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Hi, Emergencybrake,
You've hit on something I stumbled across awhile ago here on Match. Seen as a place to find, or rather, pursue love, it feels over and over like a cul-de-sac. Then, one stops pursuing that direction. Instead, it is an amazing place to meet people I never would. Period. Next weekend, for instance, I'll be attending an MFA opening at Yale. Whose? A friend I made here. I have made friends with people in California, and have since moved into the other sphere of Facebook--where I've engaged in encouraging a new friend to solve her legal issues. Or, suggested to another woman in New York, that she go to Omega or just to pick up up a copy of Julia Cameron's The Artist's Way. No doubt, I've had all sorts of less felicitous meetings as well. People who, during a walk together through Dia in Beacon, could not for the life of themselves give up their Nietzschean battles. Still, other times, I've simply talked to a woman who later became a new friend in the cafe at MoMA--and we never saw the art. It was beautiful. I have walked through the cherry trees blooming in the Brooklyn Botanic Garden for the first time in 15 years--with someone else new. I have bought a chocolate bar for a sad young woman at Whole Foods. I've had darker moments, too: a Harvard PhD showing up in the middle of the night, having driven for two hours to my house, two weeks in a row, after our brief relationship had been definitely ended, and had to turn her away, door locked, her beating on it. So, it is MOSTLY fun, but not always! And there are people I wish I had met, but been so over-the-top with myself with enthusiasm, that I lost them. I learn from this just as much, but in a different way. I'm happy to have guided one woman to believe that she really had a book to write about her falafel sales while following Phish for three years, and that she didn't have to give up her success-driven lifestyle in New York and be true to herself now, too. Strange, wondrous, unexpected, troubling, enlightening things have happened here. Love? Maybe not in the personal, as in one person way; I haven't experienced that here; but, overall there has been a goodness, a kindness, a human sort of usefulness between me and others that I think counts for it as well.
Egbert
# 160
