Word Association and Favorite Bio's

         Man, time flies when you're having fun...not on Tinder! It has been a while since I've posted here but I have been organizing my thoughts and collection of answers and "research" from my Tinder experience. Getting the cover and the first several pages done has been a relief and I am finally creating the pages that have been visions in my minds eye for months now. Below are the first few pages of the word associations that I have received from my matches. There are plenty more that I am working on organizing in an interesting way but this first batch is certainly an interesting mix. 

It's difficult for me to pick just one word that I associate with Tinder...I will have to really think about it and maybe come up with one at the end of my time with the app which will be in March. Some thoughts that I associate with it however would be the following:

-"Looking for Adventure" ( <-- the adventure thing... going to discuss this next time)

-"Does this snake around my neck make me seem more dangerous?"

-"Maybe if I don't smile in my mirror selfie I will seem mysterious."

           I'm going to throw in a small section of some of my favorite bios (please note that "favorite" refers to bio's that caught my attention for any number of reasons such as it made me laugh, it made me cringe, or made me shake my head out of disgust.  I will be adding these into the book in a more visually interseting way but I will leave you with the text for now. 

Zachary, 24: "Girl, I wish I was the helicase enzyme so I could unzip your genes."

Luke, 26: "I am a wizard. I love the surreal. I dance until the sun greets me in the morning."

Jordan, 22: "Honestly... I think it's hilarious how many bio's list food as a must. I mean name one person who can survive without it."

Sean, 25: "Too weird to live, too rare to die."

Christopher, 23: "I'm not here to make friends."

Mason, 25: "All I need is coffee, bud, Netflix, and my puppy. It's not like I don't want a relationship it's just most likely it's just not wit you sorry"

Steven, 22: "I try to take nothing seriously except having fun!"

Ryan, 21: "Bored"

Corey, 25: "So what if you are beautiful, what else do you have to offer?"

Paul, 27: "Currently using Tinder mostly for entertainmeny purposes. Though I'm far from perfect, I am a genuinely good person. I'm looking for a girl who is worth my time. Is Tinder the place to find her? Probably not, but even a blind monkey can find a banana every once in a while!"

Feyzullah, 27: "I don't feel like I belong on tinder without a photo with an exotic animal."

Eric, 22: "Look, life's bad. Everyone's sad. We are all going to die. But I already bought this inflatable bouncy castly so are you gonna take your shows off or what?"

Fun stuff right?

First Impressions

Soundtrack to reading this entry:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdzI-191xhU
*Open up a second tab and play this song while you read this entry*

First impressions are something that I know do not always hold true to how someone truly is as a person. I have a few friends that when I first saw them and had my first conversation with them I didn't think I would like them, I thought they didn't like me, etc etc, but we are actually very close now despite my first impression of them, and potentially their's of me. It's really wonderful when your first impression of someone is a pleasant experience but I am fully aware that is not always the case. I'm sure I've made some terrible first impressions during my 22 years on this green Earth but it is something that seems to me to be a tricky topic. It's all about perception. Meeting someone face to face for the first time, whether it be for 20 seconds or 20 minutes, can hold the key to a lot of information about that person whether they know it or not. On the back of this painting I wrote this about the second match I met up with in person:

               "I find it so interesting how perceptions develop. Our minds build this image or understanding of someone without having to see them in person. I met this match and before I did this was the image I had in my head of the two of us. He was this grey and dark colored cloud. He was fun to talk to [through messaging and texting] but had such a grim outlook on so many things. Is that a front or some kind of image he wants to be perceived as? He has felt a lot of pain and has built up so many walls to try to protect himself. Deep down I can tell he wants to be a happy person. I feel like this ball of color and positivity, he must get annoyed at how often I try to talk about the bright side. Oh well, he needs to hear it." 11/18/15

First impressions are funny things. I feel like I am a very perceptual and analytical person and can read a lot about someone based on their word usage, body language, and a myriad of other things. First impressions on Tinder are the funniest  to me because you make your split second impression or decision about someone based on a virtual profile that they have created to represent them them. That decision to swipe right or left to play the game of chance at potentially matching with them is based on their first picture most of the time, sometimes you look through their other pictures, sometimes you read their bio, but a decision is made in under a minute. Even through short interactions with people I can come up with a rough gestimate of some things about them as a person (I feel like I've learned a lot about profiling from binge watching Criminal Minds this summer...not that people on Tinder are criminal minds...)

 Anyway..so once you get past the first impressions within the app or within texting that person, meeting up in person is pretty much the next step if things are going well, they don't seem like a creep or murderer or catfish etc.  I was messaging this guy and things were going peachy. Really witty but intriguing conversation, seemingly interesting guy, yadda yadda. He was somewhat forward with me but not in the worst way, so I took a chance, gave him my number, and we chatted from there. I told him all about this project and asked for his input on a few things and to share his story with me. Then I asked him to get coffee, which he found to be bold of me since I didn't even want to give him my snap chat name, but again, it's all about first impressions and LIVE face to face is what is important to me. I had this theory for a while and it applied to this guy. If someone is super chatty, writes well and clear responses and participates in a conversation through a text or a message, I have great suspicion that person is more introverted in person. That has been my experience with a few guys anyway. They could text me alllll about their feelings, thoughts, etc. but were painfully quiet in person and couldn't seem to hold a conversation. I told this guy about my theory. He challenged it and said that people can be outgoing and be good writers and also express themselves well in their written words, which I totally agree with. 

So we had a plan to meet, and I had no idea what I was getting myself into. I couldn't even really get a good sense of what he looked like based on his pictures because he looked a bit different in all of them; different angles, different facial hair, and different filters. It was funny, I actually asked him if he was catfishing me because of the fact that I really couldn't tell what he looked like which was when he said he would send me a snap chat of himself. When I rejected that offer he just sent me a picture message of himself which helped prove he wasn't a catfish. I was still honestly expecting the worse case scenario when we met up. Non-the-less, I went for it. Public meeting space, coffee shop, afternoon time, all good. I got there early, got a coffee, got comfortable, wrote about about how I wanted to barf because I was so nervous, I was as ready as I would ever be. Another funny thing was I was sitting by a window and I saw someone walk by that I thought was him but he passed the door and walked around the corner, so I thought "Guess not".. then he walked back past the window and through the door and right to my table. Tall, well dressed, bright smile, green eyes. We must have talked for a solid 45 min straight before I told him he could go get a coffee or something. Not what I was expecting, which was a good thing. I was so pleasantly surprised. Eye contact was on point, super funny and interesting to talk to, very good at keeping the conversation going and asked good questions, score. The whole 2 hours we hung out I kept hearing the song (that I told you all to listen to as you read through this post) in my head because he sent me that link before we met because he saw that band in concert two days before we met in person. We parted ways because he had to be to work and left it at we would like to meet up again and would be in touch. The painting on the left was what I made after meeting him. I asked him what colors he wanted to represent him so the bottom speech bubble is him. The conversation was so well balanced that afternoon so this was how I wanted to remember it. 

I've had some pretty funny first impressions of people at this point. Some of my favorites are the following:

-One guy's first picture is him in a bathtub full of bagels

-Video chatted a guy and the first image that came up was him shirtless with vape smoke pouring in and out of the camera frame. I could have sworn the room was on fire that he was in.

-The first message from some guys are just ridiculously crass and those usually make it onto the Tinder Nightmares Instagram page *viewer discretion is advised* 

The thing about perceptions and impressions in this day and age is that they exist in two different worlds. They exist in reality, in the face to face physical interactions, but they also exist in the technological world of texting, messaging, emailing, and come with novels of unwritten rules and interpretations. This is where the game, the chase, the modern romantic experience seems to exist now but also where ones that existed in the physical realm first often find trouble.    I'll get into this more next time. 

Getting Started

The image above is a watercolor and pen interpretation of what Tinder kind of looks like in my head. Sometimes I think about how many people are on this green earth and it overwhelms me to think that each person has their own little universe so to speak. Their own friend circles, family, day to day routines. Their life may never overlap with mine and maybe it will. That's a whole other topic that blows my mind on a weekly basis, so back to this. In my minds eye I see stacks and stacks of profiles that make up each city or place. Living between Philly and New York I can see profiles from both cities and there are constantly new profiles. For those of you who don't know how Tinder works let me give you a quick run down of how it works. You start up a profile and you really don't have to do much else besides have a Facebook profile and the app pretty much does the rest for you. You can decide which gender profiles you would like to view, either male, female, or both, the distance you would like to view ranging from 1 mile away to 100 miles, and the age range you would like to see ranging from 18-55+.

So why the name? The reason I chose to title the piece "Tinderitis" is because I quickly found that the app has an addicting quality to it and that many of the people using it had caught this kind of disease to keep swiping, swiping swiping, exploring the thousands of profiles available at their fingertips at any given moment. It's an exciting "game" to see who is out there and who finds you attractive. I will develop this idea a bit more in the next post.

Soon after I started this project and started organizing my thoughts from my experience with the app as well as the thoughts of some of my matches I was told by a few of my matches that I should read comedian Aziz Ansari's book Modern Romance. His book explores pretty much everything that I was questioning and had thoughts about and after I started reading, I was amazed that he and I had similar thoughts about certain topics and was excited to read how someone else processed this information. Here is a link to read more about his book ( http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/23453112-modern-romance ). I will be referencing some of his writings throughout the blog and I recommend you check it out! 

Each week I will try to organize the posts by topic and include a few drawings and illustrations that will be in the book. Some of my thoughts and writings will make it to the blog but some of them I will leave as exclusive to the sketchbook. That way once the sketchbook is in the Art Library there is something new for you to see!

The next post is going to be about first impressions. Stay tuned!

The Beginning of the Journey

Welcome to the Tinderitis blog! 

Let me explain what is going on here. 

Open 12/28-12/30 10am-7pm

As an artist I am fascinated by the different social constructs that make up our daily lives and am in constant awe of humanity and how we function, why we do what we do, what everyone's passions are, etc. I really enjoy thinking about what home, community, knowledge, friendship and love mean to different people and find so much joy in hearing people's thoughts about anything they're willing to share about. Humans are beautiful and the act of sharing thoughts with another human is a very special thing that I think people take for granted. I believe there is beauty to be found in every situation even the ones that leave you speechless, tearless, breathless, and broken. 

So. The project. I realized that since I am now a college graduate I guess I can officially call the art that I make "pieces" and not "projects." It's hard to break old habits though. Bear with me if there is an inconsistency with my wordage? So Tinder. Why art about Tinder? Well I'm so glad you asked. My experience visiting the Sketchbook Project was running parallel to my introduction to the Tinder universe and after purchasing a blank sketchbook with the purpose of filling it and returning it to the collection, I was realizing that my very brief Tinder experience was filled with a comical collection of screenshots of profiles that made me either actually LOL or shake my head in disgust yet still took a screenshot because of how ridiculous they were. I thought, "man it would be so fun to do little illustrations of some of these and make some kind of artistic piece about what I've found on here." Then it dawned on me. The Sketchbook. I could make a journal that illustrated not just my own experience with Tinder but the thoughts and opinions of the other users that I match with and come into contact with.

I will be using this blog as a space to process my thoughts about different topics that Tinder has sparked as well as share conversations that I've had with others about these topics. If you care to share, please do! I don't want this to become a battlefield of any kind but rather a place where thoughts and ideas can be shared in a neutral way, respectful way. Don't like what I'm saying? I would be interested in hearing your opinion as well and am open to looking at things in a different perspective but let's all be respectful of each other's thoughts. I'm not interested in changing anyone's mind, just am interested in analyzing different situations and hope to share a bit about the way I think about things.

This video is the first idea of what I think I am going to make the front cover of the sketchbook look like. Please excuse the poor quality.