SL Letter of the Day: Have You Ever Heard of...?

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Online dating is so risky and dangerous. Better to have friends you trust introduce you to suitors.

Phoebe in Wallingford on May 21, 2013 at 5:25 PM

This reminds me of that NPR thing a couple months back of that woman who loved hearing people whisper while clinking things like pearls.

TheMisanthrope on May 21, 2013 at 5:41 PM

@1 I sometimes wonder if you are a real person or someone playing an elaborate game of "pretend to be the Dowager Countess from Downton Abbey". If it is the latter, I am totally on to you :-P

wxPDX on May 21, 2013 at 5:43 PM

Oh, come on, I didn't just ask her to clap, I asked for some hearty cheers of "bravissimo!" too. Does that make me a bad person?

Fnarf on May 21, 2013 at 5:47 PM

@1 Or better yet, have your passive but sardonic father make bon mots at the churlish suitor! Good lord, is there some corner of Wallingford that exists in a Jane Austin novel? Like, an old armoire in the Alliance Francaise?

zivilisierter Wurm on May 21, 2013 at 5:48 PM

Maybe someone out there will develop some gear for people with clapping fetishes, Some extra-resonant gloves, perhaps?

Absurdist1968 on May 21, 2013 at 5:49 PM

@3: Oh I'm real, alright - complete with the embellishment of varicose veins and arthritis. But thanks for the laugh!

Phoebe in Wallingford on May 21, 2013 at 5:54 PM

It sucks to have the craps when what you want is the claps.

leek on May 21, 2013 at 6:00 PM

I'm the opposite of this guy - I wish women would stop clapping and shouting "encore!" after they've had sex with me, it's embarrassing.

seandr on May 21, 2013 at 6:01 PM

I guess he knows all to well the sound of one hand clapping.

spexydevonz on May 21, 2013 at 6:20 PM

Go ahead and keep your draw's,
givin' up the claps and who needs applause

zivilisierter Wurm on May 21, 2013 at 6:22 PM

As a music teacher, I swear we aren't all that weird!

on May 21, 2013 at 6:23 PM

Let's give that couple a round of applause, everybody! Standing ovation time!

Tacoma Traveler on May 21, 2013 at 6:42 PM

Seems like a corollary of Ugol's Law applies.

EricaP on May 21, 2013 at 6:43 PM

Never encountered the clapping thing, but I was briefly involved with a guy who had a glove fetish. He particularly liked me to slap him in the face (BDSM context) while wearing gloves. I have a whole drawer full of gloves, so this was odd but workable for me.

Susan on May 21, 2013 at 6:48 PM

What if what he really wanted was...the booty clap?

venomlash on May 21, 2013 at 6:51 PM

I would understand someone getting off on genuine applause from an adoring audience. But this? A (likely-visibly) creeped-out woman reluctantly slapping her hands together in a parking lot with no one else around?

That being said, there's plenty of My Little Pony porn out there, so I guess that's not that weird.

Marooner on May 21, 2013 at 6:53 PM

"Has the craps"??!!!! Oh Jesus. Ain't nobody got time for that (seriously on a first date?!?!?!?!)

Racing Turtles on May 21, 2013 at 6:54 PM

He was probably an American.

sirkowski on May 21, 2013 at 7:37 PM

How can you be both a music teacher and such a boorish clod?

Alanmt on May 21, 2013 at 7:42 PM

Eh, maybe it wasn't so much a "fetish" as he was playing some stupid PUA mindfuck game he didn't have time to complete. It didn't sound sexual, at least.

undead ayn rand on May 21, 2013 at 7:53 PM

@21: Perhaps a private school, the sort that relies on vouchers.

undead ayn rand on May 21, 2013 at 8:03 PM

@3, it's Phoebe Wallingford from All My Children!! I"m ashamed to know that...

@2, same answer, different question. Phoebe loves gossip, you know...

portland scribe on May 21, 2013 at 8:06 PM

This guy sounded more completely unbearable than socially awkward to me. At any rate total creep. Also, @11 FTW

treefort on May 21, 2013 at 8:16 PM

@8: Indeed. I used to be 'Phoebe on NE 79th' on The Stranger. When I moved to Wallingford to be closer to my daughter, I couldn't resist the moniker. God bless Ruth Warrick!

Phoebe in Wallingford on May 21, 2013 at 8:35 PM

In @26, I meant to refer to @24.

Phoebe in Wallingford on May 21, 2013 at 8:40 PM

I wonder what a slow, sarcastic clap would do for this guy.

Indy on May 21, 2013 at 8:58 PM

Oh, whatever, that old german Beethoven role playing shtick again. Next thing you know you are clapping into an earhorn rammed up his ass while he shouts "Ach unsterbliche Geliebte, jetzt kann ich dich horen." Then comes the Furtrwangler Hitler thing, and you are pissing on him pretending it's gasoline and that the allies are coming. It gets old.

kinaidos on May 21, 2013 at 9:34 PM

I wonder how he feels about gonorrhea.....

Tacoma Traveler on May 21, 2013 at 9:48 PM

I would have played "Chariots of Fire" on my Ipod and applauded until my hands bled but only if he ran away from me as fast as possible.

lolorhone on May 21, 2013 at 10:40 PM

@29: Thank you for that!.
@Phoebe om Wallingford: Keep 'em coming. I appreciate them and you.

nocutename on May 21, 2013 at 10:44 PM

@32: well, clearly that was supposed to be "in" not "om." This carpal tunnel is killing me.

nocutename on May 21, 2013 at 10:45 PM

All I can think of is the guy in the virtual reality tank from "Minority Report"....

"Oh thank you. Thank you..."

Peace

Married in MA on May 22, 2013 at 3:55 AM

34 responses and nobody's twigged that what he really wants is to say to his friends, I went out with this girl and she gave me the clap. Puns and their enthusiasts.

--MC on May 22, 2013 at 7:05 AM

This is what happens when you have to listen to 4th graders sing American the Beautiful out of key for 20 years.

DJSauvage on May 22, 2013 at 8:20 AM

People don't ask if you've ever heard of something because they think you're skanky, Dan; they ask because they know that huge numbers of people write to you with their sexual problems. If you've never gotten a letter about something before, then it's REALLY unusual.

Corylea on May 22, 2013 at 10:32 AM

Typical male demonstrating his privilege in our applause culture.

debug on May 22, 2013 at 11:57 AM

I don't get it why people don't use a webcam for introductions:

1.they are super cheap and most laptops have them integrated anyway
2.you can immediately verify age, behavior, personality traits and a host of other things you can only do in real-time visual interaction
3.you save a lot of money and time
4.you are completely safe, even if the other person records it it's just a first conversation

Like that story with Manti Te'o, it wouldn't have happened if they used webcams.

Are people seriously not aware that webcams exist?? What's going on here??

Falcor on May 22, 2013 at 12:02 PM

Oh Phoebe, I love that you use the term "suitors". Please never change, you are precious.

very bad homo on May 22, 2013 at 12:35 PM

@38: Go fuck yourself.

@39: Even six years ago, I didn't have a webcam and most of my friends didn't have them either. Maybe it was our age, but I'm pretty sure webcams have gotten a LOT more pervasive in the last few years.

Minerva on May 22, 2013 at 8:34 PM

@39:
I hate seeing myself on video, and I don't like talking on the phone with strangers.
Webcams combine the two. Not gonna use them if I can possibly avoid it.

migrationist on May 22, 2013 at 11:24 PM

@1 - Suitors???

@38 - Is that tongue and cheek, or is your view of the world actually that one dimensional?

smajor82 on May 23, 2013 at 5:40 AM

@41, 44: Aww, I'm interpreting #38 as funny because it's absurd (applause culture! hehe) but true ("Clap for me, woman!" is definitely privileged behavior). Granted, I can easily see how one could interpret it as a satirical denial of male privilege or rape culture, but given the option thanks to lack of context, I'm going to go with the funny (and implicitly generous - has debug demonstrated hirself deserving of bad-faith interpretations due to past behavior? If so, your interpretations could well be more valid than mine) interpretation, as that makes me much happier.

John Horstman on May 23, 2013 at 12:56 PM

@39: My guess is because video calls are weird even with people you know and love. You can't see people's body language, they're liable to be distracted by random other things that you can't see or hear, the angles of webcams can make one's face look awful, and so on and so forth. Not to mention, I don't think I've ever had a video call that didn't have connection issues at some point. So I think they're a good solution for keeping in touch with people you already know and whose faces you want to see and whose facial expressions/tones of voice you can interpret correctly, even with random connection issues. But if you're meeting someone for the first time and you want to get a sense of what they're like and what your chemistry with them might be like, and reasonably sure they're not going to harm you in any way, it makes much more sense to meet them in person.

pzzz on May 24, 2013 at 8:07 PM

SL Letter of the Day: Have You Ever Heard of...?

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