Recursive random

I have one reader on this blog (that I'm aware of) that I haven't had any contact with in some other context. I like this. It's about the level of OUT THERE ness i'm comfortable with ;-). Thanks for delurking, Donigan.

So this is going to be random in response to your comments on my random.

A country nobody ever paid attention to before ... try Slovakia; lived there for seven years in the 90s, and everyone thought I was either in Slovenia, Yugoslavia, or somewhere in the Baltic or the Balkans. Oddly, Bratislava is about 25 miles from Vienna, on the same river. You could try there.

7 years? Interesting. I love this mystical mythical hidden country idea. Although the guy I had the longest-first-date-with-ever on the weekend grew up in Moldavia. Definition by what it is not (not romania, not ukraine). Like my friend from Montenegro.

I think there might be more DOGS in slovenia than in Iceland. And dogs are not the friends of cyclist.

What is a slut in the Victorian sense?

A bad housekeeper. A woman of questionable virtue because DIRTY.

Isn't internet dating kind of dangerous? What's wrong with readings, cafes, and nice bars?

It's pretty isomorphic -- it's what people do now, so it's what you do to meet a pool of single people. It's how I met F, and my friend Shay, and other people whom I dated brieflyYou get a good sense of who a person is from how they communicate online or on the phone before you meet them, and for the most part, you meet them in public. . I realize as I write that that I've violated my own "only in public" principle for the last two dates, by picking them up at the ferry, but we'd talked on the phone and I had their professional credentials.

It's always interesting to me that it has this reputation of "danger" -- IME, no more so than someone you meet in real life. When I think about it, I had more scary experiences with drunk people I knew in my late teens/early 20s than with people I've come to know online in one way or another.

As for readings and the like, see upcoming post on the poet I met at a reading a few months ago.

What is a CMM community?

"CMM" is the shorthand for the communication theory I work with -- coordinated management of meaning. The work that my mentor (the one who is sick) started. The community is the gang of us who were taught by him and who are carrying on his work.