Exposed – Part Two

(Click HERE to read Part One.)

Once Joey and I finally sat down to dinner, it turned into a pretty standard first date. Off the bat I wasn’t sure if he was my type, but he was funny and friendly, and I was enjoying myself and getting to know him.

Until he said “So did you google me before tonight?”

With all the craziness leading up to the date I’d actually managed to forget that he had found my blog! But once he asked that question, I knew what was coming.

Me: I didn’t google you, but I looked you up on Facebook. I didn’t find anything though.

Him: Yeah I keep it private.

Me: And did you google me? (I asked him this with the most knowing smile ever.)

Him: I did, actually. I see that you’re a blogger.

It’s weird. Even though I knew he had seen it, it wasn’t until he said those words that the reality of it hit me. I felt like I had been caught doing something wrong. My body stiffened and I got a nauseous feeling in the pit of my stomach. I remember having the same exact feeling over 10 years ago when my ex looked over my shoulder and asked me what I was typing. I wasn’t going to lie to him, so I had to tell him about my blog. You already know the rest of that story.

Joey was acting pretty normal about the whole thing. As he should, because when you think about it, it’s really not a big deal. I blog. So what? But I was bugging out! It was just really weird for me to have someone IN REAL LIFE know details about my life that I haven’t told them myself. It didn’t help when when he said “So did you talk to Spanish Guy? I can’t wait to see if you’re going to try the Move on me!” It made me laugh, but at the same time it was like “Holy shit, I am putting my life out there for everyone to read about, am I crazy for doing this??”

It’s so annoying how he found me. Turns out it had nothing to do with the fact that I gave him my email address. He found it using my OkCupid username – which is the same as my Yahoo ID! A few months back I sent a tweet to this girl telling her to email me at my Yahoo email. At that point my Twitter feed was displayed on my blog. I quickly realized how stupid it was to have put my personal email address on Twitter, and within a day I had deleted that tweet. But I wasn’t fast enough, apparently, because that tweet was “captured” by the search engines, and now, when you search my email address or my user ID, that Tweet is referenced and there is a link to my site. Great.

It was also really dumb of me to use that username for OkCupid. Identity protection FAIL! I’m going to change my username soon – it’s just taking me awhile to decide on a new one.

The rest of the date was uneventful. To be honest, I had so many blog-related thoughts running through my head that I was hardly even paying attention to Joey. We finished dinner, he walked me to my car, and that was it. I didn’t really feel a spark with him, but I don’t know if that’s because I was SO distracted by the blog. I was definitely willing to go on a second date, but it never happened. We texted for a while after that and we were going to hang out last Tuesday, but I canceled last minute because, well, to be honest, something better came up. Which was pretty fucked up of me. Story to come.