Hombres

That thing happened again where I have a romantic dream (not sexual, mind you) about a person I don't know in real life and don't think I'm attracted to but then spend the next day having feelings for them under some delusion that we now have a connection and they know this exists.

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Jackson Heights is a bit like a suburban high school of yore in that encountering guys who are even vaguely your type is so rare that someone who's even the slightest bit cool becomes cuter than they really are. Not that I'm seeking coolness at 42. At this point a non-beefy Anglo-ish guy over 5'5 and under 50 would qualify. (And yes, I do have a natural bias toward thinner, clean cut, white collar, white guys, which is what it is and doesn't mean I'm rigid about it in a "no fat chicks" way.)

And by encountering, I mean seeing on the street. Running errands or walking to the subway, I see very few eye-catching humans. There might not be any. Though, obviously, it was never as if strolling down the streets of Williamsburg you just met amazing men because everyone was generally young and good looking.

I deleted my Okcupid account because it was pointless.

I didn't think Tinder could be even more useless, but found out how wrong I was. In my new three-mile radius, I'll run out of options after maybe 40 guys (though for reference, there were even fewer in Santa Rosa, California) and absolutely none have friends or interests in common where in Williamsburg you could swipe until your finger tired. I will have to start adjusting my expectations (or just expand my geography) to big, bald guys with goatees and small children. Or foreign, which I'm strangely averse to despite having friends who almost exclusively date non-native-English-speakers and enjoy it. Oh, and I hate the outdoors. Or maybe I don't know what I even like anymore.

I was going to post a few screenshots, but is that really the kind of person I want to be?

Ok, maybe you'd like to go on a date with a 46-year-old blurry seafood salad named Lou.

There aren’t even Irish bars, a genre where a woman or two might be able to blend in, within reasonable walking distance. That's pretty un-Queens-like. Minus the rock 'n' roll bar for young Spanish speakers with $7 beers, the only nearby options are the Latino clubs where men pay women to dance with them and inexplicably have older Chinese women handing flyers out front, and gay bars, also geared toward Latinos. Hombres pretty much sums up this world.