{"id":34917,"date":"2024-02-16T08:21:54","date_gmt":"2024-02-16T13:21:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2024\/02\/16\/back-at-work.html"},"modified":"2024-02-16T08:21:54","modified_gmt":"2024-02-16T13:21:54","slug":"back-at-work","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/2024\/02\/16\/back-at-work.html","title":{"rendered":"Back at Work"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As much as I sometimes feel it has squashed my life into a pancake, I cannot lie that it feels safer here at the office than at home. I worked from home for 20 years, almost completely in solitude. It gains on you. It envelopes you. It drowns you. It sounds like a dream to so many but I believe most who sing praises of working from home are lying like an influencer. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">As per previous posting, I had a rough couple of days. I walked it off, mostly (literally), and slept long hours to remedy the conditions. Ate healthy, too. I heal well, at least with physical injuries. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I&#8217;ve made these mistakes before. One of my favorite Payphone Radio calls is the one where I talk about how one day I&#8217;m going to wake up dead. DOesn&#8217;t everyone one day wake up dead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In my relentlessly wasteful attempts to find friendship or more through dating apps I made a curious discovery today. In fact, it&#8217;s not new to me. I just don&#8217;t usually take it so far. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Honestly, though, any observer of the ways I waste my time on dating apps would conclude that this is a person determined to waste his life, to waste his every waking day in the hopeless, futile pursuit of happiness via online dating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">But here is what I did while sitting naked in the tub today, waiting for the water to hear up. I looked at the profile of a woman I messaged two days ago. She had not responded, and it looks like she never will. Boo-hoo, big surprise. I am not 6, 6, and 6&#8230; er, let&#8217;s say I&#8217;m not 6, 6, and that looks and money count more than almost anything in the online realm. I&#8217;m not a horrible looking guy but I&#8217;m no beefcake muscle jock and I don&#8217;t make 6 figures. The latter quality really does eliminate me from a lot peoples&#8217; consideration. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Anyway, that&#8217;s not what I was going to discuss. What happened was, as I went to check to see if she had replied I also tapped on the &#8220;sent messages&#8221; tab to see that the message I sent was there, and that her name had changed from her screenname alias to what appeared to be her real first name. I don&#8217;t know if that&#8217;s a deliberate trick to make you feel you gained some level of access to this person or if it is a bug. Whatever the case her name alone was distinctive enough that within seconds I punched it into a searchie and now know exactly where she lives, where she works, what she does at her job, how many kids she has&#8230; I am not a kind of creep who would do anything with this, but I do have to ask if people on dating apps, which are supposed to be discrete and &#8220;anonymous&#8221;, at least in the historical characterization of the realm, realize just how easy it is to determine exactly who you are. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">In this case I learned that she was bascially what I guessed based on photos and nothing else. She only had one word on her profile and the pictures, I know now but already suspected, appear to be from 10-12 years ago.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I think about my own dating app profiles and how I don&#8217;t care if anyone identifies me. It&#8217;s been like that with me since the Aline days (whoosh, who remembers Aline, the U.S. connection to the French Minitel which was a bit of a sensation in New York for a little while)? I went onto Aline with my full name and this made other people on that line think I was insane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I do know when to exercise discretion, like when I dabbled in being a pornographer, or when inquiring about things I&#8217;m not sure I want to be associated with. But that&#8217;s rare for me. For the most part I dox myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">Dating apps are a black hole of wasted time, and I&#8217;m happy to see Match getting sued for gameifying and algorithmicizing and mythologizing human companionship. \u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>As much as I sometimes feel it has squashed my life into a pancake, I cannot lie that it feels safer here at the office than at home. I worked from home for 20 years, almost completely in solitude. It gains on you. It envelopes you. It drowns you. It sounds like a dream to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-34917","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-text","et-doesnt-have-format-content","et_post_format-et-post-format-standard"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/paumAn-95b","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34917","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34917"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34917\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34917"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34917"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/wsbj.com\/sorabji\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34917"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}