Tales from the Steppes

2005-03-02

10:12 a.m.
And you couldn't find a smile, If you nailed it to his face

I am not certain if this happens to anyone else but occasionally strangers IM me. Generally speaking, if they are not rude to me, I will talk back to them. While I will never speak to a stranger on my own initiative, when one speaks to me I do not have a problem actually having a conversation. Especially if it is over the Internet and not in person.

This might seem like a strange practice but you never know how you are going to meet interesting people. There was a junior high school student from Pennsylvania who IMed me on a number of occasions and we talked and I taught her some basic safety rules about IMing. Like never tell a stranger exactly where you are, expecially if you are a 12 year old girl. I suppose it could have been an undercover agent trolling for pedophiles. I doubt it,as she IMed me on a number of different occasions and it was obvious that I was more interested in her not telling me things than giving me any information.

But now I have a dilemna. A guy who IMs me wants to meet me in person, as he has a meeting not far from my office this week. I generally do not like to make negative assumptions about people's motives but I am a bit uneasy about this. I am not worried about my physical safety, as we are talking about meeting in a bookstore. Also, there is the fact that I am bigger and stronger than many men. So unless he had a gun, he would be SOL. And there is no reason to even suspect that this would be even a remote possibility, so there is no reason to be an alarmist.

Still though, I am uneasy. I have been completely honest about who I am and perhaps more importantly, am not. So there is no reason for him to think that I am interested in anything other than being friends. And there has been nothing in his correspondance to indicate that he has anything other than honest intentions. I have been IMed by slimy strangers before and that is not what has been going on.

Yet recently he asked me who I looked like, so he would be able to identify me when we met. I explained that I did not look like any celebrity and that nothing I could say in that regard would be of any help. I was not trying to be difficult or mysterious - just honest.

It is not like I haven't done this sort of thing before. When I was in high school a bunch of us IMed (or the equivalent) over the county's network. And then we would all get together and meet at the movies or some other neutral location. It was always interesting to see the disparity between the way people described themselves and then who they actually were. And of course the assumptions they would make about who you were based on what you said. I learned fairly quickly that if you said you had blonde hair and blue eyes, there were a whole series of other adjectives that these young men would decide fit you. Perhaps they had not noticed that not all women with that coloring are Barbie dolls.

I even dated a few of these guys. I used to have a threee date rule - you get three chances before I make up my mind. And it yielded some interesting results. One of the most amusing ones was listening to this kid (whose self-given nickname was Patton) try to have an argument with my uncle about tactics. Not very impressive. But also pretty much par for the course for high school in general.

But I am not in high school anymore. And I have to decide if my curiousity and the potential to either make a friend or be terribly amused outweigh the chance that I will be subjected to and have to reject someone's improper advances. I guess there are worse things than that - it is just something I try to avoid. On the one hand, you never know where you will meet a friend (and I have made friends in unusual places.) On the other hand, I do tend to be a bit too trusting and occasionally naive about people's motivations and intentions. But I hate to leap to a conclusion and damn someone who has not given me any reason to. And it is presumptuous to assume that he would have any prurient interests in me.

So I am undecided.

As always.