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Nerve | Aug 29 2003

I was just… actually it doesn’t matter what I was doing, but I found this document I wrote many moons ago when I was, as they say, “doing Nerve.” The document begins with list of women I was corresponding with at that time. I wrote down their names because I needed to figure out who to contact to say I’d just met someone I saw some potential with and was leaving Nerve. My little notes to myself are why I bother to share this.

Elaine - no need
Kietryna - call or write
Alexandra - ?
Heidi - gulp
Eva - call or write; oh fuck
Nancy - call or write
coy_mistress - who cares

The document (entitled Nerve Misc; admittedly not the most thrilling title but who knew I’d be going public with it) concludes with three unusable profile headlines I’d written earlier and subsequently forgotten.

(If you don’t already know, online dating services require members to compose short headlines for their profiles. It’s hateful and yet of a piece with what’s happening here, which is that people are publishing advertisements for themselves as romantic partners or fuck buddies or what-have-you. When you browse the profiles, you see three things for each person listed: username, headline, and more often than not, thumbnail photo. On the basis of these three things, you decide whether or not to view that person’s profile. All of which is to say that the headline is crucial, even more so than the photo, which besides being tiny is sometimes so cleverly artistic as to be revealing of nothing so much as the person’s Photoshop skills. Nerve has thousands of profiles (the bigger services have tens of thousands), and so no one, not even a maniac like myself, can possibly read them all. Thus an insipid headline would always earn a quick no from me, just as a brilliant headline never failed to inspire a click. In fact I kept a file of my favorite headlines and would write to these women, regardless of my interest in them, just to say how great their headlines were. Regrettably this file is now lost and all I can remember is the one that made me spray spit on my monitor: Obscene amount of T&A. (T stood for tenacity; A for attitude. But you already knew that.))

I realized today that my rejected headlines, each of which was rejected for a reason that’s even clearer to me now than then, comprise a little poem. Here is that poem. It is very short. I think it’s called Three Rejected Nerve Headlines.

1. Again
2. You have no idea
3. I never intended to read her journal