19 February 2009

Loking for love and getting dead chickens

There's another one of those bizarre "woman goes looking for love and finds creepiness instead" stories in The Local today. After being "wooed" online by a man she believed to be a 33 year-old PhD student, a German woman set off for New Zealand to begin a new life. Rather than being met at the airport by the intellectual dreamboy with whom she had been corresponding since October, however, she was greeted by "old man" who lived in a "horror house."

Okay, first three things:
  1. "54" is not old. "84" or "94" perhaps, but not "54." Who writes this stuff anyway, teenagers?
  2. Moving to NZ after a four-month virtual relationship? Seriously?
  3. She's crazy.
Finding love on the internet is possible; I know people who've done it and are now married and living happily ever after. The problem is NOT the internet itself, but critical thinking skills that are needed whether you're hunting at the neighborhood bar or on MySpace.

The decision to remain in the "horror house" and sleep in a "filthy bed" with her host for six days--despite having had many opportunities to escape--because she was "fascinated," suggests to me that she's a woman who makes seriously bad choices.

I don't think we can blame the Internet for that.

Luckily, she was "rescued" after a guy she met on the plane raised the alarm when she didn't show up for a date they had planned. Wow. She hadn't even met her fake PhD student and she was already planning to hook up with yet another stranger. Okay, it was a long flight.

I wonder if she went back to Leipzig (perhaps too embarrassing) or if she decided to stay in New Zealand with Bachelor #2. Seriously, I'm pulling for this pairing. I want them to get married and tell their children the story of how they met:
"Daddy met Mommy on a plane. She was on her way to meet a man. But he was a bad man and his house was full of dead chickens, so Daddy rescued her."
Lovely.
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3 comments:

  1. Marty6:12 PM, February 24, 2009

    Internet stories like this remind me of modern day Fairy Tells. The brothers Grimm couldn't write this stuff.

    There is all the elements of Fairy tells in everyone of these stories. Inez may be able to relate as to why we have Fairy tales. Was it a German thing? My personal recognition was one that you struck fear in the hearts of children that there were people out there that would put you in an oven and laugh as they did it.

    There are many successful Fairy tales the poor peasant meets the Prince.

    Modern people do live a very lonely existence of isolation. Many because they read the fairy tales as a child. Now they are not confident enough to realise the difference. Many of us chose to be lonely and it actually becomes a lifestyle of choice we are happy with.

    Streams of Conciseness.

    To me, Conciseness really is a stream. If you throw sticks into a stream they all travel together at first. There are back wash. Currents that carry you off course. Many sticks get hung up and never escape. Because they are all in the same time together they will continue to travel together each experiencing its hangups and path but soon enough you look around and the sticks you started with show up at the Dam together.

    If you look at people in and around you it happens a lot the same way as sticks in a stream. Some call this connections. I'm amazed at how we meet and cross paths with families and the same people over time.

    The Internet gives us the ability to do this. You get into the online stream to see what connections you can make. Looking for old friends finding new ones. Chance meetings. Love fairy tale Princes. Hate, Death, destruction. Yes even a house full of dead chickens on the way to true love.

    But the lure of finding a Prince or Princess is just too irresistible to people not to jump into the stream to find out for themselves.
    Many do it before they realise they can swim. The reward for taking a risk can be good and bad. For Columbus it was good for the Europeans. Not so for the Indians.

    Cannot leave this thought without commenting on how I discovered Inez in this stream of the Internet. It was an amazing connection about wakening up to a song. If i have something on my mind i will awake singing a song i vaguely remember. The song is normally about what ever im running in my head. I awoke to the song Earthbound Rodney Crowell about a friend i had run out of encouragement for with leukemia. Opened my Emil Google search for the New Radicals and there was Inez discussing the same thing. Streams are part of life next time observing one throw two sticks in and let the experiment begin.

    if i were to blog i was going to call it "a heard of turtles". About Hermans. Thats two other stories, nevermind

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  2. Tammi3:42 PM, March 04, 2009

    Having met online my husband, the 1st love of my life, and the 2nd, I will give her credit for believing the dream can come true. ;-)

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  3. Inez Templeton5:15 PM, March 04, 2009

    Yay Tammi! I have other friends who have had wonderful experiences with online dating, which only goes to show that the problem isn't really with the internet . . .

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