Sexual Triage - Hopes For The Star Of Bethlehem, But Only Much Sorting And Waste

Brandi Adams was thirty-six, not very old by today's standards of longevity but old by the ticking of the biological clock. 'I've still time', she said, but when one added up preliminaries - cruising, sifting, sorting, vetting, and triage - there really wasn't much. By the time she found some semblance of Mr. Right, she would be at least two years older if not more.  

One mustn't hurry these things, but all in all after time for a reasonable engagement, settling in to marriage, and waiting a proper amount of time for children, the clock would be running down. 

So it was no time to ease up on the throttle and about time to give the old engine more gas, to 'get on her hurry stick' as her mother used to say, or 'time and tide waits for no man' as her father, fond of adages and aphorisms reminded her more often than not. 

But how?  She had just about run out of options. The Oak Room at the Plaza, the Senators' Lounge at the Willard, vernissages and grand openings at the Met and the National Gallery, dive bars, C&O Canal bird walks, and college reunions, all proven venues for meeting the right men had not panned out. She was left high and dry with only online dating apps remaining, and that was one route that she, a reasonably attractive, well educated, Washington professional would not travel. 

Or would she?  In these days of AI and the mining of big data, the chances of finding a match were vastly increased. It wasn't like the old days of filtering hundreds of responses, giving one or two an in-person try, and amazed at the vacuity of the whole affair.  'Professional' had its own cadre of second-hand paralegals; 'creative' meant rearranging deck chairs; and 'inspirational' meant fundamentalism. 

Now, especially if you were honest, artificial intelligence could sense these tricked out resumes, detect photoshopping, and probe far more deeply into sensibility and desire than the old mechanisms could. Sentient software refers to programs which reveal true individual reactions to hotel stays, river trips, restaurant meals, clothiers, hair stylists, and more.   Little innuendoes shared between girlfriends on social media, captured and bought by marketing firms, can provide more commercial insight than any 'How Did We Do?' questionnaire. 

The same software, enhanced and improved a hundred times, when applied to dating, produces remarkable results.  Yet, Brandi resisted.  It wasn't that she was snobby or overestimating her charm and sexual allure; it was simply too hard-hearted, mechanical, and unromantic. 

Of course there was Lana, a colleague in her office who, desperate, alone and hungry for love, came back from Lagos with an African husband who satisfied her every craving for six months, then having promised his family a high rate of return on his investment, returned to Nigeria with a sack full of Lana's money, secured from her many accounts with the same canniness as his fraudster Nigerian cousins. 

She got what she deserved, thought Brandi who was amazed that her colleague could have been so gullible, so stupid, and so desperate; but there it was. Love was not child's play to say the least. 

Lana had chosen Africa because white skin and blonde hair was all you needed to attract black men, but she paid a price for speed.  Having a white woman was not the same as loving one, and all she had to do was to look at the thousands of Baby Mommas across the Anacostia River to prove it. 

Men did the same thing, tapping into the going market for Thai wives in Bangkok, complaisant, submissive women for the asking; but somehow these third-tier men never seemed to have problems, the marriages held, children were had.  

Of course a number of these women were in someone else's pay, and had to send back remittances to their pimps on a regular basis or have their families roughed up; but by and large men seeking foreign women did far better than the Lanas of the world. 

No, sexual adventurism was not for Brandi.  Perhaps sexual tourism (Bali was apparently the place for a short-term affair-for-rent) might be a pleasant stop-gap, but she was looking for permanence. 

The trouble was within.  Brandi, like many women like her, were just too picky for words - a pickiness which masked a diffidence if not dislike for the whole man thing.  There were plenty of men who came within radar range and who would have honed in on the target if she had not been so off-putting.  To be honest, she really couldn't abide the idea of some gross man sharing her quarters, coming across her path at unexpected and unwanted moments, soiling things, disrupting things, and being a pain in the ass. 

She demanded attention, fidelity, complete honesty, respect, and courtesy and failure in any category was enough to sink the ship. She could have had Armand, but he hedged his bets about other women; or Felipe who simply left things for her to pick up; or Bart who hammered on about his interests with a fiercely conservative agenda with a sensuous Sri Lankan partner.  barely a nod in her direction.

There is no such thing as perfection, let alone in wandering, inconstant, single-minded, obtuse men; but Brandi seemed to think there was, and he was out there.  Of course he wasn't because even if some reasonable stand-in gave her a pass she would slap his wrist.  

Not that she had lesbian desires, for that kind of thing repulsed her. Of course her image was badly skewed and distorted.  When she thought of a lesbian she thought of Bernal Heights bull dykes in engineer boots, butch haircuts, flannel shirts, longshoreman manners.  She should have thought of Alice Weidel, lesbian German politician who might well be the next Chancellor - a lovely blonde woman with a sensuous Sri Lankan partner.

No, that route was closed.  Her GPS maps didn't even show it, so it was men or nothing.  What a depressing thought, but she was not ready to give up.  Hang in there she did for longer than she ever thought.  Lawyers, doctors, professors, investment bankers, software designers, startup mavens - all reasonable products at affordable prices - but she could never get past first base.  Now 40+ she gave some thought to packing it in. 

If this were a dime store romance novel, Brandi would find her true love and live happily ever after, but her life was too Hobbesian - solitary, brutish, nasty, poor, and short - to have that ending.  

She didn't hate men - she got long quite well with her male colleagues.  She just couldn't see fit to live with one given their manners and obloquy. 

It took her time to realize that she was and would always be an old maid, a spinster, an unmarried, childless woman.  Those were categories of scorn and disreputability when she was growing up, and yet here she was, soldiering on alone, facing the fag end of her life without anyone's shoulder to cry on. 

Oh, she found sisterhood in groups of equally solitary women, widows, and divorcees but they all were women without men, not women who never wanted men, and so the surface collegiality made the association unpleasant.  Better to get thee to a nunnery than to hear the whining misery of these ladies. 

She did go to a nunnery.  Well, not exactly but to an Iowa farm where she tended cows, chickens, and goats along side her cornfield, a perfect match.  Dumb men were a problem, dumb animals weren't. 

Faking It, The New Normal - Love And Money In This Brave New AI World

Brett Farley was not particularly happy with his avatar, the one he used on social media, electronic resumes, and FaceTime. He had tinkered with it for months, adding and subtracting, redefining hairline and jawline, trying to keep the original resolution of his face - which was sold and substantial but which lacked intimacy - but he was having difficulty.  

The AI program was so powerful and adept at following the most incidental instructions that sometimes it went overboard.  Brett was happy at the results which made him look far more like Henry Cavill than himself, Hollywood ready when he was just a junior executive at New Brighton Bank & Trust; and so he readjusted the algorithm until it came out looking like himself, but with a certain je ne sais quoi. 

 

The problem came when he went online dating services apps - too much off the mark could result in embarrassment at the first live meeting with a possible mate - but for all else, like building the media image he felt right for his website and for the virtual jobs he was looking for, this hyped version was just fine. 

Dating was where AI failed - or rather the entire virtual system failed.  Until there was complete, seamless symbiosis between mind and computer; that is when brick-and-mortar, flesh-and-blood ceased to matter and all relationships were virtually real, he had to stick to what God had given him. 

He found however, that given the almost universal transformation of reality into this AI-mediated virtual world, the faux image influenced the actual one.  That is, the more a prospective mate saw his mediated, cybernetically adjusted persona online, and the more she was influenced by such mediated images everywhere, the greater her suspension of disbelief.  Whatever he 'really' looked like was subsumed within the more attractive AI-generated image. The real and the virtual merged. 

President Donald Trump has made much of 'fake news', his term for reporting he doesn't like. There is nothing fake about the reporting of CNN, MSNBC, the BBC, and Politico.  They just tilt the editorial cant in consonance with their political view.  Real fake news is what is seen on Instagram.  The images generated are indeed fake but so real that the casual observer has no idea whether the speaker is real or invented. 

One notable site has a beautiful woman speaking Portuguese with a backdrop of Lisbon, Porto, and other well-known Portuguese cities.  She is inviting, seductive, personable, and sensually appealing.  Only when the viewers see 'her' speaking Spanish, German, or Russian in similarly appropriate cityscapes, do they realize it is one and the same 'person', AI-generated based on big data research which determines which woman is most appealing to most men in the cyber-audience. 

Famous celebrities from Donald Trump, members of Congress, Hollywood stars, and industry magnates are all shown in crafted scenes which could possibly be true but which are not - real enough to convince the viewer of the truth, but so well manufactured to be nothing of the sort.

Some of the distortions are for satirical purposes - a good thing, expanding the universe of print cartoonists like Tom Toles and the historic Thomas Nast into a live, three-dimensional form, and making it even more ridiculous and hilarious.  Yet when AI transforms the serious into the improbable, the trouble begins. When seeing  Pope Francis speak of an inclusive ecumenism and open borders to heaven, the site goes viral.  

It is just this welcoming message that many would like to believe; but anyone with even a casual acquaintance with Catholic doctrine would know that even this liberal-minded pope would never suggest such an easy ride to heaven's gate. 

Brett was still very much a flesh-and-blood man - the complete transformation of the world into a virtual paradise would have to wait - and he ventured more and more into the electronic dating market.  He was convinced enough of this unique AI-facilitated willing suspension of disbelief that he believed that his wholly created avatar would prevail in actual first meetings. 

Janey Perkins was Brett's Doppelganger in that she shared his complete immersion into the virtual world,  Her avatar, the electronic version of herself, was fundamentally sound - God's original architecture was in place - but all the rest had been tweaked and adjusted until it was an idealized but still believable representation of her true self. 

Both Brett and Janey had worked not just on the static visual image of their avatar, but on posture, comportment, and affect.  This was more difficult, for it involved acting - Stanislavsky method acting to be more precise - a skill which neither of them had. So when they met, although they recognized and accepted the avatar versions presented to them without hesitation, their acting was stilted and engineered.  One could use AI with great success on facial recognition, but when it came to the even more important looks, gestures, and animation, it wasn't so good. 

'Must work on that', said both Brett and Janey. 

Brett's company was using AI more and more in their conferences and giant screen performances of AI-generated executives giving speeches to employees were created. Although Brett could give a pretty good, rousing speech to regional sales managers, his avatar could do it a hundred times better.  It had been programmed not only with detailed information about him but with the features, personalities, and backgrounds of his listeners.  In other words, the avatar was Brett times ten, and the audience was ten times more open and receptive to what he said. 

No one said, 'Where's the real Brett?'

Simone, a Hollywood movie made twenty five years ago, long before AI and starring Al Pacino, was exactly about this phenomenon.  The Pacino character created an electronic beauty named Simone and through deft manipulation of the media, high-tech resolution and canny programming, was able to convince millions of viewers that she was actually real. As 'Simone' grew more and more popular and the demand to see her in person become louder and more insistent, her creator was in a bind.  All's well that ends well in Hollywood movie, but the prescience of the film was impressive. 

In any case, both Brett's career and dating went along swimmingly, and thanks to AI he was propelled farther in matters of money and love than he ever would have been without it.  

Rumor has it that after living together for some time under same roof and all avatar pretentions had necessarily been abandoned, neither one liked what they saw and divorce followed. 

That was to be expected, of course.  A completely virtual universe mediated by the individual with direct links from brain to computer and back was still a few decades off.  In this virtual world Brett would be able to assemble his own personal harem; but for the time being nothing doing.  Marge from Accounting was the best he would be able to do. 

Food As Plaything - Haute Cuisine, Locally Sourced, Organic, And Gluten Free, America's Dietary Obsession

 America was always a meat-and-potatoes satisfying, nutritious meal.  Farmers and their families worked hard, and there was no room for frills, eccentricities, or special needs.  Food was fuel, sustenance, and the stuff of life nothing more. 

Farm families looked forward to the evening meal because he was hungry. They woke up early to feed the pigs and the chickens, milk the cows, and untether the goats, ate a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, walked to school and back, tilled the fields, harvested, took care of babies and young children and by dinner time were as hungry as bears. 

No one ever asked what was for dinner, for it was always the same, varied only by the season, and was a function of what animal had been slaughtered, what vegetables were in the garden, and the size of the chicken brood. No one complained, for food was functional, a necessity, filling and sustaining. 

Times have changed and food for most, while a necessity, is also a plaything, a pastime, a hobby, an obsession.  Dinner is not simply to nourish but to please.  The color palette, the architecture, the fanciful mix of ingredients that suggest exotica, open the door to unique remoteness, that give off the scent of internationalism and sophisticated taste all represent America's new, prosperous, bourgeois culture. 

Millions of dollars are spent on food processors, Japanese steel cutlery, six-burner Viking stoves, sous-vide cookers, fine oak cutting boards, track lighting, center islands, French copper cookware, tinted rose and amber-colored glasses, perfectly weighted and balanced table settings, and much more. 

Trips to the grocery store have given way to three or four vendor locales - farmers markets, specialty butchers, fish mongers, bakeries and ethnic food stalls. 

Book shelves are stacked with recipe books and food travelogues.  Cut-out recipes from the New York Times, Food & Wine, and Gourmet are sorted and filed in alphabetical folders in kitchen drawers. Cell phones all have interactive food apps and social media are filled with food sites. 

In addition to this culinary revolution, a number of special dietary restrictions have emerged - waiters at restaurants routinely ask if we have any allergies or food restrictions he should know about.  Are we gluten or lactose intolerant? Vegan dishes are starred, low sodium and low-fat offerings are noted. 

Guests with any of these dietary restrictions will inform the hostess before hand to that she can prepare dinner accordingly.  When such prior notice has not been given, guests will often carefully separate offending items, the most polite of them in a way which suggests incompleteness rather than triage. 

 Locally grown products are preferred but the reasons are flimsy and illogical at best.  We live in a globalized market which has revolutionized the market - fresh fruits and vegetables any time of year, fish from the four corners of the globe - and 'local' is nothing more than imaginative whimsy.  Why fuss with Old MacDonald when the best, most well-tended, highest quality product may come from another continent?   

 

Nothing we buy whether peanut butter, ice cream, olive oil, salt or pasta is local; so why the flapdoodle about local produce?  It is an affectation, a political statement, a sign of good intentions but no more. 

Everything the food-aware American buys must be organic, when the cost is high and the benefits marginal.  The risks of cancer from a non-organic diet compared to an organic one are so low they are barely recorded.  While no one prefers a lettuce salad soaked in Monsanto, a good washing will take care of most of the offensive bits, and lifespan is barely affected by the rest. 

Americans are locked in a closed system where food has lost its basic function  and has become a part of the haute bourgeoisie obsession with ascribed value. 

Julia Child once said that the sign of a good cook was his roast chicken.  That is a simple product done to perfection; and while many households would never serve such a common, pedestrian, cheap food to guests, they have lost sight of inherent value and have turn to appearance, novelty, and fancy. 

The Paleolithic diet is a modern nutritional plan based on the presumed diet of Paleolithic humans. It is based on the premise that human genetics have scarcely changed since the dawn of agriculture, which marked the end of the Paleolithic era, around 15,000 years ago, and that modern humans are adapted to the diet of the Paleolithic period.

The Paleolithic diet consists mainly of fish, grass-fed pasture raised meats, eggs, vegetables, fruit, fungi, roots, and nuts, and excludes grains, legumes, dairy products, potatoes, refined salt, refined sugar, and processed oils. 

One of the hottest restaurants today is NOMA in Copenhagen.  The master chef is Rene Redzepi who forages for the ingredients that go into his five-star dishes. He gathers wild grasses, seaweed, leaves, periwinkles, nuts, and berries.  Although he does not bill his fare as Paleolithic for obvious reasons, he is a chef in that tradition.  He cooks his food, which is a big improvement on early the caveman, but he still has a profound belief that whatever grows can be eaten.

In Africa 'bush meat' - field rat, snake, monkey, lizard, or wild dog, whatever is available - is no different. Both cuisines are sensible, practical, and interesting without a lot of fol-de-rol. The Bushmen of South Africa eat hard-to-find grubs, not as a delicacy but particularly rich in fat and calories. Insects are eaten throughout the Third World.  In the bars and outdoor clubs in the quartiers of Kinshasa, dried, roasted, and salted caterpillars are eaten as snacks with beer. 

Going out of the way to recreate a subsistence diet, whether Paleolithic or African veldt, strip it down to its horny, tough, inedibility, and call it modern cuisine is an example of this fanciful obsession with food as plaything. 

Of course this idle obsession with food is for those with money. Those less fortunate are still eating cornpone, fatback, and greens, the occasional Big Mac and a Dairy Queen, candy and chips and bloating to obesity. Successive American governments have tried to encourage citizens to reform and return to healthier foods, but without success.  Cheap, processed high-sugar, high-salt foods are addictive. In a penurious two-job, low-paying trailer park existence, families have only the whammy of these immediately pleasing, endorphin-producing foods to look forward to. 

The Food Pyramid - that complicated, indecipherable image of a proper diet - was revised again and again to be more user friendly, but no one paid attention to it.  The current Secretary of Health is trying his best to wean poor Americans off their heart-stopping diets to no avail. 

So, it is only the upper middle classes who fuss with food and have turned it into this high-end plaything. Something fun to do on weekends, to share with friends.  A proper bougie meal not only shows off learned cooking skills, but shouts, 'I have been there!, to Thailand, China, India, the Azores, and Bali. Food is a sign of internationalism, progressivism, and broad thinking.  

'Toys 'R' Us' was the name of a popular toy store chain a few years ago.  'Foods 'R' Us' is the moniker, the meme, the essence of the American foodie, proud to show off his wares, his sophistication, his fancy, and his money.