It is rather amusing when life gets in the way of virtual reality, and when strange coincidences and the utter smallness of the world lead you to run into people at places you would never suspect. Like that time that my doctor/patient confidentiality was effectively shattered when, while visiting my shrink, I ran into an acquaintance. What does one do at such a mutually awkward and embarrassing moment? Rather than explain our presence, we both graciously nodded and walked past each other, me leaving the couch of healing and she heading towards it. After leaving the office of course I thought, “Gee, I wonder why does SHE needs a shrink??? What is so freaky about her?”

Of course, this wasn’t the first time I’d run into someone at this office, for this has happened twice before. As always, nodding politely, both parties are left wondering [1] What the other person is doing there, and [2] How so many interconnected people end up using the same psychopharmalogical pill pusher.

Of course, these things happen between online spheres of travel too, as when I agreed to go on a date with SexMonkey71. I had met him, with a more respectable screenname, on one of the kinder, gentler, less sexually-blatant dating sites. Unbeknownst to me, however, he had seen me on one of the more perverted sites, which is why he unrooted my yahoo profile and tracked me down. Not that I’m not a pervert myself, but I generally wished to have fair warning if perhaps someone might have expectations of immediate promiscuity so that I may ward this off with appropriate body language and attire.

Anyway, when SexMonkey hit me up for a drink, he found my guard down due to a recent series of online dating disasters. At that point, I was fed up with wasting two or three weeks chatting and impressing someone with my stunning repertoire of wit and charm, only to meet them and find that they look like Jack Black instead of their Jimmy Fallonian profile pictures. So on a whim, I chatted for a mere thirty minutes and decided, what the hell, I’ll meet this guy for drinks tonight in a very public place. He was quite handsome in person, which was particularly notable since I didn’t generally go for the blonde surfer-boy type, so we were both reasonably pleased with each other’s physical appearance.

Actually, SexMonkey71 was pretty fucking hot. The smugness with which I followed him to a booth was quickly obliterated when we sat down, upon which time he smiled like Jack Nicholson playing the Joker and declared, “Wowwwowww . . . You have a niiiiiice body. Let’s go to that park down the road and get it ON baby.” Then, and only then, while I sat there speechless, he proceeded to tell me that he only asked me out because I was on what is known as a swinger site, so I must be slutty. Sigh, of course he was a profile with a cock picture, as I later looked him up to find out, but how was I to know?

Then sometimes one’s online and real lives collide. This can have pleasant or unpleasant consequences, such as the time I signed up for that swinger service out of pure ignorance, thinking that the word friend sounded nice and fuzzy, as if you would get to know someone before dating them. Wrong. Instead, my initial search on the site revealed that 85% of profiles were accompanied by cock pictures and another 10% were pictureless. So that left very few profiles with face pictures and then I found ONE guy in my city who was actually quite cute. We soon started chatting before I realized we knew each other semi-professionally. Crap. Oh sure, in retrospect, his pictures looked kinda familiar, but damn. And after we both had to explain our presence on the pervert site, the level of discomfort was horrendous. Scratch that. It was time to reload and start afresh once more.