Pixels and Polls

June 13, 2003

Should I put my picture on this Web site?

When I initially launched the dot-com version of me, I figured the site was for editors, and they probably didn’t care what I looked like. On the other hand, I thought it might be nice for them to see that I was a real person with real quirks, like little smile lines around my mouth and eyes that crinkle at the edges.

Laziness decided it for me. I didn’t have a good picture I wanted to put up, and I wasn’t about to go through the rigamarole of getting headshots. And no, I wasn’t going to use the photo I’d used in my online dating profile. That idea was slightly discomfiting — not because the personals picture was unwholesome in any way. It’s just a black and white of my face. But I didn’t want to use the same image for two very different ventures.

However, it turned out that the two weren’t so different after all. After I wrote an article about online dating a month ago, a number of male readers decided to Google the name of the intriguing author. They came up with this site, and my email address.

Here are their cyber-valentines, spelling and grammar mistakes uncorrected:

hi (namaste/namaskar) Laura,
i just read your article in todays ny times, called 'ah, sweet mystery of email', and in it, you mention that you avoid meeting any guy who read an Ayn Rand novel. why so?
i'm reading her novels now, and i like them very much. i know only one two other people who read them, and they're both young women. and one of those women raved about the book (the fountainhead, i think it was).
regards,
joey.
washington, dc
p.s. how are you learning sanskrit, with a private tutor, or by yourself? i took hindi at the usda graduate school a few years ago, so i can read most of the script, and i tried to take sanskrit at georgetown u. last fall, but they charged the full rate of $3000 for that course, so i skipped it.

Laura... loved your email piece in the NY Times. Thanks for the chuckle on an otherwise slow day at work...
Eric

My law school pre-exam warm-up consists of a good cup of coffee and the NY Times. I liken the ritual to my pre-game warm-up for any sporting event, but instead of warming up other muscles, I am preparing one of my most valuable, for what is usually a three to four hour torture session. Well, instead of focusing on Civil Procedure this day, I find myself thinking about online dating. Great article by the way.
Next thing I know, I'm searching the Salon.com personals hoping your profile would pop up but I wasn't having any luck. Then my favorite Internet tool, Google, came to my rescue. Just typed in your name and viola, there is your bio, your resume and some of your work. No photo though, which I have to confess I was hoping to find. I did however acheive my goal in finding some way to contact you.
Now the problem is how does one grab the attention of a multi-lingual, yoga teaching, world traveling, Stanford Graduate (Phi Beta Kappa no less)? Also, how do I convince her I am not looking for a date but intellectual intercourse? Will you take me at my word?
I'm a 34-year-old law clerk by day and an evening, law student by night. I have also been a teacher, a small business owner, a certification coordinator for an aerospace company and a waiter, one of my favorite jobs.
Did I mention I made the front page of the Wall Street Journal? Did I mention it was the September 11, 2001 edition? I tend to be a bit of a troublemaker and at the time was embroiled in a labor union battle, which just happened to catch the attention of people outside of Sacramento.
I am also a certified SCUBA diver. My favorite outing to date was an eight-day trip from La Paz, Mexico all the way up the Baja Gulf. Actually swam fifteen feet from Hammerhead sharks. It was amazing.
Why are you searching online dating services? Just research or are you hoping to actually find someone? Care to discuss?
I'm attaching a photo of myself just so you can see I'm tall (6'6), dark (good tan from a trip to Spain) and handsome. Would this type of personal ad response elicit one from you?
“Senator86”

hey laura,
just a quick note to say that i've been reading your articles from time to time as an avid nytimes reader, and as a person with an ad in salon, i really enjoyed that last piece last sunday. i'm a seattle based cardiologist and travel often to LA (i trained at UCLA and left two years ago) but still consider myself an eastcoaster. i've been a times subscriber for close to ten years now and in fact i'm off to nyc tonite on a redeye. perhaps that's why i especially enjoyed your piece about new york which never got published... best of luck with writing/yoga/scuba/tango (i share two of the passions- writing and scuba, and would like to start yoga) steven btw-my salon profile is "*****". any comments? (nothing too cruel i hope)

I didn’t respond to any of them. Not that I don’t respond to people who contact me through my Web site. I do, and I love to get emails from people that way. I’ve actually made a good friend from my site, which is a story I’ll save for another day. But there were reasons not to respond to each of the letter writers above.

In case any of them are still reading my site, I am not going to say what those reasons were specifically. (I was recently mortified to think that the boy who asked me out in high school probably read the piece I wrote about him, because I used his full name, which I’ve since removed. If he Googled his name at all in the last 10 months, I'm sure he saw it, as it was one of only three search results. Talk about rubbing salt on a wound. Then again, he’s probably happily married in Ohio, while I am relegated to trolling Internet dating sites for potential love partners.)

Back to my Web site suitors. After I received their emails I was pretty happy I hadn’t put my picture up. I mean, I have my résumé online. Must I bare everything else as well?

Then again, if I really want to find someone to date, why not kill two birds with one stone? So, I’m taking a poll. Should I put my picture on this site? Let me know.

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