Notes From the Winking World

Today marks Day Three of a Match.com membership so basic it doesn't include the privilege of reading the contents of my inbox. These love notes, (I have six such so far) will remain unanswered so long as I stubbornly avoid paying a subscription fee. I will succumb to a membership which allows me to read these carefully crafted solicitations only when my inbox reaches 10, as a present to myself for seeming desirable to this arbitrarily assigned number of strangers.

In the meantime, I can view who has expressed their desires via a "wink." A wink in the online dating world sends a similar message as one in real life, but is superior in clarity. The one who is winked at need not worry that the eye of the winker is merely afflicted by a foreign particle.

Match.com has a feature called "Top matches selected just for you." Well the profiles they have chosen for me today would suggest they don't know me at all. I suppose I should be comforted by this proof that robot world domination is not anywhere on our horizon. Perhaps real live three-dimensional yentas who live and breathe still have a place in our society. Truly though, a yenta, aged but not necessarily wiser than an algorithm, might, like Match, also send me a sea of backwards baseball caps and declarations of being passionate about “life.” I wonder if these men should claim so broadly to be passionate about life, when their listed professions suggest that large portions of their day are dominated by spreadsheet usage.