Update

New message totals:

	total letters	94
	total 1st replies	40	42.55%
	total 2nd replies	20	21.28%
	total meets	7	7.45%

(The 10 I wrote since last count have all totally tanked.)

Potential title: Electronic Mementos of Imaginary Love Affairs

I am in the process of tagging the messages with the following traits:

• word count
• "too old/ too far away etc."
• MFA/ grad school
• photography
• about me
• "your post/ your profile"
• this message
• fake formal language/ statistics
• complement
• "coffee/ hang out"
• self-deprecating
• direct question
• my name

I believe that some of these will follow distinct trends (I have begun to deliberately leave out "coffee/ hang out" and add more direct questions.) I wonder if any of those trends have any noticeable effect on response rate. I am also curious to see if there is a correlation between word count and message frequency. It would make sense for more frequent letters to be shorter. I don't know if it's true.

I may borrow some Anthro 101 books from my housemate, learn more about ethnographies, and decide if I want to refer to my overarching self portrait project as an autoethnography. I like the word, but I don't know if I want it to apply. There are ethnographic interests involved in my inquiry, but I don't know if I care about those interests. They are tangential to my own. We shall see.

Also, I have gotten over my hangups regarding Lance. I have decided I want to go for it. I have decided to find a way to ask him out for food/drink. I have chickened out tonight, but not written it off completely. Part of me still thinks that waiting is a good thing, given my very fickle track record. Part of me thinks that is less relevant here, because this is not mad-crazy-crush but the slow kind that seems less likely to boom and bust. In the meanwhile, I am not writing any new messages until this is sorted out. Which kind of annoys me, because-- ninety-four! That's SO CLOSE to 100! But that is a bad reason to write. I don't want to do that.

For those of you following along from home, it's Lance.

Today, I got my life back. For more than a year, I've been working with the pieces of my life, only a few at at time. And it was fine. I was okay. Most of the time. Today I looked at my pieces and realized that they all fit together again, I have everything I want again, everything I wanted to keep with a little extra money and security thrown in.

friend

I feel like an old woman with a dirty mind. I'm embarrassed. But, damn, I'd get cougared-up for this boy.

JD

I don't even drink whiskey. But this makes me happy.

Iggy is famous

She said, "Do you have a cat?" I said, "No, but I live with one. Why, do I have cat hair all over me?" And she said, "No, but I googled 'Angela University of Iowa Photography' and got links to your master's project, which got me your full name, which got me your website, which got me your radio essay about online dating which got me to your OK Cupid profile, and you talk about having a cat."

Woot!

good reading

23

I think I like you