. I saw Kathy Ireland’s in an early 90s Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue, and I could feel the moment in my memory when I made note of its wonder, its Goldilocksian just-rightness. Like Sir Mix-a-Lot of Washington, I, too, have grown to like them on the big side, but in the interest of full disclosure, I am quite a fan of regular-sized butts, as well. I see them all flash before me, but not in the sense that they’re all, like, bared. There’s just a montage of all the butts I’ve ever noticed in my life, and it all leads up to this moment. This butt. This gloriously motorboatable bottom. The perfect ass . . . For the first time in my life, I feel peace in my heart. I hear a voice whisper, “It’s beautiful,” and I look around. But no one is moving or saying anything. I look back to her butt, and I whisper, inaudibly, “I like her butt.” She turns the corner, and everything is moving again. I hear the conversations around me continue. The wait staff is taking orders and serving them. I close my eyes and breathe deeply. I exhale and sip my beer.

We talk for a while, and then we decide to keep the evening going with some karaoke at Easy Street. Several months later she tells me that she knew she was going to fall in love with me when I was singing “Tedalicious” (to the tune of Fergie’s “Fergalicious”). I tell her that I knew for sure the first time I saw that ass.

However, this is never going to happen. I already have a copy of The Painted Veil. How many copies of it do I need to reach for until I meet that special, nice-assed lady? Sure, it’s an alright book. I did like the take on the bildungsroman with a young woman learning about what matters in life. And yeah, there’s some horribly cringe-worthy Sinophobia in the book, but that isn’t the takeaway, man. I certainly wouldn’t call it a must read in the literary canon, but I enjoyed reading about Kitty Fane’s growth as a woman and seeing her learn about the importance of sacrifice.

So, with the random meeting of my well-bottomed one true love in a bookstore, at best, an unlikelihood, and with my so-called friends holding back on setting me up with her, I felt that I had to turn somewhere else. Match.com.

When I first enrolled on Match, I didn’t feel especially comfortable with the whole process. I was a bit surprised that some women had photos that looked like they were done professionally, and not Olan Mills professionally, either. They looked like models. The pics were that well done, and the women were that attractive. It was a bit intimidating.

Well, they were intimidating to me back then. You see, for many years, until I was about 40, I didn’t think that I was an attractive man, at all. Crazy talk, I know, but as a young person, the idea that I might be good looking was completely foreign to me. And it certainly hadn’t been covered in any of the foreign languages I’d tried to learn along the way. (Maybe I should’ve studied Norwegian or something like that?) Sure, there were compliments, here and there, but they were never enough to overcome the bottomless pit of insecurity I was dealing with.

Right now, I’m working on compensating for those years of self-loathing with a measure of overconfidence that is proportionally as inaccurate as the insecurity of my youth. I want to find a balance, so I’ll have a life-long net appropriately positive self-image. Well, at least as far as looks go. I’ve always thought I was smarter than everybody, so I might have to tone that shit down a bit. At any rate, I’m looking for balance, and I’ll find it someday. Ten years ago, when I was first on Match.com, I just wasn’t there.

So, I was just awe-struck that these incredibly beautiful women with professional-looking photos were reaching out to lil’ ol’ me. It was quite a boost of confidence, at least for the moment.

Ultimately, it didn’t really help that young 40-year-old’s self-esteem because I figured out that these women weren’t local, and they probably weren’t coming back to the area, even if they were able to get enough money to renew their passports.

That’s what Mills told me. Mills Powell. She was from Milford, Maine, just across the river from Old Town, where I was still living. Her picture made me wonder A, how could she be interested in me, and B, how, the hell, had I not noticed her at Hannaford, ever. Sure, there are thousands of people who live in the Old Town area and who shop at that Hannaford. I didn’t know them all, nor would I have recalled them if I had seen their pictures. This woman, though, this Mills Powell, I would have remembered her.

Then again, maybe she did her shopping in Bangor or Brewer. I’m sure there are people in Milford or Old Town who do. I just think I would have seen her somewhere. Rite-Aid, Angelo’s. The River Fest. Somewhere. But I was keeping an open mind because she was interested in me. . . and she was super-hot, probably almost as attractive as I now believe I am. So, you know she was fucking magnificent.

 

Okay several days passed there, and I had been unable to focus on writing this, partly because I was sorting through some of the emails from this long-lost lovebird. I wanted to see them and pull the essence from them to share with you. Another partly because I don’t even know. I guess I feel alone. I was really inspired writing about that one really nice butt. I kept thinking that I was just lonely, destined to be alone, and that I’d never meet some super nice lady with a time-stopping butt. I’m miserable and lonely.

Why would I bother getting this awesome tattoo
if it won't help me meet someone with an amazing
butt? (And, no, I'm not a very hirsute gentleman.)

I just have to keep reminding myself about one incontrovertible fact. That butt isn’t real. Butts don’t stop time. I’ve been reading Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and I don’t think he’s going to cover the stoppage of butt-time. Sure, the gravitational pull of a really massive butt may be able to bend light as it passes by. That butt might not be in my wheelhouse, you know? Sure, big butts are great, but a butt massive enough to have a gravitational field that’s strong enough to bend light might be a bit unwieldy. And not just in the sense that it might be “too big”—although, I’m sure, the lady with that big butt is wonderful.

Let’s just suspend disbelief for a moment—along with some of the laws of physics. This theoretical butt that can bend light. It would have to be massive. The only thing that I know of that has been observed bending light is the sun—seriously—so if this woman’s butt were to be able to bend light, it would—according to my meager understanding of science—have to have the gravitational power of roughly one sun, 4.2 nonillion pounds or so. Unwieldy, at best, indeed. But let’s just say that this butt is so dense that it’s on the regular to big size. Something that massive and that dense would probably be a black hole. (I’m not even going there. I’m a fucking gentleman.)

Anyway, this theoretical 4.2 nonillion pound butt would likely have the natural gravitational force of a black hole. It would destroy the earth and probably a great deal of the solar system, which would then revolve around this butt. Light wouldn’t be able to reflect off it—because the reflected rays wouldn’t be able to escape this butt’s event horizon—so I wouldn’t even be able to see this butt. What would be the point? Even if this butt could be carried on human legs, this poor woman’s knees would be shot. She’d never be able to take an elevator. Can you imagine her? “No, I weigh 4.2 nonillion pounds. That elevator has a 5,000-pound limit. I’ll just take the stairs.” And that would be even worse for her knees, man. And the calories she would need to carry that butt around, she would have to eat around 2,790,951,575,999,999,934,310,907,904 calories per day, just to maintain. I’m sure she’d try to keep it around 2,500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, so she could drop a few pounds, maybe make her most recent knee replacements last for more than a year. Her grocery bills would likely not be affordable on a middle-class salary.

Let’s be real. This butt would not be practical, and as dense as it would have to be, it definitely wouldn’t be motorboatable. And let’s say she finds out that I’m the one who came up with the idea for this beautiful, massive, and incredibly dense butt, do you think she want to even consider letting me motorboat it? No fucking way.

This whole butt thing raises a variety of concerns, I'm sure.

But you know whose butt didn’t raise such concerns? Mills Powell’s. I never saw a picture of her butt. However, if the pictures from the front were any indication, her butt likely did not have its own gravitational field. She may as well have, though, because she likely wasn’t real to begin with, but let’s move on.

She sent me a message through Match. It’s long gone, but she gave me her email address. She had it disguised, for some reason. I saw that quite a bit. I don’t know if it had to be disguised because Match wouldn’t let you transmit an email address or what. But that doesn’t make sense because I’ve exchanged phone numbers and email addresses with real people whom I’ve actually met. Maybe they just wanted to get it out there as quickly as possible. I don’t know. The disguise was simple, though. They just wrote the address out and used the words “at” and “dot.” I could probably do some research or something, and I could come up with a reasonable explanation. Here’s the thing, though. I don’t give a shit, and I’ve already thought about it more than I care to.

Anyway, she wrote back pretty quickly. “How are you doing, Hope everything is cool.. And am so sorry for not replying you fast....I was so amazed after i saw your mail  I never thought any man would be interested in a lady who is just trying to find love on the internet” Can you believe that? Who uses such inconsistent ellipses? It doesn’t look very good for the English Department at the Dr. Lewis S. Libby School in Milford and the Old Town High School, where, I assume, she completed her secondary education. Then again, she could have gone to Orono or Brewer. I think Milford kids get to choose from a few different high schools. It doesn’t really matter. I can always ask my two grandsons who go to the Libby School. Maybe one of their teachers remembers Mills.

“Hey, Mrs. Harrison, did you ever have a girl in your class named Mills Powell?”

“Mills Powell, that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long time. Do you know Mills, Keegan?”

“No, she just tried to catfish my Papa.”

“Oh, that Mills! She always was a scoundrel. I wonder if she ever got the hang of using ellipses.”

That’s probably a dead-end for me, though. I’m sure all of Mills teacher have retired by now.

But those emails from Mills, man, they’ve been pretty hard to read. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because I’m grieving that loss, the opportunity to have a wonderful relationship with an incredibly beautiful woman who just wanted to find love again and who was “. . . so greatful to God that once in the journey of my life I met a sweet, loving,caring and very handsome man like you and If I die now I will still be happy that when I was in this world I feel in love with you. For almost the past days, you have brought so much joy to me that words can never explain.”

Then again, maybe the writing is a little over the top.

Or maybe, that was just her way of communicating. Maybe she was just a fountain of, you know, words. Words that didn’t always make sense or seem to work with any of the words around them. Words that didn’t seem to overtly demonstrate a native fluency of the English language.

She said a lot, and what did I give her? “Wow, that's a pretty complex picture of love you painted, but then it's a complex subject. If you're ever back in the Bangor area, let me know. Maybe we can get together for coffee at Ampersand's in Orono or something.”

She wanted to know things like, “What do you seek for in a relationship? What are the basic qualities you seek for in a lady? What sort of relationship you seek for? What interests you? What do you do for a living? What is love to you? I'll hopefully want to know what your consent is about these questions.  I want to get to know you and meet you soon....I will be waiting to read from you Soon.”

I gave her “I'd love to have an opportunity to get to know you. You're swell.  Tell me, what's it like in Nigeria?”

Wow. What the hell is wrong with me? Why is it so hard for me to communicate about love? I thought I’d come a long way, but here I am, alone and questioning my every motive. In her last email, she told me she needed a couple hundred bucks to have her passport revalidated. I gave her another heartfelt response, “About the money, we really don't know each other, and I don't think it would be a good idea for either of us to lend the other money.  For all you know, I'm just some kind of internet predator/scammer.  By the way, do you have $350.00 I could use to get tires for my car?  Just kidding!  Lol.”

There she was, stuck in Nigeria, caring for her poor mother who’d had a fall, and all she wanted was $200 to revalidate her passport to come see me. She could have paid me back when she sold the house her grandparents had left her and started her business. She had ambition. She wanted to “. . . own a big clothing line in future.” I think I need to be a little more generous. It was just $200. I could have made do. I could have put my new tires on a credit card.  It’s just so confusing now. Deep down, now, I understand why she never emailed me again. I’d broken her heart.

 

Around this time, I told a couple of the kids about my Match.com exploits and the word got to my youngest, Amber, about how I was back on the scene. She asked me about “these girlfriends” she heard about. I explained that they were just my Nigerian girlfriends, and we were really just exchanging emails. I think she was a bit disappointed, perhaps because she just wanted me to be happy, you know, with a real relationship with a woman.

The real disappointment, though, the disappointment I’ve been carrying like an albatross around my neck or a cross on my shoulder or a monkey on my back—or really like any heavy or awkward thing that one might tote around as a metaphor for one’s guilt or whatever—over the last ten years or so. The real disappointment, my badge of shame, my scarlet letter—ooh, that’s a good metaphor for shame—the real disappointment, the burden that weighs on my heart still, is that I was two-timing Mills Powell with another lovely woman named Rita Campbell, who just happened to be working in Nigeria as a fashion designer.

How did a fashion designer in Nigeria find someone in Old Town, Maine, on Match.com? (Or is the question, how did someone in Old Town, Maine, find a fashion designer in Nigeria on Match.com?) It’s an old story. I’m sure you’ve heard it before. Her profiled showed that she lived in Appleton, Maine—or some other town in Maine that began with an “A” and was outside my reasonable search radius. But her search radius was much wider—much, much wider, as it turned out—and she found me. (So, I guess this nullifies the whole “Or is the question, how did someone in Old Town, Maine, blah, blah, blah” bullshit question. I should just delete that sentence—and this one.)

Anyway, she sent me a message on Match that had her email address, for some reason, disguised in it.

Appleton, or wherever, was a bit far from home for me. It was only about a half-hour from where I was working at the time, but still pretty well outside my radius. There were, however, a couple of things that moved her up toward the head of the line. She was hot, and she was interested in me. . . not an incredibly high bar, in retrospect, but I was feeling lonely. Don’t judge me!

We quickly started emailing. She never really explained her connection to Appleton, nor to Maine for that matter. Indeed, she never really answered any of my questions, but who cares? She had so much to say! What was she going to do? Take an extra minute of her time when she telling me about her exciting life as a fashion designer to answer basic questions about herself? That’s a good one, Ted.

She had been all over the world for her work. Sweden, Japan, the U.S., Germany. If she’d had more time, she could have told me where in Germany after I asked about it, and we could have bonded over a common experience because I had been in Germany when I was in the army. Hell, we had the rest of our lives to do that. We were connecting spiritually via email. We didn’t need to get into the weeds about what we’d actually done in places we’d both been any further than “live” or “design fashions.” The same goes for Texas. She had apparently been raised there—and not Appleton, Maine, but who cares—and my last duty station in the regular army was Fort Hood. Had we been in Texas at the same time? I don’t know, but her granny, who raised her after her parents died when she was 12, she lived in Texas. Rita was sending all the money to her granny that she could to pay for her radiation treatments.

That was just so beautiful to me. I mean, not the part about her granny needing radiation treatments, that’s a frightening view into the gaping maw of existence just waiting to consume the ones we love and hold dear. Yeah, we all will die, but will it all have been worth it? Will we have made a difference in this world? Will we have atoned for the wrongs we have visited upon others? I’m sure that’s what Rita’s granny was thinking about. She’s probably dead now, you know. I hope she was able to answer those questions and find peace.

Sorry, I kind of took a turn there.

Rita, yes, Rita was working so hard to take care of her dear granny, now that was beautiful. I could learn a lot from her. I know Rita doesn’t have to worry about whether she made a difference in this world. She did, with her granny. . . and with me, that’s for sure.

Rita’s emails, though, man, they were long. She told me about how she wanted to bring her fashion design business to Florida—again, not Maine—and she never answered me about whether she was going to come to Maine at all. So, I didn’t know if we were ever going to be able to grab a cup of coffee sometime, in Maine. She was so goddamn busy.

So busy, indeed. Once, she typed the exact same message to me two emails in a row. Exactly the same. It’s weird how she was thinking the exact same thing, twice. The good thing about it is that when I got the second message, I remembered to add something to my previous email. I cheated, though. I copied my previous reply, pasted it into a new email, and just added one sentence. She had talked about how touch was important to her, and she looked forward to when we could hold and caress each other, and stuff. So, I added this, “Also, speaking of touch, I do like hand-jobs.” I’m sure she filed that one away for when we were going to meet, which we totally would have, if I hadn’t—spoiler alert—ruined everything.

Usually, though, she liked to write about what our time together would look like. Me coming home from work to a hug and a kiss. We’d just hold each other for a moment to reconnect before we got ready to go out. She said she liked “. . . to dress in a classy way with my best pairs of pumps on, my hair and nail done very nice and I love the man I am with to be dressed looking totally hot in his suit and tie with a very nice look and warm smiles. I do want us to compliment each other when we go out.” So, I’d be all, like, “You look nice,” and she’d be all, like, “Thank you. You also look nice.” Such a nice-looking couple, though, right? The suit and the dress and stuff would have been a bit much for Applebee’s by the Bangor Mall. (Maybe Chili’s?) Perhaps we could have just gone some place downtown. I don’t know what’s in Bangor anymore, but we would have looked very nice when we went out.

Everything seemed like it was moving along so well, if not merely quickly. She seemed great. She was incredibly ambitious and very into me. “I am thinking of you and I want you to go and delete your profile on the dating site and am not here to play games here.” She was also super-hot. I don’t know how her butt looked, though. She never sent me any pics that showed it off. All I knew for sure is that she was beautiful and into me and was an upwardly mobile fashion designer, in Nigeria, and who wanted me to reel it in on Match.com.

I mean, even if she had a marginal butt, I would have been fine. I’m not, as the kids say nowadays, all about that ass. It’s not the most important thing. A great butt is the dream, man, but a woman is more than just a butt—indeed, and more than the sum of her butt plus the rest of her parts. I know this in my heart.

I wish I could tell you that Rita had a great butt, and that I fell in love with her and her butt after we met. . . and that we are married and living happily ever after. It would be pretty weird, though, if I said that because none of my friends nor family have met her. “Wait a minute,” they’d all be saying, “Ted has a hot wife with a nice butt?”

“I don’t know,” someone who wasn’t in on the initial “wait a minute” stuff would reply.

“Where does he keep her, in the basement?”

“I don’t know. I’ve been to his house several times, and there’s no indication of him having a wife. I heard he banged what’s her name.”

“With his wife in the basement?”

“I don’t know where his wife was.”

First, no, I don’t have a wife, in my basement nor anywhere else. Second, what’s her name and I are consenting adults, and what we do in private during our special time together is none of your business. But no, we were never an “item” and we’re just friends and she’s not even real.

With Rita Campbell, though, everything was great until she asked me for money to help pay for her license renewal, so she could keep working out her contract in Nigeria before coming back to the states.

“You need a Nigerian designer’s license?” I asked, my incredulity probably—somehow—making it through to the other end.

“Yes,” was her simple reply.

“I don’t think I can spare $350 for you to renew your license,” I told her, “But I’d love to meet you when you come back to the states.”

Not surprisingly, I never heard from her again.  I’m such a fool. I let love go twice. I know I was two-timing them, but maybe they would have been “cool” about it. We could have made a reality show about Tedwives or sister Tedwives or whatever. Now, we have nothing because I’m selfish.

I just emailed Rita to see if she ever got her license renewed. The message wasn’t deliverable. I have failed at love.

 

Will I be able to find a way to work it out with catfishers from Russia? Will I find a way to test catfishers knowledge of American English in a hilarious way to see if they’re being dishonest about living here? Will I break down and send money to a catfisher? Keep your eyes peeled on this space to find out.

Catfish Me: Part I, This Catfishing Stuff, What the Hell Are You Talking About?

Catfishing, not to be confused with catphishing. . . or, um, exactly to be confused with catphishing. I don’t know. This is all very confusing. I feel like my real skill or gift or—I don’t know, inclination?—is writing and not researching, but I gave the full breadth and depth of the internet’s resources an exhaustive search for about three minutes. Look, I’m trying to say that research isn’t my thing as far as this blog goes. I don’t know the difference.

What is my thing? I have a few things. Promoting sweater vest awareness, making furniture, writing about cool shit like this, emotionally abusing one of my cats. I have a very fulfilling life. Another thing I do on a regular basis—besides actually doing work for the “man”—is entertaining myself, so I don’t lose it. And there are some pretty niche pursuits that amuse me, so it can take a bit of work sometimes.

One of those pursuits is to screw around on the internet. Not doing research, of course, nor gaming. And I’m no hacker like Anonymous or anything like that. I’m more into my personal brand of foolishness, and one of my most beloved foolish things to do is to engage with catfishers or catphishers. I don’t know which, really, maybe both?

I think catphishers try to pretend they’re someone who wants to establish a relationship with some unsuspecting dope—like me—to get access to whatever info they can—my bank account, my work stuff, etc.—while catfishers do, like, exactly the same thing, but they go right for it and try to get money from whichever dope they’re targeting—again, frequently me.

Or vice-versa. I don’t know, and If I can’t figure it out after my exhaustive research, then you know no one may ever be able to solve the mystery of what the difference between catfishing and catphishing is. It’s just one of those eternal questions, like, “Is there a God?” Well, except that I know there isn’t a “God,” but I don’t know the difference between catfishing and catphishing.

I do know that the term comes from actual catfish. Well, not from them. Catfish didn’t come up with the term about themselves like some goddamn narcissist and then decide to misspell it sometimes just to fuck with everyone. Catfish aren’t like that.

However, I did learn in my “research” that when fish-shippers used to, I think, ship live cod all over the place, the cod would get all fat and lazy if they were shipped alone. So, here’s what the fish-shippers started doing, see. They started putting catfish in the codfish shipping containers, or something like that. (I keep wanting to coin the term, “fishippers.”) So, then, when the cod saw the catfish, the cod thought the catfish were super-hot babes who were interested in sex and relationships with cod. The cod then decided to get gym memberships and stay in shape along the way, so they could try to impress the catfish. There was a lot of competition for the attention of these catfish, so by the end of the trip, the catfish had suckered all the cod into giving up their userids and passwords for their work accounts and financial resources. Devastated, the cod all killed themselves and had their bodies donated to fish stick manufacturers and science or whatever. Tragic.

The first time I heard the term “catphish”—or “catfish” or whatever—was a couple years after I had actually engaged with my first catfishers. I heard about it in relation to the story of University of Notre Dame football player Manti Te’o.

Te’o was a Heisman Trophy finalist and an All American that year. Notre Dame was having a great season—leading up to the National Championship Game against Alabama. (During the game, whilst Alabama was drubbing Notre Dame, I started an online petition to try to get Alabama to stop beating them so badly. It did not work.)

One week, much earlier in the season, they announced that Te’o’s girlfriend had died. “They” were the sports media. (I don’t remember this all that clearly, and I blew my entire research budget trying to figure out what the difference between “catphishing” and “catfishing” is. Well, maybe we should all stop writing the word and reading it. If we just say “catphishing” or “catfishing,” no one is going to ask if we mean “catfishing” or “catphishing” because they sound the same—unless one of them doesn’t use the voiceless labiodental fricative ⟨f⟩ sound, and I’m not about to try and find out.

Anyway, everyone was all sad because Te’o lost his grandmother and his girlfriend. Sad, huh! Or not. Well, it was sad that he lost his grandmother. I can sympathize with that. I’ve lost a grandmother or two along the way, myself. Okay, two actually, along with a couple grand dames who felt like grandmothers to me, emotionally speaking, of course. (I’ve lost a few grandmothers along the way? I obviously can’t be trusted with grandmothers.) But Te’o, then grandmotherless, lost his girlfriend, too.

He kept playing, though, because that’s what athletes do. They play the fucking game, man, and he did it to honor their memories. That’s what athlete’s do, unless, of course, they take a game off to grieve, because athletes also do that sometimes. In many ways, athletes are just like you and me—except they’re probably a lot cooler than you and nowhere nearly as cool as me.

But yeah, goddamn Te’o, man, he lost his grandma and his girlfriend. At least that’s what we thought, and the past tense in “that’s what we thought” is doing some heavy lifting here because it’s been past tense for a long time. Well, “thought” has pretty much always been the past tense of the verb “to think” in modern English, but we’re not going that far back. We’re going back to a point that happened pretty quickly after the sports world was shocked by that young man’s tragic losses during that season.

You see, Te’o had more than one reason to play through the pain of losing his girlfriend. Sure, he legitimately blew off his grandma’s funeral because he wanted to be there for his team, man. He was part of something bigger than himself—and his grandma—and he wanted to dedicate his play to her. He was so goddamn dedicated to the team that he was going to blow of ol’ girl’s funeral, too.

The thing is, see, there was no funeral for his girlfriend. No, everyone in the girl’s family wasn’t so dedicated to Notre Dame football that season that they decided to not even bury this girl.

“Just leave her in the cooler, Marty. There’s football yet to be played.”

Can you believe they said that to Marty? Well, believe me, you can’t make this shit up. No, you can’t make this shit up because I just did. (I will probably never explain my personal interpretation of “you can’t make this shit up” again. Take note.)

So, there wasn’t a funeral for Te’o’s sweet love because she, well, wasn’t.

When reporters started sticking their noses into this young public figure’s business, so they could, I don’t know, appropriately memorialize her for the world, they discovered that there was no girlfriend. (Now go back and read that again, but make sure you click on the link in “that” before reading on. You’re welcome.)

That’s right, Manti Te’o had been catphished. (I’m pretty sure I’m using the appropriate “catfish” in that sentence but not in these parentheses.) Someone—and I didn’t care enough to try to find out if anyone ever found out who—had been pretending to be in a relationship with our erstwhile young Fighting Irish?. . . Fighting Irishman? . . . our erstwhile young Notre Dame football player.

Indeed, and while there’s no evidence—that I can remember—of Te’o’s, um, would-be young love trying to get money from him, that may have been the plan. And why did I tell this story? A, it’s hilarious, and B, it really brought catfishing or catphishing—fuck it—cat⟨f⟩ishing into the public eye for many people, especially college football fans. And I like me some college football.

I kind of felt bad for Te’o. Kind of. I mean, he did bring this on himself by falling so hard, apparently, for someone who was pretending to love him online during a season when Notre Dame was getting more attention than normal because they were, you know, good. He had to face a lot more press than usual because he was playing in the National Champeenship, and he was a Heisman finalist. If he’d only been playing on a suckier Notre Dame team that year, maybe he wouldn’t have received so much attention.

The poor bastard couldn’t even use the age-old “my girlfriend lives in Canada, so you wouldn’t know her” thing because he was famous, and the American sports media would have known how to get to Canada and ask around for this young man’s girlfriend. Well, I guess he could have said, “You don’t know her. She’s in Canada, and she’s dead.” But no, he had to go public with his online love.

One of the upsides of Te’o’s story—along with not only learning what cat⟨f⟩ishing is and realizing that I had been so targeted—is, of course, the memes. The meme campaign against him was hilarious. I won’t search for them, because I’m pretty lazy, but you can. My favorite had a couple pictures of notable football players from the Southeastern Conference (SEC) along with their attractive girlfriends. It said, “The SEC: We have real girlfriends.” Hilarious. . . And who am I kidding. There is no downside to Te’o’s story for me.

You’re probably thinking that I’m getting some kind of perverse glee out of piling on Te’o by revisiting his notorious late—albeit fake—girlfriend story, and you’d be right. I am. It is so goddamn funny, but I can also identify with the poor bastard. I’ve been cat⟨f⟩ished. Well, there’s been an attempt. . . okay, attempts, many attempts. But I must admit, there were moments, initial moments, when I would have loved for the women in these pictures to have actually been interested in me—and, of course, to have actually been local—even as stupid as they came across sometimes. That’s kind of a turn-off for me. I’m into smart women. (But maybe, I thought in those moments, maybe they just don’t write good, like me, you know?)

I’m not going to sit here nor stand here nor drive here nor take a shower here nor whatever I’m doing here—or wherever—when you’re reading this and tell you that I didn’t have moments when I wished that it all could have been true—one internet lady at a time, of course—even at times when I’ve received message requests from people using the same goddamn picture as multiple attempted cat⟨f⟩ishers have used before. (Wow, she looks familiar. Oh.) Even then, in those lonely moments, when I’d wished that I didn’t have my head so far up my ass, so that I could possibly make a real connection with someone, even then, I’ve thought to myself, ever-so-quickly, I wish this could be real.

But those moments pass, for me. I’m no Manti Te’o, neither on the football field, nor with the fake internet chicks. There is a teeny-tiny part of me that just adores Te’o’s then innocent response. Someone, someday, could write a beautiful coming-of-age story—maybe a screenplay—inspired by Te’o’s ability to love and then learn.

That somebody will not be me. I have different stories to tell: my Russian loves and my Nigerian girlfriends among others, and the time I was one response away from actually sending one of my cat⟨f⟩ishers money. Seriously.

Catfish Me: An Introduction to My Search for Love Online

Sometimes it seems like yesterday, but it’s been over ten years since my marriage deteriorated to its painful but not entirely unforeseeable conclusion—unforeseeable in the retrospective sense, of course, if there is a retrospective sense of foresight. It was difficult, though. I came to realize that I had to accept much more of the responsibility (I hated the idea of using the word “blame” here) for the marriage’s failure than I’d initially been willing—or, rather, honest enough—to admit.

And, before you start thinking that I regret the divorce, no, I do not. I’m not a fan of regret. I try to learn from things rather than regret them. I’ve moved on from the marriage—which is what this piece is about—and so has she. She’s found a much better match for herself, and I’m genuinely happy for them. I just mention the marriage and its dissolution as an introduction to my journey of love. Anyway. . .

Now that I think about it, though, these several sentences hence, it does seem so long ago. I’ve learned so much about myself since then. Most importantly, I’ve let myself love again along the way. It took some time to learn and to grieve, but when the time came, I was ready.

About 15 months later, in fact, I was ready, really ready, like really ready-ready. Really. I’d reconnected with someone I’d met in college, and we really hit it off after the interim years of growing and stuff. I mean, we really hit it off. We moved-in together and all that. We probably would have married if it hadn’t been for the one thing—the one big thing—that we couldn’t get past.

"I was ready, really ready, like really ready-ready"

But this isn’t that story, either. It’s this story, the story of before how I’d hit it off with that one lady I met in college but after I’d taken some time to heal from the separation and divorce from my ex-wife, that three or four months in the fall of 2010. Let’s call it just three months. That way, I don’t have to write anything unnecessary to explain how four months fit into one season, even though that shouldn’t really be much of a leap because I live in a state where winter has only recently been reduced to about five months—thanks to climate change.

Anyway, I had these few months in the fall of 2010—see, that works. I can just say “a few months” and save the space for more important details. So, I had those few months in the fall of 2010 to fall in love, over and over again.

It was difficult, at first. I had really been hurt by the separation and divorce. Several years before this there had been some low points that led me to seek treatment for my depression, but this pain was different. I was afraid to give myself fully to a relationship again, until I remembered that love was worth it (and, ultimately, until I had someone to show me how to just jump feet first into love again). But I did want to feel it again. I wanted to be close to someone again. So, feeling somewhat socially awkward about meeting chicks in the wild, I opened an account on Match.com.

I must say, checking out women on Match felt kind of creepy at first—about as creeping as calling it “checking out women on Match” makes it sound—but I soon realized that they were posting their profiles to introduce themselves to the area’s available gentlemen, not unlike I was doing for those ladies. So, I furthered the introductions with some messages and made some connections.

The first date I went on was a fine how-do-ya-do into the world of online dating for me. That first in-person meeting was at the Starbucks in the nearby Barnes & Noble, and she led with the questions.

“What’s your five-year plan?”

“My five-year plan?” I replied.

That’s right, she asked me what my five-year plan was. I had been rather secure in my job at the time and hadn’t been on a job interview in years. I had interviewed for a couple promotions at work, but the interview questionnaire they used didn’t include an inquiry into where I planned to be in five years. I definitely wasn’t ready for that question. Even if I’d had a friend try to prep me for that date, I don’t believe that my five-year plan would have even been on my radar.

"checking out women on Match felt kind of creepy at first"

All that I could think of was, I don’t know—in five years—be alive and stuff, maybe not live in a basement apartment. I managed to say something that seemed reasonable, but it clearly wasn’t a plan because I’d obviously just come up with it on the fly. One thing in that plan was to have a house, which I managed to move into with a few months to spare in those five years. It had nothing to do with that plan, but still, pretty impressive, whatever your name was.

My conversation with whatever-her-name-was was rather superficial. The coffee was fine. We didn’t have a second date. I was clearly not goal-oriented enough for her. No big deal. I do feel bad for her sometimes, though, for she missed an opportunity to get with all of this [gestures at all of this]. Poor her, but then I guess it just wasn’t meant to be.

There were other dates, too. Mostly coffee and a chat, a few dinners. There were a couple women I had multiple dates with. These dates didn’t turn into a whole lot. It was soon hereafter that I reconnected with the woman I’d met in college and am not writing about in this story.

One woman, God bless her, sent me a picture of herself in her under-panties, and I sent her a picture of me in my boxers. Things escalated, and she sent me a picture to show me what her boobs looked like. Ultimately—at least as far as this aside goes—I sent her a type of picture that I’ve come to call a “low-angle selfie” (a much nicer name than “dick pic,” I think). These were very special moments between two consenting adults. I am somewhat loth to write of these special moments between this lady and myself, but the subject of low-angle selfies will be a big—no, “big” isn’t what I’m trying to say here—low-angle selfies will be an integral part of the story of my online loves. Only the discussion of them, of course—and naturally, only in a tasteful and hilarious way.

I have a strict “no unsolicited low-angle selfie policy” and a frequently narrowing interpretation of what “solicitation” means in this context. That being said, I do, regularly, send them as replies to spam text messages that suggest I may need some pharmaceutical assistance in that department. I just use them as a simple way to say, “Thank you, but no,” to my would-be friends in the boner pill logistics business.

But I digress.

Having coffee and dinner and showing each other pictures of what our nakedness looked like was all so much fun, but where was the love? I did find it, in-person, eventually, if only for a while, but I also found it there, on Match.com, in a subset of women who lived in the Bangor, Maine, area, but who, sadly enough, had temporarily relocated to Africa. Crazy timing, I know!

"I have a strict 'no unsolicited low-angle selfie policy'"

These were among the most beautiful women on Match in the Bangor area, well from the Bangor area. Life had just gotten in the way of us being able to meet in person. (I’m so unlucky in love!) But we were able to meet online, thankfully. And let me tell you, they fall in love fast. It was almost hard to believe, but then again, of course they’d fall in love with me that fast, just look once more at all this. [Gestures, once again, at all this.]

To be honest, I loved them, too. I loved how they were so open to having a future with me when we hadn’t ever met. I loved how I could say anything to them. I loved how they were honest about their situations and how they were open to me about their financial struggles, in Africa.

I gotta say, I felt bad for them, these young women from greater Bangor who just happened to actually be from Africa and how they were just trying to make it in this crazy world.

I knew what I had to do. I had to try and occupy some of their time, so that time wouldn’t be spent on some sucker who might actually send them money. Don’t get me wrong. I loved them; oh, I loved them. I loved them as a man can love a woman who’s pretending to be local and thereby scam him out of his money. That’s how much I loved them. That’s how much I always will.

There were a number of these women over the years, beginning with those few that fall, and not all of them found me on Match. I guess I just have a way of attracting hot chicks who need money. And before you worry, I do realize that there could have been men who were pretending to be local women who lived overseas. I just fell in love with the women part of the whatever it is this is called.

So, I’m going to have a few posts coming up about the attempts to catfish me and the fun I’ve had along the way. I hope you enjoy them.