Movies Seen per Year

I haven't been seeing a lot of films lately, at least not in the theater, and now, I notice, not even on video. Reasons? There are probably many--lack of time being one. But another is how much films in the theater cost (too much, in my view). And still another is probably my switch, this year, to DSL, which now allows me to stream stuff--I end up watching stupid random stuff online (TV shows, home cat videos, skits, speeches, vlogs) and sometimes the occasional movie (without even venturing to the video store). Here's how the number of films each year stacks up:

The 2011 total for theater movies went up as high as it did mostly because of the return of the French film festival to campus--probably the last one we'll have, since the professor sponsoring it was tired of doing it. Cheap foreign movies--it was great. The theater movies total this year was zero until the fall, when my friend Al started asking me to accompany him to a few films.

Facebook Friends

I have a lot more women friends on Facebook than men. I feel a bit embarrassed by how disparate the difference, as if I'm some sort of love and leave them sort (this from a guy who's never managed to get them in the first place). I guess I'm just too nice a guy to have a gal take an interest in me as more than friends. Here's the breakdown:

Different parts of my life render different levels of Facebook friends. The church friends are probably where a large chunk of the women tally up (and I guess I did try lamely to date some share of them). Then again, so would work be largely female, since I work in a profession that is dominated by women (about 70 percent of my coworkers are women). And even my relatives--I have only one male cousin. I'm surprised by how many high school acquaintances I'm connected with versus grad school; I made no lasting undergrad friends. Local friends take up a large share; I wonder how much of that is a testament to how much I like where I live and how comfortable I am in this setting versus how much of that is simply a result of where I am/was living when Facebook came into being (that is, would I have more Texas friends if Facebook had come into being when I was living there?).

OkCupid Contacts

So a few months ago, I was talking with a female friend of mine regarding OkCupid, a free dating site. She's not impressed by many of the guys' profiles on there, like, What are these guys thinking? Nor is she often impressed by the messages they send. I was curious about the number of messages she gets per week, mostly because I wanted to see how that stacks up with me, as a guy. Unfortunately, she didn't answer the question directly; she simply said it depended on how often she was on. (This is a true answer, though; the more one is on, the more often one comes up in searches and the more likely you look like a person who is actively using the site and thus like a person who might be dateable.)

I signed off of the site in December, when another gal contacted me and I realized that I really wanted to focus on one gal in particular who I first went out with in August. I hadn't written to many women on OkCupid in a long while anyway, since I have a very specific kind of person in mind to date and haven't really found it there--nor did I ever really expect to. If I were more keen on just going out on friendly dates with no real potential of anything more than a new friendship, as I sometimes get in the mood to do, I might be tempted to write more women. Indeed, to my chagrin and disappointment, I have returned to a period, as of last week, where that again appears to be the case and have thus returned to having a posting on OkCupid and other such sites.

I suspect that on OkCupid I probably get a 10 to 30 percent return rate on my initial messages. Such seems to have been the case in my memory. My profile has typically been rather untraditional--and it really hasn't said much about me in an explicit form. And that seemed to work, strangely enough.

My Plenty of Fish profile (which I also took down in December and refreshed this past week), by contrast, is quite sincere and generally has received no responses. I remember once, a few years ago, writing to about fifteen women on there, receiving two "no thanks" replies, and only one message that led to any kind of communication--that is, a string of messages and a planned date. In the end, the woman decided she didn't want to go out on the day of the date and then stopped communicating. (As I recall, shortly thereafter, I ended up going out with a woman from OkCupid, one who replied back of probably five or so I messaged.)

On OkCupid, I am just goofing off--I am not serious. But that is probably less threatening and more amusing; the fact that a woman doesn't know up front the kind of person I am looking for leaves more room for anyone to e-mail.

And it also has led to a few people writing to me out of the blue, rather than me as the guy taking the lead. So here's how many women messaged me to say they liked my profile or didn't like it or just wanted to say hello or whatever, by way of introduction, on OkCupid, by month for 2010 and 2011:
So basically, as a guy, I was getting, in those two years, on average about one message out of the blue every two months. I'd be curious to know how this stacks up with other guys, as well as other women.

IM Chats by Year

When I first got online at home, around 1999, I became an e-mail fanatic. Probably, about six months later or so, I discovered instant messaging, and that became a constant for many an evening for probably a year or so. But the IM usage dropped off precipitously once I moved here. There are likely multiple reasons for that: I have more friends here. I have less interest in trying to get dates online. Chatting online is no longer "new" to me, so its novelty has worn off. And finally, chatting online no longer seems as easy to accomplish as it once did.

By the latter, what I mean is that Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, MSN Messenger--these services all no longer seem as prolifically used as they once were. Many folks text rather than IM, or they IM straight from the phone, or they chat via a social network like Facebook, and since one of the main reasons I chatted was to meet new people and Facebook seems more structured around helping you stay in contact with people you already know, I'm not as motivated to chat on it (but see above also: there are a lot of things these days I'd rather do than chat online).

Nevertheless, I present what few statistics I have in this regard, which only takes into account chat from 2005 on, when I got this particular computer. The chat stats for 1999 to 2005, unfortunately, were lost in a crash. By 2005, chat in my life was already in decline; nevertheless, if you can imagine the trajectory shown here going backward, you'll probably see a pattern you could plot out to years before.

The blue line on top represents chats along with chat attempts (often people don't answer an opening line on IM); the red line on bottom represent actual chats. Where the blue disappears, all attemps to chat were successful.
The 2011 chat is the reason for my blog entry. I had a wonderful online chat one evening with a gal I'd e-mailed back and forth with a few times. But to note how my feelings about chat have changed, I really felt more like talking on the phone with her, but more than that, I felt like being out on an actual date. It was loneliness after the cancellation of a date with another gal that caused me to check into Facebook in the first place. A chat, as wonderful as it was, was a poor substitute.