Author Archives: Joel Derfner

So when I was four or five, we went (as we did not infrequently) to my great-grandmother’s house to visit her. The grown-ups all sat together and talked about boring grown-up things, and I went into the kitchen and raided the maid’s stash of Reader’s Digest magazines. (I had, unfortunately, left my copy of The Hound of the Baskervilles at home.) There was an article in one about vampires, which I started reading and which scared me a great deal. The more it scared me, the more avidly I read, and when I got to the end and saw that the article was to be continued in the next issue, I pawed frantically through the rest of them until I found said next issue, and continued reading. By the time the grown-ups were done talking and everybody was ready to go, I was quivering with fear, even though it was still broad daylight and we were in South Carolina, not Transylvania, where, according to the article, vampires were rumored to hang out. (The article suggested that vampires might actually be the stuff of legend rather than of reality, but I dismissed that idea with a haughty toss of my incipiently homosexual head.)

Eventually, after we got home and had dinner, it was time for me to go to bed.

And I wouldn’t, because of course the vampires were going to come and kill me.

I cried and cried—I will note that I did not scream—until my mother finally loaned me the gold cross she wore around her neck, at which point I went to bed willingly, if still terrified. I’d have been happier if I could have taken a stake with me, but I wasn’t allowed to play with sharp things so I knew better than to ask.

My Jewish father (I was being raised Jewish and eventually converted to Judaism) was understandably disconcerted by the whole gold cross thing, so he went out the next day and bought a gold Star of David for me to wear to bed.

It is a testament to his skill as an attorney that he managed to convince me it would do just as well as protection against vampires. By the time he was done sweet-talking me, I went to bed feeling as safe as any four- or five-year-old possibly could in the face of what terrors the world might hold.

And I tell you, I wore that thing for years.

Somewhere along the line, though, I lost it.

And now there’s nothing to protect me against the terrors the world holds.

Shit.

I know I promised vampires, but once again I seem to be proving myself a man not of my word.

Because I’m seriously thinking of giving up the search for love.

Not the blog, mind you; that I’ll keep (though I do have plans for relaunching under a new name at some point in the near future). Just the eponymous search.

What’s sending my thoughts in this direction is the fact that my failure to spark with the guy who liked Darth Vader was actually more than just a two-date event. We saw each other a total of four or five times before making out and discovering our lack of chemistry. (This in itself gives me pause—it wasn’t so long ago (check my “best of” section) that I’d be on my back for any number of people I’d never met, much less gone to dinner with several times.) And this fellow seemed so perfect in so many ways. In fact, I believe he’s the first person I’ve gone out with in a very long time who fulfilled all my criteria: smart, funny, cute, compassionate, stimulating, and a top. Yet in the end there was still something missing.

So what’s wrong?

I don’t know if it’s a question of the watched pot not boiling, or of my standards being too high, or of something else I can’t even conceive of. (I would write something about “the universe not wanting me to be dating somebody right now” except that descriptions of the universe as a sentient entity that actually gives a fuck about what happens to us make me retch.)

Whatever it is, I’m making a decision here and now. I’m not going to search for love anymore. If it finds me, great; if not, then I’ll . . . I’ll . . .

Well, I’ll just . . . um . . .

This may be more difficult than I expected.

I was going to write a post about my first encounter with the idea of vampires, but I don’t have the energy.

Why don’t you have the energy? you might ask.

Because I’ve spent the last hour creating a Best of the Search for Love sidebar, which you should be able to see over to the right. Those of you who haven’t been reading this blog from the beginning and don’t love me enough to go back and read every word of the archives can now browse through a selection of my (and others’) favorite posts.

Vampires tomorrow, I promise.

Yesterday I got an e-mail with the subject heading “Do you think about being alone

For September 11, I was going to write a post about how gross I find it when people get all emotional about today, and about the 3,000 people who died here, but didn’t bat an eyelash at the savage genocide in 1994 of 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda or the million Somalis who have died from the war and famine that rack their country or the labor camps and torture and forced abortion and sterilization with which China is destroying Tibet but then I passed an ice cream truck and all rational thought was driven out of my head by a desperate longing for a chocolate sundae with strawberry sauce.

The number of people who saw fit to e-mail me on September 8 and tell me I wasn’t useless

Of course, there’s nothing like your dad’s coming to town and allowing himself to be talked into buying you a Massani leather jacket to make your feelings of fatness, age, and uselessness fade as if you had never been anything but svelte, nubile, and of inestimable value to everyone around you.

There’s nothing like cheerleading practice to make you feel fat, old, and useless.

And if anybody leaves a comment saying “You’re not useless!” I’m kicking your ass.

Thursday I went on a date with somebody I met through Planet Out. We were having dinner and talking about Star Wars. He said, “I was ten when I first saw that movie, and the first time Darth Vader came on screen, I thought, ‘Now there’s somebody I could really like a lot.'”

It became clear to me in that instant that we were meant to be together.

So I was very excited to go out with him again last night. We had dinner again, went book shopping, went book shopping at another place, and went back to his apartment, where we made out.

And there was no spark at all.

This guy is cute, smart, funny, stimulating, compassionate, and, one assumes, given that he responded to me after reading my profile, a top. And yet there was just nothing there.

Clearly I am going about this the wrong way.

Now, if somebody would just tell me what the right way is, I’d be all set.

In Handel’s opera Scipione, the heroine, Berenice, sings:

Ahi! Non bastan
le mie pene
ch’altri viene
pi