"I'm not perfect, and so aren't you"

A pastiche of excerpts (slightly remodeled) from online personal ads, 2014.

Hey. So what's up? Unicorn here. I haven't been on a date in ten years. Why do men lie? I meet men, and then I find out they have girlfriends or wives. I’m a very hungry caterpillar, and the majority of men here give me a stomachache. I’m tired of online dating so I thought I’d post to the Internet instead. If you are charming, I will eat you and turn myself into a beautiful butterfly. I live in another state; if that is a problem, I understand.

I do not want to date a man who is old. One other thing: It hurts my feelings when people ask me to send a picture of myself and then they make fun of it and tell me it’s not my real photo. Knock it off.

I’m a pretty girl, age 40, who lost weight in the wrong places. I am a saggy mess with no boobs. I need a “face guy” who’ll think I’m sexy when I’m hiding behind nice clothes. I need a man over six feet tall because otherwise I’ll feel like I’m bending over to hug a child. Please do not try to convince me that I secretly want to date someone shorter, and I'm not interested in your classy comments about how you make up for it in other ways. Someone trim and active, too, who will inspire me to shred the rest of my weight off – not another couch potato like me. A little thug appeal would be the icing on the cake. I listen to Miley Cyrus. You must love pit bulls and hamsters. Let’s harvest the honey bud of life.

I’m a Native American girl. We dance to make the weather, and we are fascinated by boys with white skin and blond hair. You know, Pocahontas John Whatever Quetzlcoatl type shit. I need a forever boyfriend before I make it snow.

I’m 30 years old, and I have no one to stand by me. I could use a strong support system behind these walls. I can use all the love and help I can get in here. I prefer people who have their lives in order. Send your address so I can get in touch.

I was born with a syndrome. I hope it does not scare anyone off. I have brown hair and green eyes. I really want to be married at some point. I know the importance of a physical relationship between a woman and a man, but I don't want to focus on sex all the time, so I’m looking for a sexless relationship.

My ethnicity: white and pretty. Where is my punky-looking sweetie? Can you be my knight in shining armor as well as my homie lover-friend? I promise to accept you for who you are and to love you all the more for your flaws that make you unique. (Unless you smoke cigarettes – sorry.)

I am beautiful in every way. I seek an American husband with the objective of immigration. My brother, a former Marine, will screen out the losers. I hope to hear from the right man. Please include your GPS location.

I’m different, not like other women, by the way. Convince me why I should be with you. If I have to tell you what “blow my mind” means, don’t bother responding.

Looking for a guy who wants to be friends and loves dark meat. Hit me up if you’re serious. Be a real man. Successful and classy. Blue-collar and down-to-earth. No one stuffy or prissy. No erectile dysfunction, please. I’m feminine with a touch of tomboy on the weekends. I'm looking for a good-looking, laid-back guy who's fun to be around. That may be asking for too much on this retarded site. I’m job searching. I’m crazy but harmless. I just want an uncut guy for a long-term relationship.

I’m a junior in college looking for an actually relationship. Someone who lives alone, smokes, and likes snakes, and is walking distance from me. I will walk over to your place and we can smoke and play video games. If it’s not too much to ask, I was wondering if my two pet snakes can live at your place for a little while. Also, I need to rearrange my apartment, and my girlfriends and I can’t do it ourselves because we're too short. If you’re interested, feel free to respond.

Once again, someone has flagged my ad for removal, and it has pissed me off. Someone out there is trying to ruin my chances of finding love. Whoever you are, knock it off. You should be ashamed of yourself! For those of you who like my ads, thank you. I miss date nights and I’m looking for a soulmate. If you are interested in me, please respond, and whoever is flagging my posts, stop reading them. This ad is for people who are interested in me.

I honestly don't know what to ask anymore. Or what to even write. I guess what I'm looking for is a guy best friend with whom I can hang out and can text/call constantly even when we just finished doing something together. Actually, I’m just looking for someone to chat with, not a relationship – I am too unstable for that. I've been trying to get help, but no one wants to help me, and they wonder why there are mass shootings.

Remember the days when you had to call a girl to hear her voice? It’s all gone now. Everything is so f–ed up. I’m bored and lonely. I need a guy who is loyal, respectful, not into head games. White only. This Sunday, we could go to the beach or just sit around. We could make dinner and build a relationship that leads to marriage and kids.

Tough divorced executive seeking a f–toy college jock houseboy with passion, stamina, and great equipment. I'm not the slow and tender type. The whole 'I'll please you before I please myself, baby' thing just makes me laugh. Sorry, guys. Nothing excites me more than having command of a well dressed masculine guy. I find myself imagining what type of underwear he's wearing or how well equipped he is. We all have a type. Mine is young, strong, and has an ass that’s real easy to look at. I want it no-strings attached in the hot tub, the car, and the balcony. Get back to me with your most convincing pics.

Whatever happened to chivalry? “Yes, ma’am,” “No, sir,” and the like? I am a Southern belle. Whatever happened to husbands bringing their wives flowers, and children respecting their parents? Whatever happened to Christian values and human decency? There must be at least one God-fearing man who isn't married, locked-up, cheating, gay, or on the down-low who is interested in meeting me. If I wanted a bitch, I’d date broads. If you’d like to take my pain away tonight, send me a selfie.

I’m in an emotional and physical transition right now. I need grounding. Are you up for the task? I work second shift. I’m not looking for a “texter”. Please be patient with my replies. I'm not perfect, and so aren't you. Please don't bring up my past when we’re fighting.

I can’t walk around with a sign on me. My computer won’t allow me to send pics out, but I am attractive. I will “giggle” my hips for you! Don’t send a dick pic, please.

I like blond guys, mulattos, and light-skinned black guys. I like Jews – or guys who might be Jewish, LOL – with names like Jacob. I like guys who smoke pot. I like Chris Brown.

If you’re trolling these messages while eating popcorn and laughing your ass off, hi! I do the same thing! I have always associated this website with sexually transmitted diseases and serial killers, so, before anything sexual can happen between us, you must get tested for disease.

There's more to life than masturbating over fictional characters. At least, I think there is. Not that it can't be fun. But, now that it's a new year, maybe I should try giving my vibrator a rest.

I want a tall man to call my beast. I prefer long hair and a waxed chest. Are you career-orientated? Are you caring like a dolphin? Can you read between the dotted line of love?

I think I am really pretty. I rarely drink. There’s so much more to tell. If you’re not opiate-friendly, there’s no point in talking. We won’t get along.

Here’s the catch – I’m in Rhode Island.

 

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Image credit: Silhouette defining a female body shape. Public domain, from Open Clip Art Library on Wikimedia Commons. Superimposed on the background of a peacock tail at Kuala Lumpur Bird Park by Loke Seng Hon, Creative Commons 3.0, on Wikimedia Commons.

Jesus preaches eros in James Frey’s ‘The Final Testament of the Holy Bible’

James Frey's latest novel, "The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," features an enigmatic Christ-figure named Ben who is born in the modern United States. He is followed mainly by drug dealers and prostitutes and by most other people who happen to cross paths with him. People are impressed by his apparent lack of fear when facing persecution or pain and they are stunned by his miraculous recoveries from ghastly wounds. However, what really attracts them to him and convinces them of his Messianic nature is something ineffable about his presence, his glow, his magical handshakes and kisses. In his presence, his followers find the strength to stop using drugs; they have more loving sex; they care for their families; they stop feeling guilty. Lacking formal education in theology, they express uncomplicated, sincere beliefs about God in direct language.

James Frey is infamous for appearing on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005 to promote a memoir of drugs and crime that turned out to contain significant fabrications. The literary world forgives an author's sordid past - indeed, it makes for great confessional material - but is staunchly unforgiving of plagiarism. Frey has since turned his sights to fiction, which one would expect to be a better fit for him. Indeed, if he had pulled it off brilliantly in "The Final Testament of the Holy Bible," one might even have been inclined to stop mentioning his past transgression.

"The Final Testament of the Holy Bible" was self-published online on Good Friday 2011. An art gallery owner also published 11,000 print copies. Three weeks after its release, Amazon's ranking system revealed that over 15,000 other titles were selling better than Frey's new book. Nearly three years after its release, it had slipped to 72,000 in the rankings for Amazon Kindle books.

In reviewing this novel for the Guardian, Mark Lawson explained that "Fictions of this kind operate an unusual kind of suspense, in which the main tension is not what might happen but whether certain expected events still will." In other words, the reader constantly wonders: is there going to be a virgin birth, a persecution, a crucifixion equivalent? Such events from the life of Jesus, with modernized and inexact twists, are revealed gradually over the course of the 400-page novel. While Lawson seemed to find this approach sufficiently suspenseful (he described the book as "compelling as both a thriller and a provocative riposte to religious orthodoxies"), not every reader will share this fascination. After all: Either Ben will turn out to have been born of a virgin or he will not. Either he will rise from the dead or he will not. Nothing is at stake. The answers to these questions are not posed as having potential psychological effect on any characters, nor is it clear how the answers would affect the storyline or the validity of Ben's message. As such, one might easily perceive this as a long, meandering story that has been heard before, a "remake" of the old movie in which a few scenes have been changed or portrayed more graphically but the backbone remains the same.

Secondly, the presentation of Ben as an advocate of free love - any gender combination, multiple partners, in public - is a bit bewildering for a Christ figure, as is his complete rejection of the Bible as a source of wisdom. According to Ben's own "common sense" (as opposed to divine revelation), there is no reason to obey Biblical morality because we don't "live in a two-thousand-year-old mud hut with no electricity...This world is not that world. That world is dead. Those books were written for that world. Those books are dead." Likewise, "Books are for telling stories. They're not for denying people the right to live as they choose."

Point taken, but this message is not shocking to many Americans in 2011. So, why would the Messiah return to Earth and suffer pain only to preach this anti-literalist message to a group of people who largely weren't obeying Biblical morality to begin with? And if the Bible is no longer relevant, why is he repeating his same basic life story that was originally recorded in the Bible? And why, for that matter, should readers take seriously any of Ben's orgasm-afterglow fictional sermonizing unless we decide, upon reflection, that his points make sense in the real world, the one we live in?

In his review, Lawson pointed out that the story

"creates a Jesus who conveniently preaches the values of liberal America – pro-gay marriage, pro-abortion, anti-churchgoing – but there's no reason why this figure should have more validity than the historical one being dismissed. Using fiction to accuse something of not being true is an inevitably flawed manoeuvre."

In a similar vein, readers of fiction often hope and expect not to be preached to. If we must be preached to, we hope to hear something of substance or great artistry. Using fiction to deliver a simple, numbingly repetitive philosophy is a disappointment.

To be fair, this book has moments of lucid spiritual insight. For example, one character claims that

"Love is the only way to alleviate suffering. Love is the only way to find freedom. Love is the only place in all of humanity where there is security. And even love doesn't work for very long. Love always disappears or vanishes...What we know as love doesn't really make us happy. If anything, it makes us suffer more."

This paradox of love as suffering and the antidote to suffering is a valuable interpretation of the life of Jesus. We hear that "if there were a Devil, faith would be his greatest invention...[the world] is going to end, because of faith." Quite possibly true. And of the experience of witnessing the Second Coming of Christ: "It was something that scared me because it felt like I could lose control of it. And loss of control is always the source of fear. It is also, however, always the source of change." Although we know it's fiction, that has the ring of truth.

Overall, however, this story was a long slog. The third major obstacle for me was that, in the same way that the Bible tells the story of Jesus through Gospels written by various people, Ben's story is told from the perspective of the people he meets. Each character has a unique voice. Most of them are portrayed as immature, uneducated, wayward, and only partially able to articulate their experiences in interesting ways. For example, one character reports that Ben behaves "like he was Mercedes' dad and Mariaangeles' husband and the girl was part of their family somehow and it was really super cute." Any character who speaks in run-on sentences that describe the flesh-and-blood Second Coming of Christ as "really super cute" should not be allowed to have the seemingly endless monologue that she is given. This character alone could prompt a reader to take extended breaks from this book.

Perhaps part of Frey's intended spiritual lesson is in helping the reader to pay attention to their own strong reactions to the less articulate characters. Frey's version of Jesus didn't come to advise the philosophically inclined; he came to bestow a revolutionary feeling of love and empowerment to teenage moms who need to get off drugs. It isn't about you, dear reader; it's about them. If you, as the reader, are not satisfied because this Jesus character doesn't do anything for you, maybe that's part of the point.

Or maybe it's not. And maybe it's fair for readers to choose to practice their patience elsewhere.

Originally posted to Helium Network on May 15, 2011.

Image: Wikimedia Commons user 'Lestath' (Jan Mehlich) © Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license Wikimedia Commons.

What happens if you're caught 'Conning Harvard': A cautionary tale

Adam B. Wheeler made headlines in 2010 when it was discovered that he had gained admission to Harvard under false pretenses. His prize-winning work was also faked.

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An article was originally posted to Helium Network on January 21, 2014.

Helium went offline, so I reposted it here on July 4, 2014.

On December 23, 2024, I cut back what had been posted here and published a new version.

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"Conning Harvard" is the tale of Adam Wheeler, a student of middling capabilities who faked his way into Harvard University and nearly secured a treasured Rhodes Scholarship. The book was capably written by Julie Zauzmer (Harvard '13), an undergrad student reporter at the campus newspaper The Crimson. Zauzmer began reporting on the scandal when the story broke in 2010; the book was published at the beginning of her senior year.

Lessons

Zauzmer says she wrote a "cautionary tale" in a climate of college admissions in which, across all colleges, plagiarism and lies can supposedly be found in 14 percent of essays, half of transcripts and nearly all recommendation letters.

It's hard to catch plagiarists. Harvard admissions does raise eyebrows at writing samples that seem "too good," especially relative to other grades and scores, but it's too time-consuming to fact-check every credential from every institution for every person. After all, Harvard received over 30,000 applications to the Class of 2016.

People who only want to claim a credential may just photocopy a diploma. Of people who, by contrast, pretend to be college students or gain admission by fraud, Zauzmer notes that they can be motivated by family pressure, narcissism or the desire for the college experience.

One observation that, had it been included, might have improved the book - although it surely would have upset some at her university - is that Wheeler leveraged a certain style of academic writing that can be so obfuscating that even scholars in the field won't admit to suspecting that a certain passage might be nonsense, not wishing to reveal themselves as unable to understand it. Wheeler was so good at fictionalizing his life and amalgamating passages, he might legitimately have become a novelist. That he chose fake literary criticism rather than honest creative writing, and that he succeeded for a long time in doing so, is a potentially damning indictment of English departments everywhere.

Zauzmer did not interview Wheeler himself or speculate about his deeper motivations. She interviewed people who knew him, but not his close friends or family. By the time the story broke, Wheeler was already in legal trouble. Her book is probably better off without introducing the confusion of whatever Wheeler's version of events might have been or however he might have rationalized his actions. The facts reported by others create a story that speaks for itself.

Zauzmer also avoids giving any strong recommendation about how to avoid passing through blatant fabrications like Wheeler's in the future. It is hard to imagine a solution. Students and faculty can't check the resume of even a small fraction of their colleagues. Besides, informal "resume checks" are notoriously slanted by the prejudice that one is likely to be unqualified based on race, gender or background, and in this regard, these "checks" serve more as social weapons than as quests for truth.

Perhaps a plagiarism check could be most efficiently achieved if it were centralized at the level of each student's Common App before the application is distributed to dozens of colleges. On the other hand, encouraging multiple reviewers downstream increases the likelihood that plagiarism will be detected. What ultimately caught Wheeler's lies at Bowdoin and Harvard was not a computer program, but professors who noticed that his work sounded too good or too familiar and who realized that they personally knew the real author. In other words, it was the attention and commitment of genuinely educated scholars - something for which there is still no substitute.

Also

Columbia student suspended over interview cheating tool raises $5.3M to ‘cheat on everything’, Charles Rollet, TechCrunch, April 21, 2025