Ping... Ping...

Me: "Ha ha, so, what I think is funny is to insist that Tom Hanks was in Star Wars... it sends movie dorks into apoplectic fits that you could be so stupid."

Her: "He.. ha? I.. He wasn't in it? I've never seen Star Wars."

Me: "!!!"

Later that night...

Me: "You know, I really only like movies about sweetly retarded people with heart. You know, like: I Am Sam. Radio. Rainman. Love, Actually... you know."

Her: "OH I KNOW! Love, Actually was so good!"

Me: "!!!"

If you've read many of my previous posts, which you haven't, you may surmise that I generally don't care whether you're into all the same things I am, as long as we click.

You'd be mostly right.

But this girl was impossible. I realized in talking to her how unconsciously referential my humor was. An example:

She wanted to go on a walk around her suburban neighborhood. I said, "Hah, ok, I'll be the neurotic one, you can tell me about your childhood, then we'll share a cab uptown."

Offhand easy joke, right?

"Where do you want to go? Why do we need to take a cab there?"

Went right over her head. Why? It wasn't simply that she had never seen a Woody Allen style walk-and-talk New York movie. She had no impression of that even being a typical mis-en-scene one might reference in the course of a joke.

It cost me a grueling five minutes of explanation for her to get it. My reward: "Oh... ha."

In the end, the only thing we had to talk about was us as a couple, our feelings towards each other, how much we liked each other. We had chemistry but nothing to talk about. I mean, love as a topic of conversation is fine and all, but it's no basis for a serious relationship.

Now, that being said, when I lived in China I dated a girl there with whom I had no cultural overlap. None. But we got along fantastically. Every time she told me about a particular person, she hit upon the same points I thought were best about that person. When she described her favorite colors and how they made her feel, I could identify exactly with what she was saying. Her favorite sounds in the park were precisely mine, the sound of a pine cone falling on the sidewalk isn't something most people would even notice. In the few times I could get her to watch American movies with me, she quickly pointed out what was good and bad about each movie, and she was right. For a girl with no cultural training, that's impressive. So, why did we break up? Eh, no chemistry. Being with her was about as emotionally exciting as hanging out with Zane, though she did have larger breasts. But just barely.

Having a significant overlap of taste indicates shared thought processes. Our minds are largely what is known in the information sciences as a black box. A black box is any set of processes which are totally opaque to you, and which you can only test by input-output experiments. You input 3, and another 2, the box spits out 5, maybe it's an adding machine. If it spit out 6, you'd probably have a multiplier.

We use our litany of interests as input to test the processes of the unknown people in our lives.

So, I like Confederacy of Dunces, so do you. Not that big of a deal, lots of people like that book. But say that you also think Dune is the best sci-fi book written. Hmm... Most girls haven't read any sci-fi, much less enough to have an opinion.

You've read Brothers Karamazov? What, like, for school or something? Oh? Just because you wanted to? How interesting...

You hate coffee you say? Weird, I thought I was the only one.

Nausicca Valley of the Winds! Yeah! I don't really like anime, but that one is great!

Do you.. no this is odd.. but, do you eat your cereal with a teaspoon? Yeah me too! I wonder what that's about.

Wait... do you also like In Search of Lost Time? What? You DO?! Well we should just cut the crap and start having babies now.