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.