"Who, Me?"

The first e-mail came about a week ago.  Since then, I’ve received three more.  And I would just like to know:

What kind of bizarre marketing strategy gets me included on an “Asian Singles” mailing list?

Talk about your “Missed by a mile.”

That’s me, getting a Gift Certificate to the “Ham-Of-The-Month Club.”  (I don’t even know if there are twelve kinds of ham.  Leg Ham.  Neck Ham.  Ham that goes good with green eggs.  Hama-lama-ding-dong.) 

It is entirely beyond my comprehension why anyone would think of sending me an e-mail, alerting me to a service dedicated to enhancing the social life and possible marital opportunities for “Asian Singles.”  I mean, if I got one, did everyone on the planet get one?

Or, turning that around,

Who didn’t get one?

Seriously, what exactly were they thinking?

“The ‘Asian Singles’ market is too limited.  Let’s spread the net a little wider”?

Who knows?  Maybe they’re just testing the boundaries, probing the outer edges – make that the outer, outer edges – of their demographic reach. 

“Eur-Asian Singles."

“You wimp!  Go for it!”

“Transgender Eskimos."

“Easy, cowboy!”

“Jewish Marrieds?"

“What the hell.  Give it a shot.”

I guess it’s like the rule I have for when you can’t find something.  “If it’s not where you think it is, look where you think it isn’t.” “Asian Singles”, too obvious?  Check out “Hassidic Rabbis.” 

Thinking about how I might conceivably have drawn the attention of “Asian Singles”, I recall writing about, once, when I was twenty-two and living in England, stealing two plays from a renown London bookstore named Foyles (I actually paid for three plays, but I wanted all five, so I larcenously slipped forty per cent of the merchandise into the conveniently oversized pocket of my trenchcoat.)

This dubious reminiscence garnered me an amused e-mail from an actual person named “Foyle”, who was affiliated with the eponymous bookstore, calling me a “naughty boy” and inviting me “for a coffee” next time I was in London. 

Apparently, just the mention of the word “Foyles” triggered a notation on their cyberspacical “radar screen”, generating an e-mailed tongue-in-cheek “scolding” from across the pond.

I have written, to date, 1477 blog posts.  It is not impossible that within that massive fusillade of words, I have mentioned the word “Asian” and elsewhere, though unlikely very close to the word “Asian”, I have also used the word “single”, or, less likely, “singles”, a term outside the world of dating applied colloquially to a multiplicity of one-dollar bills.

Is it possible that the inclusion of these two unrelated words amongst hundreds of thousands set off a screaming alarm button at the “Asian Singles” Home Office, leading to my inclusion on their eager-to-test-the-waters-beyond-actual-Asian- Singles mailing list?

This is, in fact, not the first time I have been inappropriately targeted.  (It’s like the fishermen going out for tuna and inadvertently capturing a dolphin.)  On occasion in this space, I have mentioned that I am, by nature, if not by my voting record, an inherent conservative. 

This has led, as I have written elsewhere, to my receiving emails from half a dozen or more websites, championing conservative causes, varying from “Call Your Congressman” Gun Rights associations, to a guy trying to sell me a multi-volumed survivalist manual, preparing me for the Armageddon following our inevitable economic collapse, after which our neighbors will be attacking us, desperate for our food and water, and our hoarded bricks of gold.

Apparently, that’s how it works.  I mention “conservative” a couple of times, and I am immediately targeted by (some of them wacko) conservative-issue websites.  This despite the much-mentioned fact that, although temperamentally conservative, I am disinclined in the extreme to affiliate myself with today’s conservatives, owing to, to name but three issues, their hardline stand on immigration which seems considerably less than compassionate, their Evangelical Christian element, for which I am religiosally not a good fit, and their insistence on financial sacrifice by everybody but themselves which, to my ear, seems jarringly unpatriotic.  I am not, In short, a fan of, at least the most vocal component, of today’s conservatives.

Still, the e-mails continue to pour in.

 

Let me say before ending, lest anyone might mistakenly think otherwise, that I bear no animus whatsoever towards Asians.  In fact, though Jewish, were my situation different, I might conceivably have been a customer.  Or, at the very least, curious.  (I mean, it’s not like it’s “Let’s see what the ‘Asian Singles’ are up to.  They already sent it to me.)

However, – as the lyric from Guys and Dolls goes – things being how they are… my participation in the opportunities afforded by “Asian Singles” website would be necessarily contingent on my wife’s being positive disposed to my doing so.

Knowing her as I do, I am not at all certain she would be.